Chapter One

One I'll Build My Own

My story began in a cathedral.

Back then, much of my life was spent in one cathedral or another. These places of worship served as places of refuge, and though today not many stand, at the time, my family fled westward, spending our years from one cathedral to another.

My parents were not the religious sort; only the pragmatic kind, and we learned to flow with the shape of whichever sect or church or circle of the pantheon was dominant in whichever part of the region we figured was safest from the war.

When my hometown was sacked and we found our home in our first cathedral at Fleur d'Lain, we learned to serve Avandra, and Her golden crucible, and we learned to view the world from Her Seven Laws of Justice.

Similarly, when we fled to Listerborough, we drank wine and worked the monastery's vineyard.

And on and on, until we found ourselves in Avengard.

The Cathedral of Avengard was small -- easily among the smallest that we had found refuge in -- but special to me, for the simple fact that at the time, it was home. The building itself was seemingly humble; it was devoted to the Ascended Deity Avenor. He was no primordial being who had crafted the skies or carved out mountains; but still he was a god. He was a mortal who had Ascended. He found his calling in life, devoted himself to it, and achieved godhood.

Sometimes, it's the ordinary things done extraordinarily well that make all the difference -- and this was a sentiment I could see echoed in Avenor's Cathedral itself.

That one midsummer afternoon, I was a wide-eyed nineteen year old taking in the vaulting supporting the interior ceilings of the cathedral, right over the iron baldachin by the altar. Now, by that afternoon, we had already spent close to six months in Avengard, but there's a difference between walking past the vaulting of a building, and appreciating the intricacies of each intersection of a cathedral.

With each step I took, my neck craned upward and eyes squinting to see every minute detail, I felt emotions that could only be shared through artistry. Feelings of devotion. Of passion. Of concentrated ambition. Of recognizing one's calling and pouring one's soul into it. The bliss of creation.

I was a refugee. It had been five years since my family had owned the roof that we slept under, since our hometown was razed, but still, by the grace of Avenor and His stonemasons, I was happy. At the very least, I had something simple to be thankful for.

His masons incorporated bronze rivets all over the cathedral, partially to invoke the same imagery of Avenor's own bronze armor, but also to preserve the structural integrity of the cathedral in tighter spaces. In effect, each vault, each buttress, each column held more weight while using less stone and mortar, and as a result, the cathedral itself looked small and maybe even inconsequential to the uncaring eye, but was a labour of love through and through to anyone who stopped to appreciate it.

Colored tints of light shone through stained glass in some sections of the cathedral's interior; in others, the glass had been hauled away for materials. They had been gone since before we had arrived in Avengard for refuge. I wished that I could have had the opportunity to enjoy the cathedral how it was meant to be seen.

"Scipio?" a deep, gravelly voice called my name. It must have been Javis, an older man and fellow refugee.

"Beautiful day to you," I replied.

"You shouldn't be here," he told me, "It's unsafe. They had told everyone days ago. You know better."

"But you're here," I pointed out. He smiled. I was certain that he was there for the same reason as I; in another life, Javis had been a master mason in his home city. He wrote and crafted the designs that bricklayers and carpenters would carry out to build homes, workshops, once even a portion of an important keep. He was a creator; everything I wanted to be.

"I'm allowed to be here. I've been asked to advise the Laurel on the project," he corrected me.

"The project?" I asked, and his eyes gave me the answer. "Oh," I muttered, dejected. The project, then, is what they were calling it. This was an abstraction of what was really happening -- the demolition and material salvage of the Cathedral of Avengard.

"You think I shouldn't be working with them to bring down the cathedral. You think that it's wrong, in some way or form." He paused, as if expecting some form of answer or denial from me; there was none, and so he continued, "But the truth is, this would happen even without my intervention, young Scipio. And the cathedral is, as I've taught you, a complex and intricate opus of stone and bronze. Without a master mason to advise them, people may get hurt. Innocent people."

"Has Avengard none of its own master masons to bring down its own stone?"

