I never thought I would meet a man who loved the Fury too fully. But strong as he was– no doubt a mark of Her favor– Viscart failed to notice the god standing before him, plain as stone, grinning whitely in the desert heat. It was strange. I’d even warned him. I said, “My friend, Kajek is not all that he seems. If you don’t let his games get under your skin, he may give a glimpse of what is underneath his own.” A tempting prize for anyone, I thought. Especially one so fervent as this rising lowborn would-be lord. 

But he saw nothing. He fell too soon, and as I picked the glass from his back, I tried to show him otherwise. But the look on his face evinced only suspicion, a wariness one feels when passing a stray on the street. Did I bare my teeth? Was I impatient, pushing the shards deeper to pull him awake?

Perhaps so. Kajek had been too gentle after. Too sweet. I’d chosen a proper faithful to lay at the Stone God’s feet, but miscalculated the flavor of Viscart’s faith.

Is devotion so blind? What does Halone’s love shave away as it hones her devotees? If Viscart didn’t know his opponent for what he was, is that a failing of the Fury’s, or of the foreign god’s? 

It is difficult to think of him as foreign, although he remains everything Halone is not. She rules the sky with spear in hand, frigid and immovable, a bulwark against the dragonfire that now, impossibly, has ceased to flare. (I still cannot believe the war is over.) The Fury is as ephemeral as she is just. She weighs Ishgard’s warriors from the clouds, welcoming the worthy into her unseen hall. Her word is final. Her will is righteous. But her touch? 

They say that Coerthas froze because we worshipped only one of the Twelve. They say that in the wake of the Calamity, the gods willed the region icebound as punishment for honoring only the ice-aspected Halone. But I don’t think this is true. The gods would know better than to confuse crusade for crucifixion. We pray for nothing but the chance to prove ourselves– what better way than to outlast this eternal winter?

If the ice is not a trial sent by the Fury Herself, then it is surely a gesture of her everlasting love. She is with us always. There is no spring, no summer, no autumn for her adoration. Hers is a relentless love. It seeps into the bones. It blankets everything so thickly that even the most ancient trees must bow. It catches the sunlight and throws it back all the brighter. It mirrors the stars, doubling their secrets underfoot. 

How can it be, then, that Her love is not enough?

Flesh, warm and smooth, gleaming dark in this Ul’dahn sunshine. A voice whose pitch one does not have to imagine, low as the rumble of thunder over the hills. A scent like earth and salt, the musk of a thing that lives and takes and breathes, whose form does not require prayer and crystal to remain founded. A yellow, reptilian stare. A mouth that smiles. A calloused hand.

Where the Fury’s silence yawns wide, his laughter fills it. An earthbound, responsive thing. Not a deity by conventional means, but prayers have been given. And answered. So who am I to say?

Nearly a moon now I have served the infamous Inquisitor Fortier and learned much, but not enough to confess my devotion to this new, foreign deity. I do not know if he will understand. Perhaps I cannot know. Perhaps it really is heresy and I am fooling myself, riding the dissonance until it resolves at the point of a sword. 

I am not as troubled by the thought as I should be. As I would have been, not long ago. Yet the Fury’s judgment is inevitable and just. Perhaps I must only ensure that mine is the sword She uses, instead of Fortier’s. 

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