Chapter Text
Crickets chirped in the grass below, and fireflies lit the uneven path as heavy footfalls filled the air. The forest flew past in a blur, the thick foliage threatening to reach out and grab Grian at every possible opportunity. Still, he didn’t dare slow his pace. Slowing meant death, and he refused to die so easily.
“Come back here, pest!”
The three men following him swung their swords, chopping through bushes and branches in pursuit of their target. Honestly, Grian hadn’t meant to destroy half the castle’s barracks with his prank-gone-wrong, but one stray firework and suddenly it was up in flames. Now, he was stuck with the consequences, which he really wasn’t keen on.
He could hear them heaving for breath behind him. Grian was quicker than they’d probably expected him to be, smoothly clearing fallen trees and weaving between obstacles. It wasn’t quite enough to lose them, though. He needed a miracle.
Grian ducked around a bush and sprinted off the path in a desperate attempt to make himself harder to follow. Unfortunately, veering from the already-unclear trail left him with a much worse situation. The cover of night obscured his vision more than he liked, making everything more dangerous. Thorns scraped at his face, and roots caused him to stumble every few steps.
His foot caught on a rock, sending him sprawling out in the ground with a shriek. Over his shoulder, he heard the knights redirect towards his voice, and he groaned. Grian forced himself up again, ignoring the sting of his scraped knees.
He frantically spun around, looking for an easier direction. In the distance, he could see the moon’s subtle glow shining brighter than it did along any of the other paths. It was likely a break in the trees, an opportunity for him to gather his bearings and get ahead.
Grian moved towards it, battling both the flora and the fatigue settling in his bones. Hesitating any longer would get him caught. He stumbled forward, making a final push through the brush, only to discover an extraordinary sight in the clearing.
Instead of an empty space, there was a large, abandoned building waiting to be discovered. It was a hulking marble structure, overgrown and half-consumed by the nature around it. A temple probably, if its characteristic pillars and slanting roof were any indication.
By the looks of it, a prayer had not been heard within its walls for a long time. It was visited only by creeping vines, sneaking up the pillars, climbing the steps, and invading the interior. Not even a worn footpath from visitors of years prior remained visible to observing eyes. It didn’t hum with energy, or call to him with the magical siren song that was immortal magic.
Grian knew what that implied about the deity within.
As with all things, to forget was to fade. Should this be their only place of worship, the temple’s abandoned state would now represent the grave of its god, rather than a celebration of their being.
Grian wanted to regard the building with respect. It was beautiful, probably loved once. The sight was sad, but beyond his control. He was a bit numb to the tragedy. Abandoned temples and lost gods were rare concepts to come across, given the emphasis most towns placed on honoring the heavens. However, at that current moment in time, he had other priorities.
“He’s up ahead!”
Grian didn’t stop to think any longer, bolting towards the temple. He knew he couldn’t keep running forever, and this could possibly provide him with a unique solution. While he didn’t have time for respect, the knights might have other ideas. If they were the religious type, as most were, there was a chance they’d refuse to step upon ground as sacred as the grave of a god.
He ducked inside right as his pursuers entered the clearing. Quickly, he slid behind a statue in the middle of the room. In the darkness, it was hard to make out many defining details of the space around him. With the shadows from both the statue and the two pillars framing it, he would be extremely difficult to see too. While it wasn’t particularly close to the entrance, it wouldn’t be the first place searched if the knights decided to proceed with their manhunt.
The only light in the entire building came from the shine of the moon through a few holes in the ceiling. The roof in its entirety looked unstable, like a single breeze would be enough to do significant damage.
For the first time, Grian realized there was a completely real chance that the entire thing could cave in on top of him. He really should’ve weighed his options more carefully.
The crunching of sticks caught his attention, and he slapped a hand over his mouth. There were whispers from the knights, sounding a bit worried and hesitant, but their pace didn’t slow. Unluckily for him, it didn’t seem like they were fearful enough to stop their chase.
