Perhaps one would expect the Shrine District to be full of vendors hawking wares for divine protection, offerings to the gods, or various talismans that are purported to ward off evil and bad luck, but such was not the case. Perhaps one would envision burning incense everywhere with monks leading prayers and preachers offering salvation on every corner. Again, such was not practiced in those days, and any who dared to do so tended to come down with a nasty case of smiting.

Religions did exist back then, but most people were not religious. Naturally, everyone knew the gods existed; one could go to any shrine to commune with a god and they tended to converse back. A connection to a god is a relationship and personal, and religions try to dictate that relationship and how one should think and feel when acting in accordance to a god’s wishes. Even longer ago, religions were all the rage, and indeed countless ideological wars were fought between various sects and cults over whose cosmic sky daddy or mommy was the best.

However, the gods soon wised up. Multiple religions in the same area tend to pick fights, and people can hardly be practitioners of multiple religions at once. Such conflict leads to strife, strife to war, war to death, and death to fewer petitioners to the gods, which was an all around bad deal for everyone. The gods sorted things out, crunched the numbers, and found a more ideal solution.

Divinity is the font of a god’s existence, what makes them more than just powerful beings. Divine Essence, if you will, is like mana in that it can fuel extraordinary abilities, but gods do not generate it naturally like one does mana. Instead, they get it from some degree of devotion and recognition from mortals. Now if a person prayed every day to one god and was devoted, a god would get some amount of Divine Essence. However, pray every ten days and casually follow the ideals of a god, and they get about half as much. Ergo, instead of maybe one in ten people following you with true devotion, having five in ten following you casually earned much more Divine Essence, and generally that would lead to less conflict, and so that style was adopted.

People commune with the pantheon of their race and then also typically with whatever is the flavor of the millennium for a larger pantheon. In those days, that would be the Light and Dark gods. The membership of what gods are in what pantheons could change based on their popularity. For instance, if elves started to worship a dwarven god while the dwarves stopped worshiping said god, eventually that god would become an elven god and take on the appearance and personality to match. As such, an endless cycle existed of mortals shaping the gods through their beliefs and the gods shaping the minds of mortals through dogma.

We first went to all the shrines of the remnimi gods so that Chooka could commune with them. Shrines are simple things, the biggest of which might take up as much space as a food stall. There were no churches back then, no grand cathedrals with flying buttresses. People did not sing hymns or go to mass as there was no ‘faith’ so to speak for gods. Chooka went to each shrine in turn, head bowed and hands folded, offering her recognition that the deity in question existed, had supremacy over the Divine Portfolio granted to it, gave thanks for all the god provided, made petitions for any request of protection or aid, and left a personally-made offering.

Chooka’s offering was always a unique request form of some kind tailored specifically to that deity. Gods care not for the intrinsic value of things, but rather that you personally put effort into making it. Ergo, purchasing something to offer to a god would be blasphemy. If a king ordered one hundred cattle sacrificed to a god, it would be ignored at best by a god, for the king did nothing personally for it. If instead he carved a little wooden statue of a cow and offered it, that would be worth more than gold to a god, for the king personally tried his best to make something for the god. The skill in making one’s offering is immaterial; only one’s effort and good intentions matter. Well, not all offerings are acceptable, as human sacrifices are generally frowned upon.

Chooka’s forms often found themselves nestled between little statues, cool rocks people found on the ground, a little pie or cookie that someone had baked themselves, small bits of embroidery, and other little knickknacks. No one knows exactly how or when the gods receive their offering, but if you look away from the shrine long enough, when next you look back, your offering will be gone.

Next, we would visit the human gods for Skull. Even as one devoted to a single god, Gulthar, she still at least paid nominal tribute to the other gods of the appropriate pantheons. Gulthar recognizes the role other gods have in maintaining balance in the world, for each god has their part to play, and thus they need the Divine Essence required to fulfill their duties. For example, there would be no one to be brave if the god of fertility doesn’t enable new life to be born.

