Work Text:
When you are six years old, you learn the names of the your household gods.
Your mother tells you the stories passed down through generations: the Hearth-Mother, who keeps you safe and sound within the walls; the Field-Father, who ensures the harvest is bountiful. "They are our gods," she tells you. "They have protected thy father's family, and thy father's father's family, and one day they will protect thine."
You do not ask about the gods who protected your mother's family. You wash your hands and face dutifully at the shrine, and you do not—cannot—put to words how your skin crawls to think of your own future family: a wife whose face you cannot imagine, children who will be yours and never hers.
When you are sixteen years old, you leave for the capital—you depart the only home you have ever known, for a life of service you cannot comprehend, hundreds of miles away from your birthplace. You cannot explain any better now than you could ten years ago. You mutter awkward apologies to the Heath-Mother and the Field-Father, for forsaking their protection.
In the capital, things are done differently. People pray only in the houses of worship, if at all. You learn that to claim a god only protects a single home is close to heresy. You never speak about your old ways, and learn to conform to the new. It is not quite as incongruous as the thought of marriage and fatherhood was.
You learn to fight, and serve, and protect: strength and stewardship, valor and honor. You begin to feel there is a heart to this place, even if it has no shrine, no name to whisper during evening ablutions.
(You would not try to pray to it if you knew—you are not of this place, after all, no matter how you temper yourself to fit it. And the old prayers would not sound right in your new voice.)
When you are twenty years old, you swear an oath, unbreakable as blood. It is sudden and unexpected. It is as natural as being born.
(What is it to be unbreakable? You write to your mother every week. You have not heard her voice in four years. You are not sure you remember how to speak her language.)
Now, for the first time in four years, you know the name of your heart. You do not dare speak it.
What is it to be unbreakable? Blood and oaths taste the same in your mouth when you choke on them. You dare not stain the ancient austere Untheileneise stones with your brokenness.
They say it is only in the darkest night that a man can understand brightness. It is only when all else is forsaken that he can know the mercy of a god.
If your childhood faith was heterodoxy, what you are doing now is certainly heretical. You do not think of it. You light a white candle. You pray to a dark benevolence.