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Whom does a god worship?
It sounds like a trick: if a god is a higher power, then there shouldn’t be anything above him to worship, and if gods are meant to be the object of worship, then they cannot be the conveyors.
It haunts him, though, this question he mulls over in his eternal half-rest. Seasons turn as quickly as pages in a book of prayers, the sun and moon and stars get juggled across the sky with careless hands, and the paladin wonders why the god continues to make this pilgrimage once a year. He goes through cycles of admiring the god’s devotion and cursing his adherence to futility, but the paladin supposes that even a god must desire a taste of what it means to be human.
The paladin’s heart aches; he hadn’t been familiar with humanity in eons.
This year, the god shows up in his black mourning robes, speckled with royal purple stars that make the fabric appear leprous. It contrasts to the pallor of the god’s face, draining the color from his cheeks and nose that has appeared from climbing up this incline. The paladin lost count of the years long ago, but it wouldn’t matter at all–time means nothing to him now, and it hadn’t meant anything to the god for years more numerous than the grains of sand that rest against the sea. Empires had risen and fallen, the continents had shifted, pushing and pulling against each other like the tide, and the god hadn't aged a day. There’s not even a streak of gray across his chestnut bangs to offer some glance at the life he’d once lived, the mortality that had once felt like a gift to him.
With a quiet sigh, the god pushes past a branch of laurels, drawing closer, close enough that if the paladin could breathe, the air would brush against the god’s cheek. It’d be a whisper from the past, an echo of nights throughout the ages: hide and seek as friends, flirting by firesides as teenagers, tangled among blankets and heavy with blissful slumber as lovers.
A chain that outlasted mortality, that survived into this eternal, waking dream. It tugs at the paladin’s chest, and when the god studies the tree before him, it looks as if it does the same to him.
The paladin tries to imagine what the god sees. He knows the bark must be wrinkled and cracked with age, that the magnolia leaves have curled out and blush green, their fuzzy undersides in such contrast to their waxy faces. The flowers that the god had conjured from the ashes, that had been watered with shed blood and salty tears, must be in full bloom, and the paladin conjures up their colors, remembering their names from how the god had once studied them as a boy: honey and crimson blanket flowers, the crisp periwinkles of fireweeds, blushing violets, the pale and fragile pinks of peonies. He imagines them as a stream pouring out of the gash in the bark, a flood of life and vibrancy at a sight which had once held so much pain, where blood cries from the ground and demands vengeance that cannot be wrought.
The god kneels. This is the only time he does so in a year, when he traces a sigil across his chest, and he bows his head in reverence. His fingers brush against the petals of a carnation, and he whispers something low, his words twisted by the breath of an ancient tongue; its cadence reminds the paladin of a prayer.
Whom does a god worship?
Divinity did not begin in the pantheon of the gods or the magic that flows from their ichor-filled veins to rain upon humanity.
It began in a small village, where hawks roamed the sky and plucked stray mice from the ground with ease, where people hocked their wares for just enough to eat and nothing more. It began among pine needles and oak leaves, in the warm laps of salty waves against ankles, in patches of clovers and daisies, swollen with pollen which elicited sneezes from those who wandered near them.
Divinity was woven into the mundane: the townspeople huddled under steeples and around altars on holy days as an act of habit, but true holiness was found among the secular, the day-to-day, the profoundly human. Many of the gods walked among the humans, but the boys’ village did not care for these wanderers and troublemakers–no, the divine lived in the hands that sewed buttons and kneaded dough, the sweet musk of the trees prickling to life in spring, the glaze of the sunset across the sky. Laughter among friends was sacred, the caress of a lover’s hand on a cheek holy, and a cup of warm tea in the winter dawn the pinnacle of godliness.
The two boys met beneath the boughs of a magnolia whose limbs stretched so high, higher, straight to the heavens and the councils of the gods, and they pretended they could dig their fingers into the soft bark and pull themselves along the webs of the tree, that they themselves could touch the fabric of the heavens themselves. They sprawled in its shadows and wove grasses and daisies together, played games of tag among its wandering roots, and when the evening shaded their faces in blues and purples, they walked each other home, parting with clasping hugs and whispered jokes, their voices cackling as they separated in the night.
One’s existence was a simple testament to the other’s–if one was in the vicinity, the other could not be too far behind, and they learned the granular facts of life together. Tree bark scraped hands and knees, a new tooth will grow when your first one falls out, don’t challenge an animal for its young, and never wander too far from the light of the village.
When they weren’t confined to the church’s schoolhouse or working the fields with their fathers, they learned to notice the divinity of life around them, where it hid in the cupboards and corners of their houses and in the veins of leaves from the trees. They traced it among lines of ink in their books of prayers, tasted it on the winds that blew up from the valley, felt it in the playful tugs against each other’s hair or flicks against their foreheads, in the tricks they played on their siblings.
All of life was before them, their paths not yet discovered for themselves. This was the time of discovery, becoming acquainted with the world and each other–not the time of fates and gods and monsters.
***
Time stretched them out and filled them in, widening their shoulders and carving sharp lines against their jaws with its knife; it cracked the timbres of their voices and left acne scars against their cheeks.
When the sunlight turned the ends of one boy’s chestnut bangs into threads of gold, the raven-haired boy noticed, and he could not deny the heat which poured red into his cheeks. When they lounged beneath the magnolia’s boughs and the chestnut-haired boy conjured light from his fingers at the behest of his prayers, the raven-haired boy pretended not to notice the way the light would pulse against his face, how the other boy’s eyes would stick to his features for just a breath too long.
The time of discovery passed away slowly, like a chrysalis shedding layer by layer to reveal a new creature beneath: a time of duty, fealty, piety.
On each of their thirteenth birthdays, the boys’ mothers had marched them to the church for their oaths. In a kingdom such as theirs, in troubling times such as theirs, the only futures afforded to two lowly village boys was among the religious orders, pledged in faith to divinity.
The raven-haired boy had sworn to the path of the paladin: a warrior, powered by divine righteousness and a promise to uphold justice.
The chestnut-haired boy had sworn to the path of the cleric: a priesthood of the gods, imbued with the powers of the deities they’re inextricably bound to in religious devotion.
The religious orders made clear the dangers of fond and fickle human attachments. The boys would soon need to pledge to a higher power, and it was best to spend the next few years divesting oneself of earthly attachments.