Grian cursed under his breath. He couldn’t see a back door through which to escape, nor any windows that weren’t boarded up. His plan was turning sour very fast. A new solution was needed if he hoped to make it out of the temple of his own accord. The man hastily shrugged off his backpack, searching through his belongings for something, anything that could help him.
He found a single, unlit firework and a box of matches. Immediately, a new idea came to mind.
So… they weren’t totally worried about the wrath of a dead god, but they were still a little cautious, weren’t they? He just needed to hone in on that. Make them fear a god that wasn’t there.
Man, Grian really wished his brain didn’t work the way it did. This would be risky, if not downright lethal for everyone involved. He would have to take extra care to time and aim it properly, or he could end up with more than an arson charge.
He picked up the firework and readied his hand to strike the match. Gingerly, he poked his head out from behind the statue. Right on cue, three silhouettes stepped through the temple’s threshold. Grian saw the tightness in their shoulders, and heard the nervousness in their voices as they spoke to each other.
“Where is he? I can’t see anything,” one guard whispered.
“He definitely came in. I watched him,” the other replied, taking a step closer to the necessary mark. Grian held his breath. “Stars, I don’t want to be here right now. It feels wrong.”
“It’s abandoned,” the third hissed. Another step. Their positioning was almost perfect. “Calm down.”
“That doesn’t mean the god isn’t still sort of present,” the second said. “What if they get mad–!”
“Hey, coward! Surrender, and we might spare you,” the boldest of them shouted in the darkness, ignoring the prior’s reluctance to anger the temple’s owner. The reverb of his voice made the roof groan. Grian lit his match. “If you don’t, we’ll strike you down where you stand! You can be this god’s last sacrifi–”
Before the knight could finish his sentence, the ground in front of him exploded. He shrieked and fell backwards. Colorful sparkles and angry smoke filled the room, shaking the floor and cracking the walls. Screams echoed throughout the building, and Grian was forced to curl into a little ball to avoid a falling piece of debris from the fragile roof.
“The god’s angry!” One of them shouted, “I told you this would happen!”
“Shut up and run!”
Their footsteps thundered as they fled. Grian risked a look out from behind his hiding place, and felt a swell of relief in his chest when he spotted their retreating forms. His scare tactic had been a complete success.
But he wasn’t out of the woods yet. As he had been previously with the knights – thanks to another ill-advised firework – Grian was now stuck facing the consequences of his actions. Again.
The temple was beginning to rapidly collapse in on itself. Debris tumbled from the sky and the roof groaned from the force of keeping itself upright. If he didn’t evacuate immediately, he would die there.
“So, so stupid,” Grian grumbled. “Unbelievable. My traps never work properly. Should’ve just ran away.”
He slung his pack over his shoulder and tried to stand. His attempt was interrupted by a chunk of ceiling breaking free and slamming down inches from his face, barely dodged by a quick roll to the right. Dust was sent catapulting into the air from the force of its impact.
Grian gasped, inhaling an unfortunate amount of rubble. His legs shook, adrenaline pulsating through his veins and blurring his already-limited vision.
Still, he couldn’t rest. His next attempt to stand was impeded by a blooming scrape on his calf – the result of his close shave moments prior. Nothing deep, though it was immediately sore.
Putting weight on his limb hurt, but he could hear the world crumbling around him, and feel the dust settling in his lungs and under his fingernails. He needed to run, to escape, to live. Or else a couple of scrapes and bruises would not be the worst of his injuries.
Grian heard a cracking noise, and glanced up. There was a blur of motion, a looming figure beginning to tip closer to his spot on the ground.
Move, his mind screamed. Pure terror propelled him forward a few steps as the very statue he’d been ducking behind came tumbling down. It shattered into a million pieces against the ground.
It was too close of a call. A second longer of hesitation and he would’ve been crushed. Death wrapped its freezing hands around his heart, squeezing until he felt like bursting. He could feel nothing but fear, hear nothing but destruction, see nothing but darkness.