Indeed, all the gods do their best to ensure no one god falls out of favor with mortals, assuming no god decides to become a tremendous jerk. Gods have winked out of existence before due to lack of devotion, and eventually, the desire of mortals for there to be something divine in charge of some aspect of the universe will force a god to spring into existence. Some of those new gods have been difficult to deal with, and most gods are content to deal with the devil they know than to roll the dice on what new god may come into being.

At that point in my life, I had long since stopped trying to go show devotion at any shrine. I tried the human gods first, but the most polite amongst them firmly told me in no uncertain terms not to worship them. I tried the rest of the racial gods, and then the Light and Dark gods, but all refused to allow me to worship them or entreat them for any favors. They never told me a reason, and I could not have known at the time that I would someday become a demigod, but the gods knew I would. Time is not as linear to them, and Divinity tends to propagate backwards in time as well in some ways. Gods worshiping other gods in the same tier in the divine pecking order tends to create a whole bunch of fuckery that gods almost unanimously want to avoid. Demigods are in a league of their own, and not even the most chaotic of gods would want to touch worship from a demigod with a ten-foot pole.

Demigods also have their own shrines, but people are not ‘expected’ to show devotion to them. That falls much more under personal choice and perhaps what future ventures one would take. Demigods represent more oddly specific domains, such as how I have the domain of Roads. Gods would represent something more abstract, such as Travel or Civilization. Ergo, people prayed to demigods on a much more transactional basis. Most races have a god of the Sea, but you go pray to the demigod of Sea Travel (of which there is only one such demigod present in the world at a time) whenever you take a voyage on the ocean. The further some activity is from one’s Domain, the more costly divine intervention would be for a god to help a petitioner. Demigods fill that void for the things that are too specific to warrant a god personally dealing with it.

Now, when people pray to me, a small tithe of what Divine Essence I get from that goes to the appropriate related god above me in charge of Travel, which is usually the one related to the race of the petitioner. In return, those gods help me out when I need to coordinate with other gods so that no toes are stepped on. When I build a bridge over a river, they handle the politics for me in ensuring the god of Rivers or whatever doesn’t throw a hissy fit about it. That makes us all one big happy family where everyone has their place in the Grand Design, as we call it.

We would typically go with Skull to the Temple of Gulthar as well. Chooka and I mostly liked to look around because it was rather pretty in a macabre fashion. Temples are places of learning, for both laymen and clergy, as well as places to receive certain services, store holy artifacts and relics, and to offer more serious prayers. They are not churches and do not offer religious services and all that nonsense. That is a very clear distinction that even gods make a point to enforce. Stepping into the church of another religion is sacrilegious if one follows a different faith, but a temple serves as more like a consulate or embassy between mortals for various gods. Skull has her own responsibilities to Gulthar, and sometimes that requires her to help out with the mission of the local temple.

Every Adventurer loves having a healer in the party and will go out of the way to recruit one. Most Adventurers don’t actively like having to help the healer go do things for the healer’s patron god. However, since few Blessings have any potent means of directly healing other people, [Clerics] and other people with Blessings of a more divine nature are often the only source of it to be had. As such, we saw more than a few parties of Adventurers traveling to various temples, usually with one person merrily skipping along while the rest begrudgingly followed. Gulthar’s temple perhaps provided one exception, for it also had a haunted house in one wing, which often provided ample entertainment to gaggles of plucky youths trying to test their mettle. Only a year ago did Gulthar decide to put up a publicly visible leader board for people’s scores. I don’t know how one scores a person going through a haunted house, but the end result was that business boomed since the change.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Fortunately, Skull could use the employee entrance, so we could skip the riff raff. Mercifully, nothing of note was required of her this tenday. Three months ago we had to go put a beatdown on an order of knights that talked a big game but were nowhere to be seen when they were called upon to do their job. Gulthar despises cowards, especially arrogant ones in a position of privilege where their duties require them to be brave from time to time. Most strange was how a good chunk of those knight’s treasury also disappeared around the same time that the treasury of Gulthar’s temple grew by the same amount, which will probably remain an unsolved mystery.