Religious orders do not have dominion over matters of the heart, try as they might, and especially over hearts as big as the soon-to-be paladin and the soon-to-be cleric. They spent their days in careful study, spread beneath the shade afforded to them by the boughs of the magnolia and perfumed by its sweet blossoms. The chestnut-haired boy memorized his prayers and the divisions of the gods he would one day serve, and the raven-haired boy practiced his parries with a whittled stick, imagining the foes he would someday face and the power he would wield once he could pledge himself to an order, when he could call upon the gods for their strength and wisdom.
“Who will you choose?” the raven-haired boy asked one day as he jabbed and parried with the young branches of the magnolia tree, their bark still wet and pliable.
The chestnut-haired boy rubbed at a spot on the back of his neck, a tell that his nerves were getting the best of him. He hunched back over his book and shook his head. “It does not matter–besides, my heart does not belong to the gods.”
“But you have to choose one. Or an ideal, or something to be yoked with.”
With a spark in his eye, the cleric-to-be studied his friend, and the paladin-to-be tried to pretend like he did not notice or care.
“That day is not today,” he finally said. “Today, I choose you, and us, and the life we have right now.”
“You choose home."
“Yes.” The boy slowly nodded. “Home.”
***
On the chestnut-haired boy's eighteenth birthday, he swore an oath to the wandering goddess and her followers, having decided her precepts and knowledge would be best suited for mankind’s troubles in these dark ages, and he was bestowed the title of cleric. He took up his small pack of belongings and met his friend by their magnolia tree and held him so long that their skin began to stick together. The cleric dug his face into the other boy's neck, and the other boy dreamed of what it would mean to press their lips together.
He compromised, pressing a sweet kiss to the crown of the cleric’s head instead and squeezing his fingers against the fabric of his robes, and when they parted, it had been too soon.
Two weeks later, on the other boy’s eighteenth birthday, he pledged to follow the same path, to join the order of the wandering goddess with his cleric and to choose to defend her will, and he was bestowed with the title of paladin.
But her will be damned–the paladin had only one reason for making the decision he did.
They met again in a forceful embrace, and when the priest noted their familiarity, he assigned them to a shared room in the goddess’ order, two beds pushed against either wall. Their days fell into a mixture of routines old and new, of rising early for prayers and descending to the altars for nightly prayers, of making the cleric’s tea just how he likes it, and of the cleric rubbing his thumb in the tense spot between the paladin’s shoulders after a hard day of sword drills.
And so the years passed, the sun rising and setting on the order of the wandering goddess and its clockwork measures of time: holy days and daily prayers, calling upon the divine to heal the darkness which plagued the land. The cleric learned his part and fought the war in holy chants and fasts and devotion to the goddess’ will, the paladin in serving justice when it was necessary, correcting the wrongs of the people and leading campaigns against the darkness threatening to swallow the kingdom–upholding the goddess’ laws through enforcement and learning to call on her grace for strength.
Until one day, when they walked the meadows surrounding the stone walls of the order, noting the different flowers in bloom and the trickle of the nearby stream. The cleric muttered his prayers in dutiful devotion and spilt webs of light between his fingers with what powers he borrowed from the wandering goddess for the day, and the paladin watched in reverent awe.
In the years since their arrival to the order, the cleric had become a dutiful adherent to the goddess; he was the most devoted of all, kneeling for the proper prayers night and day, her precepts and codes ingrained into his mind, offerings to her always present on the altar–faithful in the highest sense.
“I’m just doing my job,” he’d said one day with a shrug, picking at a stray thread from the embroidery on his robe.
And the paladin had watched, curiosity and pity bruising his chest.
Is this what you want? Is this a kind of life to live?
As if he could hear him, the cleric had added, “It is the life we’ve been given, and I do what I must.”
The paladin turned this over in his mind like a stone, watching the cleric as he he held his arms out, and a path seemed to open before them, the limbs of the laurels and myrtles and the saplings of pines bending at the gentle motions of his hands. It led them on, beckoning with the sweet scent of flowers neither had smelled in years.
They walked, and a magnolia rose before them.
“It’s just like home,” the paladin said, his fingers brushing the bark.
The cleric nodded, a sweet grin poking at the corners of his mouth. His hand pressed into the wood as well, and he dipped his forehead to rest against it for but a moment, a sign of reverence to the goddess.
And then, there was a rustle behind them; footsteps calm and purposeful in their approach.
When they turned around, beyond the shade of the magnolia, a woman stood before them, illuminated by a power far greater than that of the sun. Her hair billowed behind her, thick and curly and full, burning in shades of copper and ruby, and her skin the color of basalt simmered with the heat of the divine. Her eyes burned molten gold, and her robes were made of the wind and its colors, an ever-shifting palette hardly discernible to the paladin’s eye.
He couldn’t help it; he knelt. The cleric followed suit, making the sigil of the wandering goddess over his heart, muttering her prayer of worship at her feet.
The paladin was never one for studying–he did not know what to say, but simply bowed his head and offered his reverent silence.
“There is no need to bow,” the goddess mused, and her voice sounded as crackling and sharp as bonfire smoke, the nip of wind against one’s cheek, a tear rent in the fabric of the earth. “Stand.”
The two men followed suit, their heads still bowed. Once more, the cleric made the sigil over his chest.
The goddess studied them, and the paladin noticed that her eyes swirled and danced within their depths of liquid gold. She reached for where the cleric’s hand still hung above his heart, and she pried his fingers open with her gentle touch.
“For your fealty and devotion,” the goddess explained, holding the cleric’s palm up to her eyes, “and your loyalty to the ways of the gods, to my order and its precepts–may godhood be extended to you, good cleric. Your prayers have been heard and answered, and the people of this land will be saved under the banner of worship to you and your cause.”
The cleric blinked several times, his flushed lips parted in surprise. His first words to the goddess are not thanks or praise. “I never prayed for this.”
“You prayed for salvation for your people,” the goddess said, one copper-red eyebrow slanting up against her forehead.
The paladin watched, his eyes stinging from the radiance of the goddess’ glow.
And then, she held up her thumb, and she pressed it into the cleric’s palm.
