What makes a sacred land?
The answer is laughably simple to those who know.
It’s Holy affinity. A sacred land has Holy affinity. And the presence of Holy affinity, means that it is a sacred land.
What then is a sacred land deprived of Holy affinity? Or a land, which has the potential to host Holy affinity, but doesn’t? A target, apparently.
The Cleric waited outside the abyssal dungeon. The transition was coming to an end. The dungeon would have grown, but it would also expose a period of weakness.
He had two missions. The first was from the Ecclesiarchy: find again the dungeon’s core and return to the surface alive to report the path. The second was of a more personal nature: to ignore the core, and to die.
He visited the Gods in his dreams. They stood looming, stone-faced, and encircled him with silence. And he heard them, saw them. This was omens unlike any other, yet alike every other in the most important way: Grace born from dirt, Purity from the most unlikeliest of hands.
Some pilgrims had to die.
He fingered a coppery coin and prayed.
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That did not mean that they had to die in meaningless ways.
It was common among the mundane philosophers to see phenomena in time, interwoven by cause and effect. The Cleric’s epiphany many years ago, was what this really meant, for all chance to be providence, for all to move with the blessing of divine intelligence. If the Gods were there at the beginning, at every beginning, and will be there at every end, then the divine must therefore be out of the river of time, unmoved, yet in time, moving. Only in birth and death, when mortal souls leave the grips of time, can they truly reach the Gods.
That was when he abandoned the texts, and moved to the coin. The world needed a preacher among the wretched, and the wretched preacher needed the world. And the coin, his symbol, was his proof: it carried with it traces of sacred lands, the same ones the Cleric travelled, like the coin. It was a faint echo, but a fragment of the divine is all he needs to work in-the-world. Workers of miracles were otherwise bound as hosts to their marked sites.
That hall-of-dreams was built on direct witness, the Cleric was sure of it. It possessed that divine origin, of memories disconnected from time. In his past explorations, he has found various other works that might have been astonishing in their own right, works one would expect to find in a church instead of hidden in murderous depths, but they pale as imitations of the imagination, tainted by marks of history. It showed in the features of Mesophian innovation, or the various symbols and gestures profligated to the uneducated rabble. Whatever monstrous artist clearly was groping in the dark, trying to reconstruct a forgotten memory on popular word-of-mouth alone.
The Cleric paused at the thought. What a tragic waste of the poor people that were those mouths. If only the artist knew. Devoted, but fundamentally mundane artworks, when instead the artist should be looking within for the touch of the Gods.
The Cleric would find that hall-of-dreams, and Vermin would learn just how very lucky she was a sufficiently high level priest has yet to reach her hall.