“Nobody just visits a god,” Tamsin said, three days into research that had buried the Coinhouse’s back table under a small mountain of borrowed scrolls, most of them older than the city itself.
“That’s not how any of the old faiths worked, even before the Imperium decided organized worship of the Seven was politically inconvenient and let it quietly starve. You don’t knock on a god’s door. You travel to a place where the boundary between their domain and the mortal world wears thin enough to be heard through, and you make yourself worth listening to.”
“So we need a temple,” Draus said.
“We need the temple. Most of the old shrines are just empty stone now — abandoned, picked over, nothing left behind the altar but dust and the occasional desperate graffiti from pilgrims who showed up centuries too late to find anyone home.” Tamsin tapped a specific, water-stained page with the particular reverence of someone who’d just found exactly what she’d been hoping for.
“But Ritnja’s faith never fully died the way the others did. Death doesn’t go out of fashion. There’s a site — the Hollow Sanctum, six days southeast, built directly over what the old texts call a ‘thin place,’ where her domain supposedly presses closest against ours. Still tended, even now. Quietly. By an order that never stopped believing anyone was listening.”
[New Quest Available: The Hollow Sanctum]
[Difficulty: Unrated — destination, not combat]
[The Ledger notes it has no formal category for “pilgrimage to personally confront a god about an unresolved grievance.” The Ledger has created one. The Ledger would like that acknowledged as a meaningful administrative concession.]
“It made a whole new category for this,” I said, half-laughing despite the size of what we were actually about to attempt.
“High honor,” Draus said.
“Don’t waste it.”
The road southeast ran through country none of us had traveled before — drier, older-looking, farmhouses spaced further and further apart until they stopped entirely and the land settled into something flatter, quieter, the kind of landscape that seemed to be holding its breath rather than simply existing.
Even the birds thinned out the closer we got, until the only sound for the last half-day’s travel was wind moving through grass that had gone the pale, bleached gold of something that had stopped actively dying and simply settled into being finished.
“Cheerful,” Sela said, breaking the silence after nearly an hour of nobody bothering to.
“It’s her domain,” Tamsin said, quiet, clearly choosing her words with more care than usual.
“Not evil. Not even sad, necessarily, if the old texts have it right. Just — honest. This is what land looks like when it stops pretending it’s going to be anything other than what it actually is.”
The Hollow Sanctum itself rose out of that flat gold country like something that had grown there rather than been built — pale stone weathered smooth, a low, wide temple with no doors anywhere visible, just open archways leading into a dark that didn’t feel hostile so much as patient, the way the gods in the Hall Between had felt patient, like time simply meant something different on the other side of that threshold.
A single figure waited at the outer steps — an old woman, robed in undyed cloth, hands folded, watching our approach with an expression that suggested she’d been expecting us for considerably longer than the six days our journey had actually taken.
“Driftborn,” she said, before any of us had said a word, her voice dry and unhurried as the country around her.
“And carrying a question old enough that I felt it three days before you arrived. The Sanctum doesn’t get visitors like you anymore. Not the kind who actually have something worth Her attention.”
“You felt it,” I repeated.
“From three days out.”
“Grief and unfinished business both have a particular weight, child. Yours has been sitting unresolved long enough that even an old keeper half-deaf to most things could hear it coming.” The woman’s gaze swept over the rest of the company — Draus, Sela, Borin, Tamsin, all of them standing close, unwilling to let me walk this last stretch entirely alone even now — and something in her expression softened, just slightly.
“You may all enter. Few who reach this place do so with this much waiting for them outside the threshold. She’ll find that interesting, I expect, whatever else she finds.”
“Is there a ritual,” Draus asked.
“Something we need to do, to actually get an audience?”
“There’s a door,” the keeper said, simply, nodding toward the dark archway behind her.
“And a willingness to walk through it without flinching. That’s the whole rite. It has always been the whole rite. Gods don’t generally require much ceremony from people who are actually ready to ask them something honest.”
[The Ledger notes the absence of any further mechanical requirement for this encounter with something that reads, to the Ledger, distinctly like relief. The Ledger has spent three months bracing for whatever this moment would eventually cost you. It would like that bracing, retroactively, to be on the record as well.]
I looked at the dark archway, at the patient old keeper, at Draus’s steady hand finding mine without either of us needing to discuss it, and felt the specific, settled clarity of a question I’d been carrying since a room with no real walls finally arriving at the door it had always been walking toward.
“Okay,” I said, quiet, to the company, to the keeper, to whatever was waiting in that patient dark.
“Let’s go ask her.”
We walked through together.