Silver light burst from the tip of her finger and dug into his skin, a hot and glowing core sinking against the lines and calluses of his hand. The paladin stumbled back at the luminosity, tripping and catching himself on his palms on the forest floor, scraping them on the magnolia’s woody roots; he watched, helpless, as light he’d only seen twinkling in the sky in galaxies too far away embedded itself in the cleric’s skin, the dust of the heavens raining from above like crushed diamonds mixed with spring rain and settling against the cleric and his robes. His hair was rustled by the hands of the wind which wrapped the goddess in its loving arms, and when he gasped, his hazel eyes became rimmed with gold, as if some from the goddess’ eyes had poured into his.
She held her thumb there for too long; the paladin had lost count of his heartbeats, and time always slipped away from him regardless. When she pulled it away, the cleric gasped once more, eyes fluttering, fingers twitching. He held his hand up to his face, and even from where the paladin had fallen to the earth, he could see an oval of red pressed into his skin, a remnant of the goddess’ touch.
“God of starlight and prayerful devotion, god of salvation to the people of this kingdom and their needs; cleric of the wandering goddess, communer with the divine and bridge between the healing streams of the gods and humanity–William, may you be welcome to the pantheon.”
The cleric’s voice stretched thin–this was usually the part where he would begin to cry, and the paladin stood to comfort him, but no tears came. He choked on air, but no tears fell. “I did not ask for this.”
The goddess raised her eyebrow once more. “Most would not question a gift of godhood. Most would be grateful for the opportunity to serve their time and place well, to defend it from the evils which threaten its existence.”
With a frightful look at his hand, where starlight winked and pulsed beneath the skin in his palm, the cleric frowned.
The paladin drew himself up and stomped back over to the two, and he did not care that he had pledged his oaths to this goddess; he would spit in the divine’s face and let himself crumble to oblivion at her touch before he let the cleric be hurt. He pulled himself up, standing between the goddess and the cleric, nearly nose-to-nose with basalt skin, the heat of magic and divinity itself.
“What did you do to him?”
The goddess quirked up her lips. “Your cleric’s prayers are answered for his faithful devotion to my precepts, and you will follow him to the ends of the earth, my paladin. “
“I’m not yours,” the paladin spat back. He wished he’d brought his sword; he wished he had the strength to cut down a god.
Blazing to life, her eyes shining a ferocious molten gold, the goddess laughed. “Of course you’re not. You were never mine.”
***
They returned to their quarters in a flurry of heat and motion, the cleric far outpacing the paladin. No tears erupted from his eyes, but his breaths sounded choked and sobbing, and besides, the paladin’s heart beat for him: he knew the cleric's pain more than he knew himself.
“We will figure this out,” the paladin assured as the door clicked behind him, and he held out an imploring hand: please, let me help you figure this out; we will adapt and learn and grow, just like we always have.
“No,” the cleric said with a shake of his head, his hands raked into his hair and palms at his temples. “No, there is nothing to figure out.” A short, painful huff of air. “I have to join the gods.”
“Not all gods ascend,” the paladin pointed out, his own heart beating bloody with pain now. “The goddess wanders, and others walk among men. You would be no different than them.” The paladin swallowed, hesitated, and then, he added, “I’ll stay by your side, and you can stay by mine, and we will figure this out.”
“What happens when time passes?” the cleric asked, grief wearing at the edges of his voice. “What happens when your hair turns gray and mine remains the same? When you begin to fade and I remain as I am?”
It was a plunge that felt as natural as slipping into sleep. “Then I will love you more than life itself, and I’ll love you until I have no more breath to give, for however long we are given,” the paladin countered deftly, his first words of love darting out from his tongue like a lance to an enemy’s chest, a final blow to strike down a god. “There is nothing you can say that will make me forsake you, and no pity you feel for yourself will ever surmount what I feel for you.”
The tears didn’t come as easily to the cleric with his newfound status. The breath of eternity in his lungs and divinity woven into his veins diluted the emotionality that had once so defined the young man. When one has an infinite supply of time, emotion tends to get lost in its currents and tides.
But then, a tear, silver and glistening with starlight, bled from the corner of the cleric’s eye, sharpening the rings of gold that had clasped around his hazel irises. He was a creature of beauty and otherworldly divinity, and he cried as if a child.
With hands animated by a force far past his own will–deep-set and primal, an instinct far greater than the one for his own life–the paladin pulled him close. There was a newfound warmth that simmered on the cleric’s skin, like the power had slaked off of the goddess and soaked into his skin instead, but otherwise, he fit as neatly into the paladin’s arms as ever. They bent and molded against each other, their hands settling in the spots they were most familiar with, faces in the crooks of each other’s necks. Another tear bled from the cleric’s eye, and its salt stung against the paladin’s skin; when the paladin breathed against the cleric’s neck, he detected new scents–the molten cores of stars, lava cooling to basalt, the wick of a candle snuffed out by the wind–and beneath it all, the same perfume of wildflowers and pine needles clinging to their skin since they’d been children.
“I am devoted to you, helplessly so,” the paladin murmured, steady against the cleric’s sobs. “You are my holy order, that which I fight for, and I live to serve you.”
“Don’t say that,” the cleric countered, magic-warmed fingers tightening against the small of the paladin’s back. “Don’t say that when you don’t know the cost, and when forever cannot be afforded to us.”
“I didn’t say forever. I said for as long as we are given.”
Their order’s hearth continued to crackle with flames
Suddenly, tension wrapped around the cleric’s shoulders, his fingers tightening against the paladin. What few tears had sprung up had dried, and the heat burned against his skin even more. “You are a fool,” the cleric whispered, his lips feverish where they fell against the paladin’s neck. It sent a shock of heat seeping into his bones, and he wondered if the divinity of the mundane which had grown a part of him could somehow call to the divinity of the gods now inexplicably joined in his cleric.
“It’s a prerequisite for bravery,” the paladin pointed out, dragging his head just enough away to join their foreheads together, until all he saw were pools of rich browns and soft, lilypad greens, kept steady by rims of gold which shone with the light from the stars above. “And the bravest acts are always done in the name of love.”
The cleric tensed at the word. “It is foolish to love what has been set aside for holiness, and even brasher to love a god.”
“We’re all fools in the end,” the paladin said, and with every last stray inhibition having fallen from his mind, like a tree dropping its leaves after a frost, he pressed their lips together, like he had so longed to all those years ago.
The cleric did not pull back. His magic warmed from his hands and against the paladin’s shirt, and the lips of the divine tasted like honeyed-wine and dandelions, the smoke of a fire at sunset and the bite of winter against the skin.