Grian whirled around, intending to bolt for the exit, but stopped short. The two support pillars closest to the door crashed to the floor, their booming collision echoing through his ribs. His exit was sealed before he’d even started towards it.
And those weren’t the only pillars to go. Like a deadly line of dominos, Grian watched in horror as support after support was toppled and slammed into the ruined marble floors. His skull shook, teeth rattling from the strength it took to stay upright while the entire building shook.
He remembered far too late that he was positioned beneath two pillars himself. His eyes widened as the shadows shifted at his feet, and he whirled around to see a hulking mass looming over him, already being pulled by gravity’s unyielding grasp.
Grian screamed, dropping to the floor and squeezing his eyes shut. This was it — his final moment alive. He would be crushed, trapped beneath the rubble and suffocated by debris. Grian braced for the impact, braced for the feeling of every bone breaking beneath stone, braced for the inevitable death that awaited him there.
But it never came.
The insurmountable sound of the roof caving in, the support beams failing, and the marble decorations shattering around him seemed to stop all at once. There was nothing but silence. Cold, abrupt, threatening silence.
As quickly as it had begun, the disaster simply ceased.
“Woah,” an unknown voice chimed, echoing through the rubble. “You’ve caused quite a bit of chaos here, haven’t you?”
Slowly, hesitantly, Grian peaked at the world around him. He saw the legs of another person, and followed them up until he met two bright red eyes. They seemed to swirl and shine like a ray of sunlight in the darkness of the room. A man smiled down at him, his expression bordering somewhere between surprised and amused.
“Who,” Grian heard himself whisper, awe evident in his quiet tone. “Who are you? What’s going on?”
His eyes focused on something over the man’s shoulder, and his breath caught in his throat. The two pillars that had almost been Grian’s end were currently being held up by one of the stranger’s hands, as if they weighed nothing.
And that made no sense.
There was no world in which anyone could withstand such dramatic pressure and still have the strength to shoot a smile his way. Yet, despite what should have been possible, Grian was watching this stranger do exactly that.
His mind could only conjure one thought, chilling as it seemed.
“I’m dead.”
The stranger quirked an eyebrow, huffing out a little laugh. “Are you?”
“I don’t know. Am I?”
It was all that could possibly explain what he was witnessing; A stranger cloaked in black appearing without warning, the sudden quiet during a disaster of his own design, an impossible act of strength, the numbing pace of his heart. Surely he was dead, right? Reality couldn’t have distorted so much in such a short span of time.
“Mm, not quite,” the other man intervened. Casually, like it was completely unimportant to him, the stranger shoved backwards, letting the two pillars fall against the ground somewhere behind him. “Unless you plan on dying from shock, we should be in the clear.”
He bent down to eye-level, and with his now-free hand, tousled Grian’s hair. Grian, not expecting the contact, flinched away from it. The whisper of a touch sent a shiver down his spine, and a slight sense of vertigo spiraling through his gut.
Not quite, he processed. It was a vague answer, the kind that buzzed against his ears and seared his brain. It wasn’t enough, wasn’t everything he needed to hear. But, it meant that – at the very least – he wasn’t dead dead.
“Not dead. Then, does that, uh,” Grian started, breathless. He leaned forward, as if proximity would quell his curiosity. “Does that mean… you saved me?”
“Of course,” the man said. His smile sharpened, eyes glinting in the moonlight. From this angle, a blossoming variety of scars were visible, scattered across tanned skin. “I wouldn’t let you get away from me that easily. Not when you owe me.”
A weight settled in Grian’s stomach. His heartbeat rang in his ears, nearly distorting his words. There was a permanence in the man’s voice – the binding, inescapable kind. “Excuse me? What did you say? I owe you?”
“Obviously,” the other hummed. “You completely destroyed my temple.”
Grian straightened. “Your temple?”
