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Once the Old Faith had been unshakeable, rooted in devastation and victory and bonds forged in blood. A power wielded as naturally by them as they did their own fangs and venom. Maybe it remained. Maybe it had persisted. All else ceased to be in the wake of a pain indescribable. A deluge of pressure, an overwhelming force; pain split the mind, clouded the conscious, hung and cloyed and tore as a vine of bramble, a barbed wire, a chain heavy and binding. All else ceased to be. But not the chains, not the weight, not the hate in Narinder's eyes nor the vitriol spit as they bound him.
Pain. Shamura was familiar with pain, for conquest had always been in their nature. It was punishment that they were not yet accustomed to. For conquest did not accept failure.
A pulse. An ache. A stake driven through the thick of their skull, splintering their faith, condemning their fate, cleaving their mind in two — one part to echo the pain unceasing, one part dismembered by their brother shackled to order. His fate. Below them lay a tomb — one ruin, one tomb, five portents of doom. Above them, ichor of the Gods, staining the temple walls, soaking through silks, pooling thickly on the mosaic tiled floor. What had occurred in this place? What battle had incurred far too great a cost? Reason was lost to the pain, the wounds so fresh they numbed and blinded and cut away any thought beyond the primitive and senseless. But they knew. They knew the truth by the sight of Leshy's dissevered eyes staring vacant to the sky, by Heket's ripped throat still gushing wetly as she reached towards them, and Kallamar's hands pressed to his ears stained black as ink. They knew by the retribution Narinder had vowed, cutting deeper into their mind than any weapon. They knew what they had done. And fate followed.
They had been injured in the conflict as well, Shamura came to learn. The wound was a fog that rent their head from their body. The wound was a curse which expunged their mind, and in it's place did they meet their punishment. Agony in disaster, by way of war, by loss of death. Agony shared across the five of them and felt by Shamura in full. Kallamar was there. He tended the wound with shaking hands and prayer, and a concern so fathomless it came to resemble disgust. Shamura had known it before. Millenia ago when they had been young and few and the Gods had been plentiful. Then, assurance had been borne through the strength of their resolve. An endless war which turned predator to prey held no favour for the injured and the fearful. Now, with the end known they could not form words which could soothe what had already come to pass. Their wound crippled, their resolve faltered. Kallamar could not listen to words unsaid. He stopped their bleeding and bandaged his own head thereafter. He fled to his temple and did not return. The ache of Shamura's splintered skull weakened to a pound, but the pain did not.
Many days passed by at the gray threshold of the gateway. Below its cool stone tile and heavy arch lay the crypt of Death incarnate. Below them a tomb, but above him a prison. For they were no less bound to their creed than he. Traitors. He thought them all traitorous, he believed his own tongue, discounting what had been built over so much time. Shamura could not forget the sight of it, how furious his red eyes, how embittered the snarl of his maw. Narinder had not been lost, he wait there below them. Narinder had not been lost, but Shamura felt lost. Within loss lay sorrow, within sorrow crept pain. Within themself lived aeons of knowledge, memories of past so distant as to become legend, memories of present circuitous, restless and barren, and of future prophecy they would not allow to pass. More than a lifetime of memories and still Shamura could not ever remember feeling so lost. It was not in their nature. In times past they had seen all, acted swiftly and without mercy. Prey in their web, spinning signs of battles yet to come, and then in time shaping the past by the might of their kin. They were not lost, but they felt it. He was not lost, but he would rather have been so. Freedom traded for annihilation, for they were all imprisoned now.
The knowledge was pain. The memory was their punishment. The wound that softened their brain, dulled their senses, and set time passing in a slurry before them a curse and a blessing both. They were all imprisoned. They were not all entombed.
They would not forget the sound of it. Narinder had not seen reason on that day. He had been beyond dispute, beyond mercy as he turned against his own. A bond forged by the spilling of blood. A bond severed again by the tearing of blade, of claw through eyes, throat, and ear. He was beyond mercy, but Shamura had still shown him such, unwilling to rescind their faith in familial ties. Uncompromising in their insistence on a bond aeons old, an affinity blinded to the passage of time or the decay of stillness. He was beyond mercy, but Shamura could not choose malice.