It was the paladin’s first kiss, and it was with a god, not because he wanted divinity for himself, but because it terrified the cleric–it wasn’t a request for eternity, but a promise to bear it with the cleric, to remain by his side for as long as possible. Never had the paladin been as sure of himself as he had been then, facing the prospect of a shared life that would end for him too soon and continue infinitely for his lover, that their story would subsume the pages of his own life while only remaining a chapter in the other’s.
“I would follow you if you were the most wretched of beings,” the paladin whispered, his lips pressed against the marble skin of the cleric’s neck. “Your starlight cannot tempt me, because I have seen you at your worst, and that is just the beginning of the parts I love most about you.” And then, all at once swept up by the emotion he lets run free in his chest, he fell to a knee before his love, head bowed in reverence and arm pressed across his chest, his hand right above his beating heart. “You are the order I pledge to, the god I will follow, and the person I most love in this life and the next.”
Oaths are powerful things, typically bound to books of ancient magic and prayers; they’re confined to lines of poetry long passed down, inscribed in stone by the gods themselves, and set to the meter only the greatest of poets have ever obtained. They are sacred and holy, meant for steeples and altars and knelt in supplication before offerings to a divinity which will not show its face.
But the boys had learned long ago that the divine is in the mundane: divinity breathed through the paladin’s spontaneous oath, sparking to life with the warmth of spring, glowing in shades of gold and dancing like motes of dust in the beams of the sun. They were words plucked from the heart of a lover, his devotion as pure as refined gold or the cloudy face of a diamond–and they were a holy oath all the same.
Fingers brushed against his forehead, brimming with the warmth of the stars. They brushed down his face and to his chin, tilting his head up, beckoning him to stand back up, and the paladin had no choice but to obey.
“You are mine,” the cleric murmured, though tracks of silver still stained his cheeks. His hand grasped for the paladin’s, then drew it up to his mouth, pressed a feverish kiss to the knuckles of his hand. “And I am yours.”
The paladin dropped all airs of piety and religious adherence then, and he drew the cleric close, and the cleric drew closer still.
What a lovely thing it is to love and to be loved–to fall into the arms of a god and love them because of all that came before, not what is to come.
***
As the ills in the kingdoms grew, the threat of shadows against the borders raged, and the people called on the gods to help, the cleric could not help but answer.
He took to communing with the gods more, or calling down the wandering goddess out by the grove of magnolia trees and demanding her attention; each night, he staggered back into his and the paladin’s quarters, burdened with the weight of more knowledge and concerned more and more for what he had fallen into. Doubt dogged at his soul, and he took to being lost, made all the worse by his eyes’ refusal to cry and his mouth’s inability to stretch into a toothy grin.
But whenever the doubt began to seep its way through the cracks in the cleric’s heart, the paladin was there to scrub it away. His hands were gentle, and they cleaned away the darkness with his quick jokes and soothing words.
One night, the cleric perched on their bed, the two from their early days at the order now shoved together, hunched over his knees and exhausted despite his eternity, his sanctity. He rubbed a hand over his eyes and said, “Why do they follow me? Why do they ask me for help? I don’t have any more answers than they do.”
It was a problem they’d both struggled with in the year since the goddess had pressed her thumb into the cleric’s palm and raised him from the perdition of humanity. What good was godhood and eternal life when you didn’t know how to handle it, what to do with it, how to help the hands that stretched out to you and asked for help you felt you could not give?
The paladin set down the bowls he’d been cleaning and approached the cleric. Once in front of him, he knelt, like a worshiper being received at the altar, and with his hands draped and hanging from the cleric’s knees, said, “You were chosen for a reason. We will figure this out together, and all will be well.”
“And if we don’t? If the kingdom perishes and the gods were foolish to put salvation into the hands of a human turned god?”
“Then I’m still devoted to you, helplessly so.” And here, the paladin bowed his head, resting it just on the tops of the cleric’s knees. He savored the warmth he could feel through the fabric, and he murmured a quiet prayer of devotion, as if only he could hear it.
Hands carded through his hair, soft and tender. “And I to you.”
“That’s not how it works,” the paladin noted, tilting his head up to see the cleric in the firelight. “I pledge to you, not the other way around.”
“Then perhaps I’ll be the first,” the cleric said, the gold rimming his irises flashing with amusement. “The first god to swear an oath of fealty to man, to love him as he is and not for what he shall become. I am in service to you, bound by your every word, should you so allow it.”
The paladin smirked, but he nuzzled closer, pushing up on his elbows to level with the cleric’s face. “I don’t think you mean it–there’s no gold in the air or stardust on the wind.”
“Perhaps we’ll tear heaven and earth apart together,” the cleric continued. “Make our own rules and divest ourselves of these pretenses.”
“What a stupid system: I can swear an oath to you, but you can’t to me.”
“The gods are fickle indeed,” the cleric noted with amusement, right before his mouth slotted against the paladin’s, and no oath bound by magic could taste as sweet as he did then.
And so the days wound on as such, dreary tales of the woes brought upon their kingdom by an army of shadows, more practitioners showing up at the order demanding help and leaving offerings to the gods.
To one god in particular, the wielder of starlight and prayerful spells.
The cleric spent his mornings and afternoons in careful meditation, convening with whichever gods would speak with him or else meeting practitioners with open arms and healing hands. A scrape against a child’s head, tumors bubbling in one’s stomach, sores puckered up and down a vagrant’s arms–a brush of starlight against their skin, and their bones would mend, their illnesses disappear, their blood wick away. As the situation grew more dire across the kingdom, more people came, and because their god was once human, he bent an ear, and he listened.
He did what the other gods failed to do: he cared for his practitioners.
In his own time, the paladin took to running campaigns across the kingdom: acts of espionage against the army of shadows, quests for villagers in search of their lost loved ones or to deliver supplies to those they had to leave behind in their escape. Some quests took a few hours, and others took him away from the order for days, weeks at a time, leaving him slightly unmoored, lost in confusion without his love by his side.
Though they’d first mourned the connection to the gods, they both blessed it in these times of separation; the paladin prayed, and his cleric heard, his answers coming as a kiss of wind through the pine needles, a trace of a falling star in the sky, a path of dandelions in the forests which led the paladin and his men to fresh water. When he needed it most, the paladin prayed and pressed his thumb to his palm, and, just for him to see, an arc of starlight would bloom from his hand.