The stranger’s grin faltered, but it returned before Grian could blink. “Yes. My temple. I am the… Head Priest here. Look at the mess you made!”
Grian frowned, glancing around for the first time since he’d met the mysterious man. The damage was exactly what he’d expected from the building’s attempted cave-in. Rubble and debris covered the floor, and the roof was basically a skeleton overhead, stripped to its framework.
“You’re indebted to me because of that,” the alleged Head Priest declared, gesturing to their surroundings. “My god will get really upset if it's not fixed, and it wouldn’t be fair for you to leave me with all that work, would it?”
Grian’s frown deepened as he thought about what was said.
Not five minutes after being saved from near-death, he was already getting caught up in another confounding situation. The stranger hadn’t given him a single second to gather his bearings, or to get to his feet. He was still shivering at the base of a broken statue, blood dripping from a cut on his leg, and the smell of fireworks lingering in the atmosphere.
What was happening? Who was the person in front of him? Why was everything moving so quickly? How was he expected to respond? With anger? Acceptance?
There wasn’t an ounce of common sense left in him at that moment. He needed to get out, to think – to actually, truly process.
“I-I need some fresh air.”
“I agree,” the man said. He stood to his full height, rocking back on his heels. “It’s stuffy in here. Y’know, now that you’ve trashed the place.”
Grian ignored the blatant jab, didn’t even really hear it, and used a nearby chunk of fallen marble to pull himself up. He just needed to go.
His knees shook violently, threatening to buckle and bend with a single wrong step. His skin was coated in dust, scrapes, and bruises. Every breath was jagged and uneven.
The Head Priest didn’t speak, or offer any help, but Grian could feel those haunting eyes trained on his back the entire time.
He hobbled forward, catching himself on the remnants of a pillar before he could collapse under his own weight. Though the original entranceway was completely blocked, he managed to locate a small section of the wall that had been knocked down. Using that as a makeshift door, he tumbled forward into the overgrown grass outside.
The plants tickled his skin, and the pollen of the wildflowers bothered his nose, but Grian embraced those inconveniences wholeheartedly. Anything was better than the inside of a ruined temple. Rolling onto his back, he took in greedy breaths of the summer breeze.
Being able to look up and see the night sky felt like a moment of clarity – especially in comparison to whatever the hell was going on prior to that.
His view was rudely blocked by the Head Priest, who leaned over his starfished form with an unimpressed scowl on his face.
“Yeah, relax while you can,” he muttered down at Grian bitterly. “You have a lot of work ahead of you.”
“Alright,” Grian sighed, a little fed up with being confused. “What exactly are you on about? Explain it to me in simple words, please.”
The Head Priest crossed his arms, unhelpfully repeating, “You destroyed my beautiful temple, and now you’re gonna make it up to me.”
Grian really wasn’t enjoying the presumptuous tone he was being given. No politeness, no sympathetic questions, no proper introductions, just vague demands from a guy he’d never met before. Every iota of common sense in Grian’s brain pointed to this being some sort of weird, overcomplicated attempt at a scam.
That was made ten times more obvious when he glanced over his shoulder at the ruins, and realized his damages only contributed slightly to the place’s overall-abandoned aesthetic. All he’d really done was speed up the process that was already naturally occurring.
The Head Priest was claiming to be upset over this temple, but he looked smug, rather than frustrated or angry. None of his reactions or answers had been normal. It seemed more like a weird power-play than a genuine request for repayment for his damages. Grian’s gut instincts were rarely wrong about scams like these, and the guy’s attitude was not helping his case.
He hadn’t meant to actually bring the temple down – especially not when there was apparently a resident dwelling within – so he could admit that he wasn’t exactly free of guilt. Still, he had a hard time feeling completely sorry for his actions when this was the man he’d inconvenienced.
Maybe it was his suspicions over the stranger’s real motivations, or maybe it was all the adrenaline running through his veins, but Grian found himself with a little more audacity than he typically possessed.