Heket did not suffer the same. Her grief levied on the lands of the Old Faith as years passed. With her throat torn her voice only grew, denouncing any who would dare whisper Narinder's name and silencing those few who bore witness to his internment. She rid the Old Faith of his memory, purged unholy thoughts left to fester. In their sister's eyes, Narinder had been lost long before he was sealed, fate set from the moment he cast insult on the natural order of his domain. Heket believed the one they had chained was no longer Narinder but the corrupt beast which remained. But he was not lost. Bound, but not lost. Shamura would not forget the words he had said with chains round his neck, his cold ire reminiscent of a far younger God with a far less mutinous Crown, and they knew he was not lost. Heket asked not for their power or wisdom in her crusade, but through her infrequent visits, transient amid the knell, the echo, the aura of a migraine now decades old they came to know what even Heket would not say. Her eyes held a pity Shamura could not understand, and a mercy they knew all too well. It was unfounded; for what mercy befit they who did not by nature show it?
It was no more in Narinder's nature to change, though he had sought to regardless and forced change unto the five of them in turn. Bound by their nature, bound through their blood, and by the blood of the First beyond them. Five siblings stood in unity. Five to arise calamity. And one doom. The years gave way, but the strength of Silk Cradle persisted. Although Shamura found their mind turned slowly, cumbersome and fractured, their form in battle remained fluid and dominating. Mindless was the task following millennia of experience. Mindless the escape from that which they would not forget. Battle was never without rest, ambition not everlasting, and the pain always exhumed. Their followers sought wisdom as well, blind to the truth that had befallen their God. They knew not that they prayed in vain to whom that no longer was, just as they knew not that four Bishops had once been five. Decades passed as days to the eternal, but swayed the memories of the mortal.
Before their most loyal could discover it, Shamura carried their wisdom into the heart of Silk Cradle. Their skull, fractured and cumbersome. It was a precious thing, and instilled within them a despair intangible and distant, a wound left to fester. It was a precious thing, wrapped in silk and ready for burial. Integral to the power they had commanded, to their Godhood held since the infancy of ages past. Now it was lost, and knowledge lost with it. They did not oft lose. They were might itself in name, and both their family and the Silk Cradle that surrounded them had been built from the bones of their conquests. A blessed gift, now lost. Now doomed.
"Lay it here, Shamura." As a quake, a sudden spark, the scratch of thorn persistent and unyielding. He broke through the din. "Even the burrowers have left this place undisturbed for centuries. It will be safe here."
Above them, ichor of the Gods, a burial for the First kept in peace through the reverence they commanded still. Leshy had too felt lost in the aftermath of the Red Crown's treason. It was by his own will that he had wrest awe and dominion from the chaos of their paradigm shift, a growing power unconstrained yet desultory. Once it had been Shamura who had helped weave the threads of Leshy's still evolving Godhood. Now it was he who led them, imploring Shamura to hide their relic in safety when he had found they had held it on them as a burden.
It was a wretched thing; a failing they would not outlive. For the past could not be forgotten. Their mind was no longer sharp, reason had long given way to circling mantra, and visions once clear now maddened. Unable to change the tides of fate, unable to shield their kin from the foundations of their dogma fractured. Faulted. Failed — a cursed thing, a damning loss.
It was their siblings who now sought to shelter and protect Shamura. They knew it as the weight of old promise lifted without recourse, heard it in their patience at once uncompromising and unfamiliar, felt it as Leshy guided their hands from their chest and their grip on their own skull softened. It was a duty unfounded when each had themselves persisted in the face of the indescribable. The pain they would not forget. It was a duty unfounded, but Shamura could find no blame in them. Their cursed skull they dropped from a thread of silk into the abyss of the Cradle amidst the remains and the weaponry of a divinity which had outlasted them all. And still he was not lost. They were none of them lost.
The youngest among them, Leshy was at once both vigilant and imprudent, and he would not wait for trailing thought to turn torturous once more.
"Shamura, forget him." He spoke with a burden of years he should not have known, a venom tuned to wreckage and ruin. "He does not deserve your sorrow for what he has done."
But they could not lose another. Five was still five. Their faith preserved, and the Red Crown in chains below them. Leshy did not see the whole, but Shamura no longer held the mind to teach. "We must not forget. He waits... he waits for us regardless."
It was the kinder fate. Let them all carry the blame; in sight, sound, and voice, in mind and freedom. To shoulder the weight of Narinder's insurgence across the five of them instead. It was the kinder fate. Unceasing as death, so too was Shamura unceasing. Their conviction was their family, and their faith as ruthless in retribution as it had been in war. Pain echoed by means of their nature. Punishment they would endure.
It was the kinder fate.