It worked especially well in times of battle, when he and his men would face down factions of the army of shadows. The paladin needed but to call upon his god, his cleric, his love, and so the starlight would come, igniting his sword and illuminating a path through the darkness to lance through the shadows and divest the earth of another swarm of inky, parasitic shadows.
For years, they live like this in what harmony they could find for themselves amidst the chaos of the age. The cleric, raised into godhood and dutiful to his practitioners, heeded their prayers and took their requests before the proper gods, and in turn helped where his dominion could stretch. The paladin observed his quests faithfully, and at the end of each task, would come home into the loving arms of his god; they talked and they ate and they loved and they tasted what crumbs of heaven were theirs to be had, grasping onto the specks of light that descended before them.
And the shadows grew across the lands.
***
A battle loomed over their shoulders like a ghost, breathing down their necks and dripping chills down their spines. It was early morning, the sun just beginning to bruise the horizon with purples and pinks, and the paladin and cleric did what they’ve always done.
They carved out a space for themselves between heaven and earth.
The paladin lounged in a patch of clovers and dandelions, the dew from their petals sticking to his plain linen shirt and pants. He’d decided to save putting on his armor for later, right before the cleric was set to call the troops to arms and defeat the army of shadows that had long tormented these lands.
He watched the cleric as he picked through the clearing, now free of his robes and all pretense, a grin smudging at the corners of his mouth. When the first rays of the sun peeked above the horizon, lighting the view of the valley beneath them, the cleric turned around with his hands stained red, a mound of berries and leaves resting in his palms like treasure dug from the earth.
“Strawberries?” the paladin asked with a quick grin.
“Your favorite.” The cleric sat close to the paladin, his knees bumping into the length of his thigh. As teenagers, they’d once shied away from such contact, but now, they reveled in it–a close and soft connection, intimate and at once declarative: he is mine, and I am his.
It coaxed a flush of warmth down the paladin’s chest, all the more so as the cleric leaned over with a berry pinched between his fingers as a humble offering. Remembering holy days spent huddled together against the cold while the priests sang their homilies and mothers left handfuls of coins and fruit as offerings to the gods, the paladin laughed and gladly leaned forward, teeth sinking into flesh, a sweet burst of juice soaking his tongue.
“You laugh,” the cleric noted with amusement, his smile turning into a smirk. The dawn breathed anew on him, rustling its fingers through his hair, and as the starlight faded from the sky, it seemed to reappear twofold in his eyes.
The paladin nodded, swallowing against the bite of strawberry. “You’re precious.”
“Not half as much as you.”
What a thing it is to be complimented by a god–to be perched on a cliff in a bed of flowers, to see the fingers of the sky cup against the sun’s light and pour its scarlets and golds into the valley below, and to know that the divine only has eyes for you.
The paladin eventually sat up, and they bent their heads like practitioners in prayer over the berries, picking through their treasure and nibbling on the flesh, one offering bites to the other. Light continued to peek over the lip of the cliff, brushing against their faces with warm fingers and transmuting the night’s dew into a fresh mist.
As the water rose from the ground and clouded in the air, the gravity of the day descended upon them with languor. The berries quickly became crumpled stems and bits of unripe flesh left scattered among the yellow puffs of dandelions, and the worry tightened its hold in the center of the paladin’s chest.
“What happens after today?” he asked in the quiet. The cicadas hummed around them in early-morning song, and for a moment, he feared his voice had gotten lost within it.
But the cleric heard–he listened when the paladin asked, even across time and distance. He always bent an ear to his most loyal practitioner. “I don’t know. The only path forward is the battle, and the only way out is through.”
“You gods always did give troubling advice,” the paladin quipped, but it’s with a grin on his mouth and tears stinging at the backs of his eyes.
The cleric softened, nuzzling closer. A hint of silver light illuminated against his fingertips as he reached up to stroke a lock of gray hair that had fallen out of the paladin’s tie, one of the few streaks of silver amidst the raven darkness of his head.
“Did the fates reveal anything?”
The cleric continued to play with the lock of hair, gently shaking his head. “No. They said it is not for men or gods to know, a veil not meant to be seen past until it is torn.”
The paladin swallowed. The knot in his chest grew tighter. “Then…what happens after today?”
No tears came to the cleric–they rarely came now. Years of godhood had settled upon him, and though he hadn’t aged a day, time took its toll in other ways, most notably in his inability to weep or for his smile to stretch as wide as it used to. But in this rosy-fingered dawn, as the starlight from his fingers traced the plane of the paladin’s cheeks, down his jaw, warm light brushing against the curve of his mouth, it seemed not to be an issue of the cleric’s godhood, but his once-held humanity. A soft laugh passed from his mouth to the paladin’s, still fresh with the vapor of strawberries and damp from the mists of the morning, and he said, “We will go home, and you will say petty and cruel things, and I will laugh at your mistakes, and when the nights grow too cold, we will glow with the light of the stars, and your arms will be my home.”
Never believe the promises of a god–they are tempestuous and ever-changing, bound to paths paved by worshipful hands devoted to their own destruction in the name of divinity.
***
His armor rested heavy on his shoulders, and his joints began to ache; it had been fifteen years since his first campaign, and his body had kept its score well. At the rise of this hill, he watched the valley below, how the armies of shadows had clustered together, undulating and boiling into a wide wall of darkness that writhed beneath the gaze of the sun.
“Should my god allow it,” the paladin breathed beneath his helmet. He shoved the fear that stirred within him down into the dark depths of his chest and tried to grasp on to the starlight the cleric had gifted him with all these years: brushes of light across his cheekbones, the heat of fingers traipsing down his chest and around his ribs, a much-needed spark in a dark cavern, a warm glow in the fire on cold nights during campaigns. A stitched star winked at him from above, where their army’s banner flew in the gasping breaths of the morning, urging them forward to the point which not even the gods could see past. He simply had to trust that there would be light.
Light drives out the darkness–where there is light, no dark may bloom.
He raised his sword above his head, the same call ringing out: should my god allow it.
He felt the heat before he saw the light; his fingers prickled with discomfort beneath his gloves, but it faded as the sword shifted into the paladin’s view, and it glowed with the light and power of a sky full of stars.