“What temple exactly?”
The Head Priest froze, eyes widening. “Wh–? What temple? That temple! The one right over there!”
Grian pretended to look towards the building, allowing an easygoing smile to drift onto his lips. “Oh? Was that a temple? An active one?”
“Yes, obviously,” the other man scoffed.
“I dunno,” Grian continued, sucking in a breath through clenched teeth. “I’ve never seen such a poorly-cared-for temple. If that was supposed to still be in use, then you’re really bad at your Head Priest job.”
“Wh– Hey! I did everything I could,” the other defended. “The overgrown-ness adds to the aesthetics. It was a design choice.”
“Sure, I believe you,” Grian said, completely monotone.
“It was!”
“Yeah, whatever you say.”
The Head Priest blubbered, gesturing frantically around like he was losing a game of charades. Grian took the moment of confused silence to bring himself to his feet, brushing off blades of grass and leaves from his clothes.
“Listen, man,” Grian started. “I appreciate your attempt – from one sketchy businessman to the next – but I don’t have the money to repay you for destroying that definitely already-condemned building.”
The other man blubbered a bit more, somewhere between outraged and devastated.
Grian offered him an olive branch, “Although, if you chase down those knights I scared away, they might. I reckon they’re the gullible types. Probably keep loads of gold in their pockets to spend at the taverns after their shifts.”
The Head Priest blinked, tilting his head. “Uh… Money? I don’t need–”
Grian ignored him, moving on, “Unfortunately, I’ll be no help to you. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to continue on my way. Lovely meeting you. Good luck with the squatting!”
He turned without waiting for a response, beginning to walk towards the treeline.
The other man’s confused muttering tapered off as Grian left him, but he didn’t shout or try to call him back. For a brief second, Grian thought it might work. He thought he’d talked himself out of a rough situation, and that he’d be able to proceed with his life as normal.
Then, he felt something wrap around his leg.
His eyes widened and he looked down, but he wasn’t given a chance to see what it was before his feet were stolen out from underneath him. Grian shrieked, clawing at the dirt as he was dragged away from the trees. Stray rocks and twigs scraped at his exposed skin, and the world blurred around him.
All at once, the sensation came to a jerking halt. Grian panted, throat raw from screaming and head spinning. A familiar figure hovered over him. Despite his unfocused vision, he could tell the priest was grinning.
“Uh-oh,” a sly, condescending voice rang out. “Looks like my god is mad.”
Grian gaped up at him, words failing. His confidence fled.
His god? Was that what that was? Was that what just effortlessly yanked him across the ground in a matter of seconds? Was that what stole the breath right out of his lungs? The power of an angry god?
He’d never experienced the wrath of the divine, but if that was it just then…
Had he genuinely screwed up way more than expected? Had Grian actually unknowingly made an enemy out of a god?
He wasn’t the religious type, not any more than the regular person – in fact, probably less. Never once had he imagined being in a position like this, where the heavens themselves were his opponents – unfathomable powers, unruly attitudes, unknown consequences for his actions.
“He’s not going to let you get away. Not with a debt as big as yours.”
“A-As big as mine?” Grian struggled to get his mind to calm long enough to process anything. “You mean the temple-destruction-thing?”
“Mhm, yeah, among other stuff,” the man mused. “I also saved your life using his power. That’d probably be a debt too, wouldn’t it? Divine intervention to prevent death is a pretty big deal. Could cost you quite a bit. Maybe even your entire life.”
Grian’s blood ran cold. He could only watch as his situation rapidly worsened.
“A life debt,” the other repeated. “I like the sound of that.”
He stood to his full height, shadow blocking out the light of the moon. A hand was extended, and Grian felt a foreign force lift his arm up to meet it, remaining stubborn no matter how he fought it.
Their firm handshake sealed a deal the hopeless mortal would never fully understand.
“The name’s Scar, by the way,” the Head Priest said. “I have a hunch we’ll be spending a lot of time together.”