Solo [The Temple of All Gods] First of Season Ritual

[Tristan Albayn]

1st of Summer, 513. 10th Bell. Hunger had begun to set in. Tristan had awoken at the 5th bell to begin his 1st of Summer ritual that had been rigorously followed since his early childhood, the days when he was forced to do so by his mother. ”It’s the Albayn tradition,” she would tell him as he tried his best to remain asleep. It was now second nature, and he performed it will an iron will, as it should be for an Albayn. After an early light supper yesterday, he had prayed to Yahal in total darkness until the first bell of the day. After a five hours of rest, it was back to praying in his small room with his hands intermingled over his shield. He would fast the entire first day of each season, as a form of sacrifice to his beloved deity. He would offer up many different prayers he was taught as a child and some he himself created as an adult. “O Yahal! Thee who has defended the family Albayn! Purify my name. Purify my family. Purify the earth below and the sky above.” After four hours of prayer, he would allow himself half an hour of mild exercise and a half an hour to prepare for the temple. Kneeling between prayers in the Temple of All Gods his stomach grumbled. This always aggravated him, as he interpreted it as a small mark of impiety within. “No sacrifice to too great for purity,” he would mumble under his breath.” Only a handful of times a year this is required of me yet my body still longs for holy defiance,” was the argument in his head. If he had lent his thoughts to others, even his highly pious father, they may have very well regarded his thoughts with incredulity. They knew of his devotion. Such was the standard Ser Tristan held himself, both in religion and his duties as a knight. When it was not a holy day of obligation, he would still pray to Yahal thrice daily but would not allow himself to be aggravated by the most simplest errs, if that is what they could be called, of worship. He was able to compose himself once again and recite a quick prayer, as if to quickly pardon his body’s yearning for something to digest. The prayer was one of the earliest he had been taught as it was one of the first ones children blessed to be followers of Yahal were forced to commit to memory. His abdominal pangs gone, he looked up from his hands to glance around at the other inhabitants of the temple. All different deities were represented here with their followers, some in more numbers than others. It was easy to spot others praying to Yahal, always adorning a chain with a spear pendant or some other item representing a spear. Tyveth, a deity and worship base he deeply respected and even admired, was always the most represented it seemed which was unsurprising in Syliras. He saw quite a few of his fellow knights praying this morning, perhaps following the same ritual as he. “O Yahal! Thee who has defended the family Albayn! Defend me in battle! Defend the knights! Purify our swords and give us the strength to restore civilization and strike down cowardice and deception. Aid us in bringing forth the truth and the light of salvation. O Yahal! I pray to you for purity.”

[Tristan Albayn]

Tristan rose from kneeling and leaned back against the pew, removing a wooden carving of Yahal from a pocket and began to twiddle it between the fingers of his right hand. A decent piece of craftsmanship depicting Yahal thrusting a spear into the base of the statuette, he had carved it himself just before becoming a squire many years ago. After looking about, he noticed the Temple was much emptier now than when he had first entered. A group of indistinct robed men, whose deity Tristan could not distinguish, sat a handful of rows in front of him and had begun chanting in a low murmur. “Monks of Gnora, they are,” said an old woman who sat not two bodies away from him. He had not noticed her there and was caught a bit off-guard. He must have been inspecting them closer than he thought he was. She was dressed in drab, grey clothes with a light blue piece of cloth that loosely covered her thin white, curly hair. “Write a lot of books, they say. Don’t matter because I can’t read, but their singin’ 's nice.” “Silence is a virtue.” “You knights and your ‘virtues’.” And with that, the commonwoman was off with quite a disgusted look across her face. Tristan had heard about the goddess Gnora and her insistence on order and balance which led him to wonder why more Sylirans, especially fellow knights, did not worship her. Perhaps he did not know enough. However, he found it a bit ironic that these same monks were disrupting the current order of the temple – an unofficial time of silence. “Everyone worships in their own way,” he said to himself, shaking his head. Looking up at the masterwork of the ceiling and stained-glass windows, he felt that perhaps this was indeed the reason the Dyres family built this temple he frequented so often. The mumbled chants of the monks broke his daydream and he realized it was time to retire for the evening, after spending the whole day in prayer and meditation. As he rose from his seat, he noticed a leaflet was in the very spot the old woman was sitting, apparently left behind in her disgusted rush. Upon picking it up and flipping through it, she managed to surprise him once again! Tristan now holding before him a missalette containing some prayers to Yahal and select quotes from the Penita Scrolls. An embarrassed smirk shot across his face, realizing that silence, which he saw as a something of a religious virtue, was not valued as much by a fellow follower of the Holy One. The knight suddenly yearned to ask for the woman’s forgiveness. “An illiterate woman with a prayer booklet. Everyone worships in their own way, indeed.”