The army roared behind him, the enemies roared before him, and with one final yell into the break of day, the paladin led the charge.
His sword glowed against the swarming masses of shadows, and it sliced through their hordes. Before him was a darkness thick as the night sky, but light pulsed in his hand, and around him, the armies of the god of starlight’s followers shone forth with that same glow. Between stabs and slices through the enemy, he saw snatches of the pale morning sky, blanched oranges and bits of downy yellow clouded in blushes of magenta and lavender. The mist coated his armor and slicked between his plates, but he breathed it in, savoring the dampness of it on his metal and the beading sweat across his face, how the light bled into his hands, a reminder that he was alive.
We will glow with the light of the stars, and your arms will be my home.
It became his battle cry–the reason to fight and continue on. He would give up the kingdom and its laws if it only meant bringing that promise to fruition, and with a stutter in his heart, he realized the voice had come from in his own head. A reminder, gentle and whispered in his ear with a caress from his love.
Renewed with purpose, he threw his arm back towards the soldier in front of him, how he stumbled forward in haste.
And then, there was a lance of frost between his ribs; it surprised him to feel so cold inside when the light of the stars glowed in his hand.
Another. Another. Another.
When he managed to stab through the wad of shadows in front of him, he felt the first trickle of blood, and a shifting in his gut, as if everything had been displaced. When he sank to his knee, he tried to ignore the aches in his shoulders that had seeped into his chest, how his heart had gone from a pounding warm drum in his ears to a faint, stuttering hum he could scarcely notice.
The paladin’s breath turned ragged, as if strangled by roots sunk into his lungs and airways, but it did not stop the prayer that fell sweet and blood-tinged from his lips, a confession of a thousand little desires he could already feel pulling out of his grasp.
We will glow with the light of the stars, and your arms will be my home.
Please, the paladin prayed, give me this last–a kiss that tastes like strawberries, the light of dawn blushing against your cheeks, and your arms to carry me home.
***
In the village long ago, the boys had learned that to call upon the gods in times of distress was a foolish thing to do. The gods require signs of faith and sacrifices left over time before giving way to small demands, not the cries of children grieving a dead parent or a soldier left to die on the field of battle, and most of all, they do not involve themselves in battles such as these. Before you’re old enough to learn your letters, it is a fact well-acknowledged: the gods remain cold and distant, and they do not involve themselves if they can afford not to.
But they are not the paladin’s god.
There was a flash of light, scalding to the touch and so bright that the paladin threw his arms over his head, half-convinced that this was the end.
The air filled with the scent of singed flesh and clotted blood; screeches both monster and human alike drowned out the birdsong and cicadas that had serenaded the valley that morning.
Breaths coming short and fast, the paladin tried to stand but only stumbled. The armor dug into his joints and pressed into his wounds, and when he finally shucked off his helmet to free his neck of the burden, he saw a field of desiccation and ruin: ashes where grass and wildflowers had bloomed, shadows burnt and melted into the dust as the only remains of the enemy.
The bones and severed limbs of the god’s army. A torn banner draped from the boughs of an empty oak, its royal purples turned maroon from blood and its star darkened into a deep, unwavering abyss.
Arms curled around him; for a moment, he thought it had begun to rain, but the water dripped silver across his vision, and he would know the rhythm of that heart from anywhere, for it beat out of time with humanity and the gods alike.
His god had answered his prayer.
***
Time no longer existed. The paladin could only measure the streams of blood pouring from his torso which watered the earth and the drops of silver tears against his graying hair.
The gods are gifted with many things, but not all–this was a lesson the paladin and cleric had learned very quickly after the goddess’ gift, and it became painful fact now as the cleric trudged up the hill with the paladin in his arms, as he he tried as gently as possible to rest the paladin’s aching head against one of the few trees that hadn’t succumbed to the blaze of light. When the paladin felt himself settle into the ground, ready to sink into his grave, he finally peeled his eyes open, blinking upwards at the spread of evergreen leaves that shone against the morning sun. His eye briefly caught on a white petal curling outwards, and the sweet scent of its blossom cut through the tang of his blood and the simmer of the cleric’s magic, driving straight into sun-stained memories.
“Magnolias,” he whispered. It hurt to speak, but he hoped it said everything he needed it to: you took me home, where we used to sit beneath these trees and weave garlands out of daisies and tease each other about our own stupid mistakes; where we said goodbye, and I almost pulled your lips to mine; where the wandering goddess had pressed her thumb into your palm and blessed you with a divinity you never asked for.
You took me home.
The cleric’s image wavered in front of him. Silver tears streaked down his flushed cheeks, and his robe was torn and singed, all of its purples burnt into the color of basalt. His chestnut hair, free of the grays which streaked against the paladin’s, rustled against his short, stuttered breaths. “Yes.” He sniffed, and when his next breath came out in a gasp, he added, “Magnolias.”
The paladin coughed, and the blood tasted cold as it hit the back of his teeth.
There was a hand against his cheek. Warmth pulsed from it, and even though his eyes had fluttered closed, he knew the light was silver.
“Hey, it’s okay,” the cleric cooed. His fingers continued to press into the paladin’s skin, though they were beginning to feel fainter with each pulse of light. “It’s okay, love. Don’t go–it’s okay–”
But the last words came out like a choked sob.
The paladin grasped up, pulling his blood-slick fingers loosely around skin that felt like a furnace, just a thin barrier between magic and eternal life. “Not even the gods can prevent some ills.”
“No, no, no–please.” It was troublesome to hear a god plead against nothing, to have life eternal and not be able to mete it out to his loved ones. “Please, Mike–just keep your eyes open. Keep your breaths steady. I can–I can fix this.”
The paladin blinked his eyes open, only barely so. A familiar figure wavered in front of him, legs on either side of him and hunched over the paladin. It was as familiar as breathing to either of them, but in the dimming morning light, it felt faint and alien–the same action but with a different connotation. He did his best to grip the cleric’s wrist tighter, drawing close to the heat as his own fingers began to feel like ice. “Just…take me home.”
“I can’t,” the cleric’s voice cracked. The starlight glowed with rage from his hands, but he looked so, so small for a god. “It’s too far, and you can’t move.”
The paladin fought for shallow breaths. He shook his head once, eyes fluttering closed again. “I mean…stay.” A ragged huff. “Just stay.”
