from ashes: cinder

[sword_logic]

Myrkul is your god of death, and you have always valued the domain over the divinity. It's an arrangement that works.

Safvara makes herself intimately familiar with death, and the dispatching of it. Corpses dust her wake, left for you to coax them back as you see fit. Things are simple.

The world changes. The pantheon shifts. You are adaptable: when Lord Ao casts the divines down to the Material Plane, you take a leaf from your sister’s book and pick up a weapon to arm yourself in lieu of spells. The loss of your divine-granted magic does not mean the loss of your strength. Warhammers suit you. Blades have always been Safvara’s poison of choice.

Murder is nestled close to Death, by nature; when Bhaal is killed, you feel the minute shift of divinities rearranging themselves long before news reaches your mercenary company of his death at the hands of a mere mortal, and of Bane’s spectacular duel with Torm.

A month later — the blink of an eye — everything changes.

The pantheon realigns.

Your cosmos is left revolving around a cold dark sun.

Myrkul had been infectious heat; the feverish touch that heralds death, a lingering dread, a constant presence. Distant, but far from absent. Respected and feared and held at arm’s length. He granted you your spells; you dedicated deaths to his domain. A functional relationship. A polite distance.

Cyric is air so cold it leaves you gasping for breath, lungs empty, and he rushes in to fill the space left in Myrkul’s wake quick and clean, like the cut of a dagger. You’re dizzied by the idea that maybe, this whole time, you hadn’t been breathing, and this is the first time that oxygen has ever coursed through your blood.

Death, Murder, and Strife have always had precious few true supplicants. Fewer that ask for divinity to grant them daily spells. Fewer still that bear the mantle of clerichood. You know your path is not one that will be met by understanding or mercy, and a part of you revels in this. If you are to be a repulsive thing, then let it be for the sake of this god.

Cyric digs his fingers into the atrophied thing in your chest that passes for a heart, and whispers this is mine. You don't know if that's a lie or not.

(It isn't until much later that you realize it was a self-fulfilling prophecy more than it ever could have been a lie.)

For a decade, the Lord of Three Crowns rules your domain. When he adds a fourth crown to his name, you rejoice. You kill and bleed for him, and for yourself, and there is no room for doubt that whispers nothing good can last.

---

Your loss is swift and punishing.

The morning begins unassuming. You tidy the shrine alongside the other cleric currently in this Zhentarim company’s camp; an overeager fool, too earnest for a liar. But dedicated. Teachable.

The only warning that comes is a faint tremor through the strings of divinity, something like a sigh. Your colleague jerks, startled. Your eyes are on the small holy symbol that crowns the shrine.

Tarnish creeps slowly up the cast silver, and wreaths the skull in black to match the sunburst behind it. Something wrenches in your chest, like the strings you’ve wound so carefully around the heart of your worship are straining.

And then, nothing.

Nothing.

Your god is gone and the world is tearing itself apart.

Fire buries itself far too deep beneath your skin. The cleric who'd been burnt before your eyes is begging you – for healing, for relief, for mercy, for something. You dispatch death swiftly. It’s more than he deserves. It's all that you have left.

Just you and Death and nothing more.

And this time, it feels something like loneliness.