With the shrines out of the way, we had one final civil duty to fulfill. We meandered over to a large plaza that had a few tents on one side and long queues leading to them. Fortunately, the queues were rather empty, not for a lack of customers, but for the streamlined and expeditious processing as set up by those in charge. We made our way to the tents, the first of which has healers that use some sort of [Detect Disease] Ability. None of us had any ailments, but if we did, we would go to an adjacent tent to have it treated. Some cities take epidemics seriously and are willing to use an ounce of prevention rather than a pound of cure to ensure they don’t break out, and Berkerin was one of them.

Berkerin had to be pretty progressive on the front of combating disease. As a thriving trade city, goods and peoples from all over the world traveled through it, and with them they brought afflictions. Curing all the patient zeros was cheaper than having the city slammed with a plague every decade. It also made the city rather alluring to anyone wishing to set up shop, and so the population had grown over the past couple decades thanks in part to the public healthcare provided. Small cuts, broken bones, dentistry, and eye care were all provided at no cost to residents of Berkerin or its surrounding vassal villages. Anything more advanced, such as organ failure, would require a specialist and was thus paid for out of pocket. That’s still better than most of the world, so the people were rather happy about their quality of life.

I could only imagine how it was all paid for. There must be close to fifty healers here on any given day and they don’t work for free. Healers were mandated to work here on their Shrine Day, but they were still compensated for their efforts. Most could make far more money as Adventurers and indeed did, at least until they retired from that life, and so their services did not come cheaply. The bureaucracy between the Duke, his noble retinue, the local temples, the guilds, the merchants, and everyone else in town who had skin in this game must have been a nightmare, but fortunately, the average person did not have to deal with it. They simply got in line, received treatment, thanked the healer, and went about their lives without paying a copper. I would wager this played no small part in the Duke’s wild popularity and the strong sense of community of the local populace.

The smaller towns and villages, client vassals of Berkerin, would not have that many healers or indeed shrines to each and every god. Healers were on an annual rotation where they traveled a circuit between the various towns, usually with one showing up once a month for a few days. The shrines in those towns were typically All Faiths Shrines or, if they splurged, Pantheon Shrines. The gods found it to be a bit crowded, having to share shrines, but they understood the practicality of how a small population could not maintain large numbers of shrines. Typically, the healers were aligned in some way with some god or pantheon, so they also tended to the maintenance and other duties related to their own shrines during their travels.

Fortunately, Skull was no healer. While still a [Divine Champion] to her god and thus having some education in shrines and how to tend to them, such duties were in many ways beneath her. Unless a shrine long since forgotten and run-down located out in the wilderness needed to be reconsecrated or something, she was not called upon for such trivial matters. Some gods get finicky when a devotee of another god comes to tend to their shrine, but sometimes needs must when the devil drives, so Skull could in theory be called upon to tend to shrines for other gods as well.

I’m not sure why gods have shrines way out in the middle of nowhere or why they let them fall into decay. I suspect it is intentional, that it provides some grand quest for a neophyte to go tend to. The accomplishment of the task strengthens the bond between deity and devotee. Some shrines in the wilderness are well known and Adventurers camp by them on the regular, so they stay maintained. Perhaps the pattern of where Adventurers go shifts over time, and so shrines that were used often yesterday go out of style the next.

For me personally, I never let my shrines fall into disrepair, but I have the advantage of being a demigod and thus can exist within the material world without destroying it. Gods cannot set foot here directly, and creating an avatar and maintaining it costs a lot of Divine Essence. [Clerics] are just too few and far in between to maintain everything for them, but I do not find myself at the mercy of my clergy to see that my interests are followed. Demigods are at times called upon to go do such things by the gods. It is all about trading favors, so usually we demigods play nice.

