— Keira —

After a brief discussion the pair decided to enter separately. Neither knew if it would actually matter, but they figured phrases like “A secret can only truly be kept in your heart and Lunith’s hand” were common for a reason.

At first Marsaili was going to wait in the courtyard as she had no business with Lunith but she decided that if there was a shrine to Mortis she would offer her thanks that her son and daughter in law were returned from beyond the veil.

As Keir watched on from the middle of the courtyard Marsaili walked up to the door and opened it revealing only a void of shadow that even Keir’s undead eyes could barely pierce enough to to see vague indecipherable outlines.

With no perceptible hesitation the dwarven warrior walked through the shroud of shadows and within a few steps was reduced to just another blurred outline, identifiable only because Keir already knew what she was. Seconds later the large heavy door slid silently closed again.

While trying not to think about the possibility of having missed some crucial step to the process Keir waited the agreed upon three minutes. Neither had been entirely sure why that amount of time seemed appropriate but they both agreed it had.

Keir was almost sure she remembered a bard singing a song about Lunith that mentioned the importance of the time.

Marsaili on the other hand was all but sure she’d read it in a book as a child.

From the time the door was fully shut Keir started counting out the seconds. Between her undead nature and the timeless unchanging location it would be all too easy to completely lose track of time.

After what she was pretty sure was three minutes, but felt like half an hour, Keir followed in Marsaili’s footsteps and approached the single door visible on the black cube.

She was barely even surprised when the large heavy looking door opened silently with only the slightest effort.

Beyond the open door was the same shadowy void she saw roughly three minutes before.

As she stepped into the shadows they clung about her form like wet clothes. The cold wet and slightly constricting feeling didn’t last long, however, and barely four steps later the shadowed forms grew clearer. Two steps more and the shadows split and peeled away from her, leaving her standing in a large strange room.

Much like the outside of the building, what she could see of the floor, walls, and ceiling were formed from polished obsidian. The floor was at least textured with faint ripples where it wasn’t covered by all manner of rugs.

Curtains of all different colors and materials hung down from the ceiling partitioning out sections of the room.

A short distance into the room was an arachne woman with an albino looking elven body that joined to a silvery white spider body with long thin legs, at her waist.

Her upper half was dressed in an ornate silk jacket like robe dyed in shades of dark purple and black with silver buttons that each showed a different phase of the moon.

Her spider half was more decorated than dressed in silver and electrum pieces that never seemed to hold the same rune when examined again.

Her long hair was almost translucently white but her eyes peeking from under her bangs quickly drew Keir’s attention from her hair and clothes.

Like all arachne her eyes were a little larger than would be typical for an elf. More striking were the six pupils in each of her blood red eyes. Five small round pupils surrounded a more typical sized slit pupil in the middle of her eyes.

As Keir approached the woman spoke up, her voice quiet with an almost purr like undertone of clicks and rasps “Greetings, Daughter of Steel and Sea, Lady Death’s Favored Champion. Welcome to the temple of Lunith. Have you come this day to seek the Moon or the Stars?”

Keir was somewhat thrown by how much the woman seemed to know about her and it took her a few steps to understand the question. Lunith was the goddess of the moon but not the stars. That was when her mind was drawn to the starry veil of Mortis and the fact the night sky over Still-Leaf Village had too many stars, ever since purchasing the upgrade that protected undead from the light of the sun and purifying magic.

Keir did her best to keep an uncertainty out of her voice as she answered “So does that mean there is a shrine to Mortis here?”

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The woman smiled, showing her elongated fangs and sharp teeth, and said “Just as the Stars shelter the moon in the vast darkness of the night sky. The moon shelters the stars in this place within the earth.”

Keir decided that probably meant the information Antheia found was accurate So she said “I came here to learn about and if possible commune with Mortis”

The arachne seemed lost in thought, or perhaps a skill of some sort, before saying “Follow me, I will guide you to the Sanctuary of the Stars.”

Without waiting for Keir to respond the woman skittered around and brushed aside a curtain of hanging silver chains that hung almost directly behind her. Keir was generally pretty confident in her sense of direction but she completely lost all bearing as she followed the woman.

Sometimes the woman would walk in a straight line through multiple curtains. Other times she would make sharp turns, even spinning almost entirely around and going through a curtain next to the one they just entered through.

At first even when Keir lost track of the turns and distance she at least tried to remember the curtains they passed through. That didn’t last much longer as she noticed that some of the enclosed areas were hemmed in by multiple of the same curtains.