"They're all off to the lines," Javis said, before pulling a wooden pipe from the inner folds of his wool cloak, filling it with tabak, and holding it to a nearby lit votive. He held it to his mouth, inhaled, and blew out a smooth, thin stream of white smoke. "Priest Seledor asked for one, and I answered. It was as simple as that."

"I still don't understand why Priest Seledor allowed to this to happen to begin with. He's a pious man," I mused.

"He's a pragmatic man," Javis added. "He understands the sheer amount of bronze and iron keeping this place together. He's read the first master mason's design and understands the cost. And he understands what that bronze and iron would mean for Avengard's men to the west. This means lives, Scipio."

"It's destruction for destruction's sake."

"You'll understand in time." He looked at me expectantly, but I said nothing. I looked away, resting my hand on a vaulting buttress that arced upwards towards the ceiling to support a primary capstone. The weight that that buttress supported through its capstone and the iron, bronze, and stone poured into it was much greater than the sum of its parts. Javis himself had taught me that, and now he was bringing it down. I sighed.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Come, walk with me," Javis said. "There's something I'd like to show you."

I didn't answer him, but I nodded, and followed as he led me to the cathedral's sacristy, and then to its cellars. "I don't know if you're a man of faith, Scipio, but I know that you're a learned one. You may not have had the opportunity to attend a university or the coin to see a tutor, but you have the spirit and persistence of a scholar. You'll take the learnings where you can find them, and so here's another. Do you know why Avenor has His own cathedral?"

I frowned. This felt cryptic. "Well, He's Ascended. Avengard itself is named after Him. Why wouldn't Avenor have one?"

"Yes, He is Ascended, but only as a minor deity. A mortal rising through an immortal act. But many other men have accomplished such feats, and they don't have their own cathedral. Nor their own town as a namesake."

Javis led us deeper into the cellars. The air was cold and musky. I could smell stale incense, and I made doubly sure to feel ahead of me with every step I took, clawing out spiderwebs and ropes of dust before they caught onto my face.

Here, there were no votives nor torches to light the way. He held his lit pipe to one candle, then another, and so it was lit just bright enough for me to make out Javis pushing aside one old wooden crate branded with the crest of Avenor. "Give me a hand with this one," he asked me, and so I did.

The crate was heavy - as if it were filled with stone and mortar - but together, Javis and I managed to push the thing aside, revealing an intricate engraving on the stone wall behind it. I couldn't quite make out what it said, but then Javis brought one of the candles he had lit up to the surface, and I could see that it was etchings of old elvish runes.

"What does it say?" I asked. "Can you even read something like that?"

"Even I'm not that old. But I asked Priest Seledor, and he told me a secret, which I'm now going to share with you. What this rune means will be our secret, young Scipio, as is the real reason why Priest Seledor asked me to advise the Laurel on their petty demolition job. Can you keep a secret, Scipio?"

"Of course."

Javis gave me the handle for me to hold, then emptied his pipe's tabak onto the ground before slipping it back into his cloak. With his hands now free, he placed his hands on both sides of where the runes began and ended, cleared his throat, then in his low, gravelly voice said, "We serve Avenor, and Avenor serves the Lady. She sees and rules over all."

The runes began to glow, and the simple etching and carvings on the stone emitted a bright purple light. I gasped. This wasn't some sort of decoration; it was an enchantment. A ward of some sort. I knew that some wards watched over some fortresses and keeps in Fleur d'Lain, for one, but I had never seen one up close and in person.

The etchings began to move, and the lines of light curved further and converged, until they created a circle, and within this circle, the stone and brick began to move until the wall had turned into an arch, and framed within that arch was a spiral staircase leading even deeper below the cellar.

"Go on then, young Scipio."