Perhaps back in those days, the gods called upon me and my associates to do things because the gods knew I would become a demigod and wanted to condition me to be inclined to help. Gulthar was the first to establish a relationship with me back when he saddled me with Skull as a companion. It was done as a punishment and payment for almost getting Skull killed, but if I knew what I knew now, he should have been the one to pay me to have one of his devotees tag along.

Most gods would kill (and many have) to get one of their own in the inner circle of a demigod. Gods are restricted to their universe and what worlds (such as other planes or planets) it may have, but the one distinct thing that separates demigods from gods is that demigods can travel the multiverse. Granted, we don’t often get a choice of which universe we end up in, why we are there, or when we get yanked out of our previous universe, but our connection to those other universes gives us knowledge beyond what gods have. We are their eyes and ears in those universes, and we can gain knowledge of what other demigods exist and when they may find themselves in a particular world.

When I travel to a new universe, my divine retinue goes with me. That means Skull goes with me. Skull still has her connection to Gulthar, so he can see the world through her. Sometimes, a clever god figures out how to jump the gap between universes and establish themselves in multiple universes at once. This creates a local cluster of universes, and it could elevate a god from being a god of a single universe to a god of many universes, which is essentially a promotion. As such, gods tend to be rather generous in their dealings with demigods, since we are the vessels through which they can get a free ride to another world in hopes of ascension.

For our part, we demigods stick together. There will never be two of us with the same Domain in the same universe at a time, so I only tangentially know of other demigods with the Domain of Roads. However, time doesn’t exist or flow between universes. I could meet a demigod in one universe when he is 1,000 years old and I am 10,000 years old, and in the next universe, he is 10,000 years old and I am 1,000 years old. From our own perspective, it is like we see past and future versions of each other wherever we go. We cannot change things for their past selves, for if we try to, well, it already happened as far as their future self is concerned.

So we help each other out, show new demigods the ropes, and help each other cope with the trauma of being ripped from a world we were happy in and into another. Few demigods enjoy it when they are forced to bring about the end of the world, so we offer what we can to make the task easier to endure. There are no cosmic therapists, and we demigods in many ways still have mortal minds and thus can suffer the same mental perils as mortals, such as post-traumatic stress. Our perfect memories come back to bite us, for sometimes even I can still hear their screaming and see the anguish on their faces as the mortals beg me to spare their worlds.

Okay, so that got dark and depressing real fast. I’m sure this has been a huge theological information dump. Most mortals are not allowed to peek behind the curtain to how the universe works, but I figured I would let this universe know and see how it plays out. Just follow me, the Dragon of Roads, and we will get right back to bedding beautiful women, slaying scumbags, eating cheese, and giving snacks and belly rubs to The Boys before you know it.

Anyway, Shrine Day was over, and it being lunch time, we headed home. The Boys were given their daily meal (no snacks), and Skull and I parted ways with Chooka for the day. Those trackers I had placed on the kobolds were heading out of the city, and I wanted to see where they went before they got out of range.

With Skull in my shadow once again, I took the quick way out of town by traveling across rooftops. Thankfully, rooftops were made to support the weight of people skulking about, but it was generally frowned upon to use them casually. It is just bad manners to crowd someone trying to brood as he looks down on the city, so you gotta be quick if you want the best spots for the night. With it being just past noon, very little brooding or skulking took place, so I didn’t have to fight much in the way of traffic, other than postal workers and couriers, who were quite busy at this time of day.

I made haste in an all-too-familiar direction. Three mountains surrounded Bekerin to all directions but the south, and the one before me to the north would be where my trackers moved. They were heading suspiciously close to my road I had built, and dare I say, they were probably walking on it right now. My road stopped at a very small and absolutely temporary cabin that I intended to replace with something nicer than a glorified shed. Beyond lay the ascent up the mountain proper. If these kobolds had a lair in that area, I would have seen them by now, unless… No, no sense jumping to conclusions. I would need to investigate to find out more, so onward I went.