“I am. I will.” There was a pulse of heat against his mouth, right before the cleric’s lips closed over the brush of starlight.
The paladin exhaled, but he could not feel himself breathe in again. There was a taste of silver starlight and the metallic tinge of blood on his lips and tongue, a faint warmth at the sides of his hips, and his chest felt so, so cold.
Time dilated, and in his last moments of consciousness, the paladin knew only three things.
First, the anguished cries of his love–his best friend, his cleric, his god, his creed. They echoed among the empty limbs and hung across them like the spatters of blood and ash that now desecrated the forest, where the world had come to learn why the gods are not allowed to interfere in the matters of man.
Then, a rumble, deep and low in the earth. Another and another. There were sparks of warmth, and he could barely hear the chants in ancient tongues beneath the cleric’s breath, the prayers he’d studied for years in their village. They’d spent every afternoon for years out in the meadow, the paladin-to-be practicing his parries and blows with a whittled tree limb, the cleric-to-be muttering prayers to himself until the words were seared into his and the paladin’s brain alike
The cleric roared: he cried and begged the earth to keep its greedy hands away from his love, for the light which he wielded in his hands to cauterize the wounds, for the other gods–wherever their fickle whims had taken them–to aid him. There were cries for healing and warmth and comfort, for life eternal if it meant just one more night.
And lastly, as the cleric’s voice faded out of awareness, the paladin felt something new. Life sprouted where his blood had spilled, soft petals from his childhood opening their weeping faces to embrace his wounded body, pricks of thorns as if to guard him, and the floral scents that reminded him of home.
The tree groaned beneath his head; there was the kiss of flowers against his skin and the caress of a lover’s hand against his cheek, warmed by the light of the stars.
***
When his eyes opened once more, he could not move at all. He stared out into the meadow, at flowers that had grown around where he had once lay down, and the paladin could not move from beyond the shadows of the boughs of the magnolia.
The cleric was nowhere to be found–not until spring had come again, and he knelt before the tree and spoke as if the paladin was not there.
The god speaks, and the paladin listens.
It’s like this every year: he stands before the paladin, then kneels, and when his prayers are finished, he leans back on his heels and speaks. His words are simple and punctuated, enveloped by a silent sadness that seems to be living as long as him, and he speaks of the old and the new. In the better years, he talks about achievements and what the future looks like for humanity; in the worse years, he laments the past, and he meditates on the graveyard of his grief a few hundred feet beneath them, an entire army of followers swallowed up in a deafening roar of light brought on by the thorn of love, its destructive core that would give up the world in exchange for its own soul.
It’s a grief that lives as long as the gods themselves.
This year is a worse one: the god speaks of ash, how some of the stars have begun to fall from the sky. He can’t discern if it’s from lack of belief or because the universe is unspooling in entropy.
His magic-warmed fingers brush against the faces of the flowers–the paladin feels it as if it's a caress against his own skin. He remembers that warm, skating touch from many nights and mornings long ago, and if it’s possible, he manages to draw a little closer–as much as he can, in a state like this.
“This isn’t a kind of life,” the god says. “They gift you life, and it only becomes a kind of death.”
Don’t say that, my love, the paladin thinks. He longs to reach out but is met with painful silence.
Palming at his eyes, his fingers coming back dripped with silver tears, the god examines the flowers and the tree. The paladin imagines the magnolias smell sweet this time of year, and he hopes it reminds the god of home.
“But I suppose I subjected you to the same thing,” the cleric continues. “In trying to prevent your death, I merely condemned you to this state.”
You brought me home, the paladin thinks.
With a shuddering sigh, the cleric stands, and the grasses of the meadow bend their heads to his steps. He signs the sigil across his chest once more, then steadies his starlit fingers above the flowers, muttering under his breath. They glow in response before winking back into their natural state.
Parting is always the worst part; it’s when the tears drip past the corners of the god’s eyes and water the flowers beneath him, when the paladin tries to reach past this half-death of his and into the eternity the god exists outside of. What a pity it is when the god presses his lips against the bark of the tree in some desperate, pitiful act of devotion for the one person he cannot reach; what a pity that both continue in parallel existences, their paths unable to intersect.
What a pity it is to live forever; what a pity it is to never die.
But another year will pass, and the paladin will still be here, sewn into the bark and blanketed in soft petals, the cool earth beneath his head, dead in sleep but alive in spirit. The gods will ask how one of their own could bow to such a lowly, broken, human thing, and in response, the paladin will whisper his answer, the wind will kiss his god's cheek, and it will only be a matter of days until they meet again and again and again, until the stars rain as dust on the earth.
Whom does a god worship?
The paladin does not answer now; his breath does not wind through the clearing.
The days fold in on themselves, but when the cleric next comes, it is wrong.
The paladin long stopped trying to count the days; he simply watches day and night in its endless melt, how the seasons blend into each other every day, one always slowly creeping up to get the best of another in a race with no end. He cannot count the days, but he knows the rhythm of these meetings, and it hasn’t been a year, not quite. Spring is just beginning to wake, the flower buds not yet in bloom, the grasses still sweet and new, and the trees have not unfolded their leaves.
It is night–dark and velvet and midnight blue–and the cleric emerges from the shadows of the trees.
The paladin sighs, and a warm breeze cuts through the chill of the night, where winter still futilely clings with bites of frost. It is a question the god will never hear: Why do you come now?
Swaying against the breeze, tilting his head into its warm embrace, the god closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. When he looks back at the magnolia, he murmurs, “It shouldn’t be this warm this time of year.”
Vain hope stirs awake in the paladin, an ember refusing to die: You see me?
The god steps forward, his boots just beginning to press into the edges of the flowers not yet bloomed. His gold-rimmed eyes focus on the green buds and the dips of the tree leaves. Then, in a louder voice, addressed to the heavens above, he says, “I have come to make an offer. A life for life.”
Fear seizes in the paladin’s chest. The breeze grows more fitful in the clearing.
But the cleric does not care; his eyes stare up at the dark glaze of the night sky, and starlight begins to weave between his fingers. He addresses the air, his voice knocking against the door to the gods themselves. “Godhood was not a gift–it was thrust upon me and pressed into the palm of my hand by the wandering goddess, a chain around my neck in exchange for the devotion I had maintained in my duties as a cleric.” He steps forward once more, close enough to the tree for the paladin to feel the brush of the god’s breath against the bark. “I have served the pantheon for eons and wandered to the ends of the earth, and there is no more I can do with what has been bestowed upon me, not at the expense of a life worth living.”