I held the candle ahead of me, watching my step as I descended down the spiral staircase, but soon, another source of light much stronger than my own little candlelight lit the way. There was a small chamber, slightly smaller even than some of the prayer rooms in the cathedral above below, and the perimeter of the room was lit by a gentle line of runic light surrounding the interior. At the center of the chamber were two statues, so lifelike and natural in its construction and composition, built out of a wispy, almost smokelike material I had never seen before. The edges of the statues moved, just like flame, but it was jetblack, emitting no light, and the room was frigid, as if a cave in the dead of winter.

My eyes adjusted to the dim runic light of the chamber, and I could see the two figures more clearly. The first was a kneeling figure, and its identity was unmistakable. The wispy, shadow-like material not so dissimilar from that of flame, interweaved with casts and strips of bronze and iron. The figure knelt down to offer a dagger. This was Avenor Himself.

The figure that He was offering His dagger to was much less clear to me. It looked to be a female figure, wearing a robe that obscured her face. She didn't move to accept the dagger; instead, she stood upright, with her arms to her sides and with her palms open and facing Him. I searched her statue for any sign of who she might be, but it was difficult with the dim light and wispy material used to construct her constantly shifting and moving despite the lack of any moving air in the chamber. Then, on a sash she wore around her waist, I saw a crest, and I realized --

"That's the Lady of Loss," I whispered to myself, as Javis nodded.

"That's right."

"Avenor served the Lady of Loss. She was Avenor's patron, and gave Him the power and strength that He had used to fight. She's who He died for and Ascended for..." I began to ramble. "That means Avenor died for an--"

"Don't say it," Javis stopped me. I was about to say that Avenor had died for an Exiled One, an outlawed god or goddess that we were forbidden to worship. "She holds less power outside with no church or supporters, but down here, I have a feeling that she may just be watching us."

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Javis and I spent a good amount of time in that small altar chamber, dissecting and appreciating the masterwork that it was. Here, we speculated that the construction and masonry exceeded the sum total of the skill and ambition that had constructed the structure above us. If anything, the runes and the statues were obviously augmented by magick, and that alone served to make constructing something like that chamber way beyond even our wildest dreams.

He explained to me that Priest Seledor had described the strange, wisp-like material used to act as the medium for the two statues as "shadowstone," an ancient material refined by followers of the Lady of Loss aeons ago, with the secrets behind its concoction lost to time. I don't know if the shadowstone served any other purpose for the statues other than decoration, and neither did Javis. Neither he nor Priest Seledor had wanted to conduct any experiments on the material for fear of angering the Lady of Loss.

Avengard, Javis explained to me, was a city of devout followers to the Lady of Loss, before it had been a city of Avenor. As times changed, so did the city, and the cathedral to the Lady of Loss became dedicated to Her follower -- Avenor.

Eventually, we made our way back up to the cathedral, making sure to return the arch above back into a plain, etched stone wall and putting the crate back in its place as we did. As we took the stairs from the cellar back up to the sacristy, we could see the Laurel's workers already beginning to move furniture and dismantle ornaments. Some old men brought in wagons and carts of picks and hammers. The demolition of the Cathedral of Avengard had begun.

Javis led me outside; we took our last look of the cathedral's interior together. Some of the Laurel's minor masons -- men that should have been retired and enjoying their last years of life rather than breaking down cathedrals -- asked him for his signal to began picking away at the edifice's points of foundation. Javis asked them for a second before they began.

"It's a beautiful cathedral," Javis mumbled, half to me, and half perhaps to himself. "Understated, but beautiful in its simplicity."

I thought of the bronze used masterfully to accommodate more weight with less space, and the buttresses that fearlessly flew over the pulpit and held the capstones that held the entire structure together. More than that, I thought of the dark secret that the cathedral held in its foundation, and the works of bronze and shadowstone that the cathedral held in its foundation.

"It's beautiful," I agreed with him, as he gave the men the signal to begin. As supports for the capstone feel, larger and larger sections of the cathedral's walls began to fall onto the areas where Javis had marked for them to fall.

"There's no going back now," Javis said. "This will be no more by tomorrow."

"That's no matter," I mused. A thoughtful glint flashed in my eyes. "One day, I'll build my own."