It was only shortly after she fully gave up on trying to maintain some sort of mental map that the half spider woman paused before a crystal speckled black silk curtain. For a second as Keir studied the curtain, it felt like looking out across the vast sea at night with the star speckled sky overhead.

The illusion shattered as the woman said “The Sanctuary of the Stars lays just through here. May the Moon light your steps and the Stars guide your way.” and pulled the curtain aside revealing a similar wall of shadows as she’d seen at the entrance.

Keir was about to step through the curtain into the shadows when a thought occurred to her. She turned to look over at the woman and said “Will you be here when I leave? I doubt I can find my way out without assistance.”

The woman simply smiled and said “When you have found what you seek the way will be clear.”

Keir wanted to ask for more details but she was almost certain that even if the woman answered her, the response would be no clearer than the first answer.

Allowing herself a deep breath she no longer needed, Keir stepped into the shadows. Once again the shadows felt more like walking through an icy cold pool than stepping through an open curtain. Fortunately, it didn’t last long and after a bare handful of steps the shadows split around her.

For a moment, as she got her bearings, Keir thought she might have somehow stepped into her soulscape.

She was standing in a room that at first glance seemed almost identical to the first room in the temple beneath the sea of blood. Like that temple the walls and floor were bone white marble and the ceiling at least twenty feet above, was obsidian, or something like it.

Also like that other temple the room was almost entirely unadorned. A large statue of Mortis stood in the center of the room with a shrine just in front of her.

That was when she started noticing the differences. The temple in her soulscape had three doors leading further in. The room she now found herself in, had only two. One was a large heavily reinforced adamantium door, or perhaps gate. The other was a small door carved from some sort of polished bone white wood.

The statue and shrine were also different. The shrine was the size of a large desk draped with a silk cloth that resembled the curtain Keir had just passed through, instead of the small unadorned marble plinth she’d half expected to see. The final and somehow most attention grabbing was the statue. Instead of a veil like a scrap of the night sky the face of a lovely dwarven woman peered out of the ornate hood.

While not all deities and their clergy placed an equal importance on such things, it was expected that a supplicant would seek permission from the clergy before utilizing any part of the temple other than the main shrine.

With no clergy in sight, or any indication of habitation at all, Keir briefly considered requesting permission directly from the goddess. That thought only lasted a moment, however, as she realized the foolishness of interrupting an ancient and powerful goddess to treat her like a common receptionist. That seemed like a quick way to get another more permanent trip through the veil.

Instead she walked over to the small wooden door and tested the handle. Her hand tingled slightly as she grabbed the faintly tarnished silver handle, but she found it was unlocked.

Beyond the door was a short narrow hallway carved from black granite with unusually large crystal flecks.

It was only when Keir noticed the sometimes fingernail sized crystals didn’t catch any light that Keir realized the entire portion of the temple devoted to Mortis was unlit. She had gotten so used to her undead dark vision that she barely even noticed the lack of light. If the temple had been as colorful as the main temple she might have at least noticed the muted hues.

Clearly the comfort of the living had not been a priority when building the shrine to Mortis.

At the end of the short hallway there was an open doorway leading into a small library. The room was barely over a dozen feet long and half that wide, with bone white wood shelving reinforced with lightly patinated copper fittings. In the middle of the room was a simple wooden chair and table made from the same bone white wood.

Looking over the hundreds of books Keir wished she had Antheia. A scholar would not only be better equipped to locate the most useful texts, she could read those texts exponentially faster and with greater clarity than a normal person.

She was no longer as certain of that when she pulled out a leather bound tome and looked at the title. “Ritu**s *nd *or**tions o* *n *r**ne *it**” was written out in the strange fractals writing found in the library in her soulscape.

After quickly checking over the rest of the books she found only a single book written in common and five more in languages Keir had never seen. The single book she could actually read was a small thin book bound in black leather with tarnished silver fittings. Inside were prayers and invocations to Mortis along with the proper steps to sanctify a shrine or temple in her name.

Mentally cursing her lack of foresight in not bringing any writing materials, Keir did her best to memorize the information before returning to the first room.

She didn’t even try the other door as it was quite obviously locked. Instead she walked over to the shrine and made a symbol she’d seen in the book as she repeated one of the invocations she’d memorized.

Keir couldn’t have said exactly when the shift happened but as she finished she saw she was no longer standing before a shrine and a statue. Instead the form she recognized from the statue in her soulscape stood before her.