“Hey ladies, sir, what's happening? You all seem intent on something,” Kan asked, looking up as they passed the man splitting wood on their trek to the edge of the camp.

“We’re about to make an offering to Lady Stewart’s patron Freya. These two intend to ask for a boon. Did you want to join us?” Caldur explained as they passed.

“If you don’t mind?” he asked Chess, who nodded. With a thunk of the ax biting into the stump Kan fell into step with them.

“Another witness won't be remiss,” Caldur reasoned to Chess.

They stopped to collect the heart from the butchers before settling on a spot behind Chess’ tent to set up the shrine. It sat on the opposite side of camp from Lynn’s tent and they’d silently agreed to keep her as unaware of the rite as possible for the time being.

Chess summoned her guitar and played through ‘Simple Man’ a few times while growing a complex woven shrine filled with flowering vines and brambles. She translated parts of the song as she went and performed it in Brastian on the last run to the delight of the group.

She’d left a shelf with a small bowl-like indentation in which she laid her scarf and Caldur placed the heart. They'd set a dozen candles around the bowl which flickered in the diminishing light, casting the small white flowers in stark relief.

“Now what? Do I just sing?” Chess asked, while taking the time to tune her guitar.

“A moment please?” Kan asked, digging into a pocket. He presented a small gold crown and placed it in the bowl with the other items. He shrugged and smiled when Chess gave him a questioning look.

Ashley stepped forward once he'd stepped back and drew a knife before bringing her tail around in front and cutting a clump of hair from the end before adding it to the bowl.

“Alright, well, here goes nothing,” Chess said with a sigh, after another moment of silence. She’d decided on an old favorite for a love song. Playing the tune for a while before she started singing, she did her best to play The Beatles classic; ‘I wanna hold your hand’. The translated version, that she’d worked out in her head, sounded as good as the original and the others smiled when she’d finished and the tune faded into the din of the men setting camp behind them.

Taking a deep breath Chess gathered her thoughts.

“Freya, we have gathered here to give you this offering and ask that you grant permission for me to adopt Ashley here into my family,” Chess finally said aloud, cringing at her stilted words, and throwing an awkward arm over the girl’s shoulders. Ashley gave her a hesitant smile then she looked down.

Nothing happened for a long minute and Chess looked at the others who seemed to take it all in stride; standing and waiting stoically. She let out a long sigh and shuffled from foot to foot.

Freya, but I hope this offering is big enough for you to respond in some fashion or I’ll look like a fool, she thought, looking up into the sky.

With her head raised she only saw a flash of fluttering white and silver in her peripheral vision to herald the arrival of a large falcon. It perched on the edge of the bowl and picked at the lion's heart, tearing a strip out of the organ meat and swallowing before darting in for another chunk.

Caldur stepped forward with a frown but stopped when Chess put out a hand to stop him. A trickle of memory tugged at the corner of her mind. Besides, it was strange behavior for a bird of prey, and the bird had finished half the heart before she’d wrangled the thought. Freya has a cloak of falcon's feathers. Excitement flowed into her limbs as she watched the falcon consume its meal. Wait, how do I know that?

Once the bird had finished, it launched itself into the air rising into the sky. The moment it disappeared into the gathering gloom, magic started coalescing in the bowl. At first, the magic drew into a small red glowing lattice that drew the flames off the candles and into the center. With a bright blue flash, the remaining offerings disappeared leaving the bowl empty and undamaged. The candles now danced in blue and green flames.

An intricate matrix slowly gathered the moment the offerings disappeared. The magic spun in tones of green, red, and blue reminding Chess of a time she’d spun a length of Christmas lights overhead, the colors bleeding into their trailing partners. It spun so fast that the matrix became unclear before stopping with an implosion of light, leaving behind a tiny ghostly figure of a Greenwood lion pacing around the bowl of the shrine.

“’I wanna hold your hand’, really? A little on the nose don’t you think? Sigh. This is not exactly where I imagined my first shrine would be but I admit it has a sort of rustic remote charm,” the lion quipped in Freya’s amused tones, in Brastian, pacing, but keeping her head locked on Chess and the others.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Did you just say sigh?" Chess asked.

“Maybe, I can convince the Dryads to leave me offerings so we can chat, I’ve come to appreciate their ruthlessness in the deals I made when dropping you here. Yhyslimron has expressed her delight in my choice of envoy and the follower you’ve acquired.” The small lion Freya stopped and grinned a mini toothy smile.

She scratched an ear with a back paw for a time, studying each of them in turn.

“This is truly an unexpected development, Chester my boy! You're adopting a child, and it hasn’t yet been a month; what are the chances? Don’t get me wrong, I understand your reasons, that core will fit you wonderfully, but I want you to be sure about this. If I do this for you, I expect you to take proper responsibility for her. She is the first local to give me a fervent offering and I think I already like her more than you. She's definitely cuter,” Freya said. Chess drew in a sharp breath before realizing she was speaking English.