No breeze stirs through the clearing; the paladin holds still and silent, curiosity blooming awake in his mind.
The god takes his thumb, much like the goddess had eons ago, and he presses it into the palm of his other hand. He stares into the eyes of the universe and proclaims, “Gods are allowed to bestow their godhood upon devoted practitioners, as was done to me long ago. The wandering goddess met me beneath the boughs of a tree such as this, and she gave me life eternal. She subjugated the stars beneath my command.” Silver starlight burns into his palm, blending with the coolness of night in a pearly wash. “In exchange, I was bound to the pantheon to offer salvation to my people, and I have served its whims for eons. I have been a loyal follower, and I have looked after my practitioners with care but once.”
The grasses and flowers stir with wind, the breath of memory of a battlefield turned to ash, of shadows melted into the ground and an army of starlight blown to dust.
“And now, I stand before the heavens, and I divest myself of my oaths, my fealty, and my godhood.” He presses his thumb further into his palm, and more starlight bleeds out, so bright that it warms the bark of the tree. “I will not be subjected to the whims of the gods nor take part in their games any longer, and eternity will be purged from me. This gift will return to the arms of the universe, and in my sacrifice, I demand but one thing, and that is the life of my love.”
The light from his palm begins to float upwards, like motes of crushed diamonds twirling in the air returning to the stars. The heat of the heavenly bodies that had run in his veins for so long drains from him and fills in the dark remnants of the sky, where stars had once shone and since blown out, candles snuffed out by the cold and uncaring hands of the cosmos; they fill with light once more. The gold in the god’s eyes turns molten, and he fixes his divine gaze on the magnolia tree in front of him.
“In my last act of godhood, I pull his soul out of time. Let him no longer be confined to this valley and its suffering, set to lie among the wildflowers and the magnolia blooms, a reminder of my own sins. He will be whole and well, and we will leave, and we will live whatever quiet lives the gods so choose to give us.” There’s a weighty pause, and then, the god adds, “He will be mine, and I will be his.”
The light pulses anew. He digs his thumb in just a bit more against his palm, then, with a soft groan of pain, removes it. A hole burns, bright and the silver of molten star cores, and he presses it into the bark.
One last gasp escapes his mouth, and the gold winks out of his eyes; silver dust continues to float up to the heavens, the power of the stars returning to their rightful owners, and the heat of magic and eternity dies against the bark.
In the ground below, beneath the soft roots and opening petals of the wildflowers, the paladin wakes, and he takes his first breath in eons.
He shakes awake, pushing his palms into the cold earth, slick with dew. His back scrapes against the bark, and when he takes his second rattling breath, there is nothing but the sweet scent of flowers and the simmering remains of the cleric’s magic left floating in the air. Petals shake off of him, and the roots of the flowers unwind from his limbs.
The blood has long since fallen from his chest; the wounds are closed, and he is whole.
And then, the cleric gasps, falling to his knees before the paladin as if in prayer. His hands stretch forward, one of his fingers pressing into the paladin’s pulse point in his neck, and when he feels the rhythm of life ticking against his touch, he collapses into his old friend with shaking sobs.
They hold each other, supported by the trunk of the magnolia tree. They sob in time with each other, and the breath of night around them is not enough to dry their tears.
“It’s been so long,” the paladin rasps, his fingers pressed into the planes of the cleric’s face, pulling his head back to study him. It’s an elixir to press his forehead against another’s, to feel warmth and life beneath the touch of his skin once more. Furnace-fire magic does not thrum in the cleric’s veins anymore, and gold no longer rims his eyes; when he cries, he cries freely, and his tears rain freely against the paladin’s cheeks, where specks of dirt and unwound petals still cling to his skin.
“It has,” the cleric says. He trembles under the paladin’s time-weakened hold, and it is with the greatest of comfort with which he reaches up to smooth that lock of silver hair away from the paladin’s face. “It took me forever to learn the answer.”
“And how did you?”
The cleric wets his lips. “I made my own.”
When their mouths press together, it is low and sweet, the refrain of a song long forgotten to the whims and currents of time.
In some act of penance, a final goodbye from the touch of magic and eternity that had once been lent to the cleric, the flowers they lie among open their faces in full bloom, wet with moonlit dew that makes them look as if they’d been weeping along with the two men.
When the paladin pulls away, he presses a hand to his heart, lets it press as a reminder into his palm: I am alive, and I am here with you, and we shall be together for as long as time affords us.
“So much has changed,” the cleric says, “and yet, it’s like everything has remained the same.”
“Time is fickle,” the paladin notes with a tease. He would know–they both would know.
The stars no longer rain their dust upon the earth. Instead, they shine, brighter and more fully than they had in eons.
“What will we do now?” the paladin asks. Something like fear curls in his chest, and he’s overwhelmed at the thought of becoming reacquainted with a life that he had been pulled out of long ago.
The cleric glances up at the sky, and his eyes still catch the glow of the stars like a child’s hands picking fireflies from the sky. He grins, his fingers still wrapped in the paladin’s silver lock of hair, and he says, “We will go home. We will live our lives for as long as time affords us, and we will eat strawberries in the dawn, drink spiced tea in the dusk, and we will learn what it means to live once more.”
We will glow with the light of the stars, and your arms will be my home.
The paladin captures the cleric’s mouth in another kiss, savoring the taste of the ephemerality that is only afforded to humans, those eternities which live in seconds and minutes and days spent together, in memories that will fade with one’s own last breath, a vapor so brief that not even a god could capture it.
Beneath the boughs of a magnolia tree, in a small village on the edge of a kingdom, a paladin and cleric rest beneath the scent of its blossoms and the shade of its leaves. They whisper stories and poems to each other, watch the sun dip the earth into a baptism of night; they marvel at the gray hairs which overtake each other’s heads, count with joy the notches, lines, and wrinkles which begin to etch into their faces. Theirs is a joy long in the making and a bliss sweeter than what any god could comprehend.
Whom does a god worship?
The answer is simple, the same for gods and humans alike:
We worship that which we love, the paladin thinks as he presses his thumb to the corner of his love’s mouth, right before he draws their lips together, and that which we cannot let go.