“I am, and I will,” Chess said in English, surprising herself with her confidence. Freya continued in Brastian as though the question hadn’t been asked.

“So,” Freya said in a drawl. “You want to adopt a cat-girl? When I tell people, they should get a cat this isn’t usually what I have in mind but it just might be better,” she said to Chess, then gave Ashley a frank inspection.

“So, Ash, are you sure you wanna have this loser as a mother? That this isn’t some sort of messed up family rebound thing?” she asked.

“Yes,” Ashley chirped and nodded vigorously. “She’s nice and I trust her. This is better than anything I could have hoped for,” she murmured.

“And you join a noble house,” the lion winked at her before turning back to Chess. “I approve and this gives me some ideas.”

“Ok, the heart of a lion was a nice touch by the way." She turned to focus on Chess. "I’ll expect you to do a good job in raising her from now on, no more of this pretending she’s not here bullshit or lazing about with a ‘headache’. Get some good tutors for you both, it's painful watching you blunder about. As a start, well, you’re in a camp of soldiers...” She gave Caldur and Kan a significant look before settling back to sit on her haunches.

Blue and white magic lit the shrine, flash blinding them all. When they’d blinked away the glare, the entire shrine had changed. The branches and vines had taken on a hard-dark brown color and the flowers now resembled fragile glass; the bowl had taken on a smooth golden sheen. The green and black lion remained frozen. It now lay at the back of the basin its paws hanging down inside.

Chess opened her mouth to speak but a window interrupted her.

You’ve adopted Ashley Pemburtton with full rights and responsibilities. Her name’s been changed to Ashley Pemburtton Stewart. Congratulations!

“Huh, I expected something... more?” Chess muttered.

Caldur and Kan gave Chess and Ashley considering looks while having a silent conversation with nods and gestures.

“Spear,” they both eventually said at the same time.

“To start, and dance when we get back home,” Caldur amended with a single nod.

“What’s this?” Chess asked, looking from Kan to Caldur and back.

“When a Goddess makes a suggestion, you do your best not to disappoint,” Kan explained, giving her a wide smile and tapping Caldur on the shoulder with a fist as they left.

“Is it just me, or was that unsettling?” Chess asked Ashley in an aside watching the men’s backs.

“Yeah, she was intense and strange,” Ashley responded, stepping forward to run a hand over the front of the shrine. She mumbled something under her breath that Chess missed before speaking up. “I think it’s petrified wood."

“Really?” Chess said, copying Ash by running a hand over the front of the shelf before knocking a finger on the hard surface. “That’s impressive.” She dug the core out of her pocket and held the large marble in a fist.

“So, Ash, do you know how I take this thing?” she asked with a smile.

“You put it in your mouth and it should dissolve into your system in a couple of minutes,” Ashley explained.

“Well, no time like the present,” Chess said popping the sphere into her mouth. She felt a zing of charged mana and an overwhelming taste of maple syrup as the orb slowly grew smaller on her tongue.

“What are you two doing? What was that surge of divine magic!?” Lynn’s voice interrupted from behind and Chess very nearly choked on the core in surprise. Chess glared over her shoulder at the girl. Lynn looked in disarray with fur sticking out wildly and her robe rumpled. How long did we take? I’d swear she only just went to her tent. Chess looked about finding night had fallen and she’d not noticed her vision had adjusted to greyscale. Huh.

“We made an offering to Freya and she blessed the shrine,” Ashley explained gesturing at the display in front of them. Chess gave her a grateful look.

“What did you offer?” Lynn asked excitedly and proceeded to grill Ashley on the setup for the ritual and the offerings they’d made.

The core finished absorbing and distracted Chess with a window. That was way too much maple syrup. She coughed to clear the coating of phlegm stuck in her throat.

Amber Core: Rare: Rank 3

Active: Apply Rank x Will(mod) square inches of sap a second to an injured organism to help promote healing and prevent infection. The healing rate of wounds increased by 5(Rank x Will(mod)) percent/day that it remains applied. [Current 30%]. Created sap loses efficacy after Rank x Will(mod) minutes if not applied to a wound.

Passive: Slows the blood loss from your wounds by 2.5(Rank x Will(mod)) percent/second. [Current 15%]. And increases the resilience of the heart muscle by an equal percentage.

“Shit, that’s useful,” Chess mumbled and looked up at the other two who'd gone quiet at her words, “Oh, so what do you think of the shrine, Lynn? Beautiful isn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes, the petrification is quite impressive,” Lynn enthused and went on to examine and describe various things about the magical and mundane makeup of the shrine. Chess let out a mental sigh of relief resting a hand on Sprigs handle.

Fuck me that was close, she thought, letting the conversation flow over her as she contemplated the usefulness of her new abilities; itching to try it out.