Acolyte of the Pleasure Goddess Ch. 01

Delyssa shrunk down, wishing that she had anything to hide behind. Allarane's chastisement made her feel more naked than Mother Corporeal's disapproving stare. "I didn't know anything about that," she said, feeling like a fool.

"If you want my advice on what to ask Brother Kruit about, it's this: every once in a long while, a servant of Shevlana is chosen for a sacred task that demands the devotion of both body and spirit, and to venture out on a holy quest. Kruit was chosen, many years ago. Ask him about that."

"What sort of quest?" said Delyssa, surprised to find that she did not have to feign her curiosity.

"It's not my place to tell," Allarane quickly said. "Just know its not something that is often recounted about these grounds." The priestess finished dressing and braiding her hair, and smoothed the creases and folds of her robe. "I must return to my duties, Delyssa, and you should hurry along. I enjoyed our time together, and I'm glad to hear that you are being chosen for greater duties. Make sure you come see me before departing the temple."

With that, the priestess bowed her head and walked off towards the main cloister building.

As Delyssa made her way to the dormitory, still nude, she tried to picture herself as an adventurer out in the plains beyond Gra'tan. She nodded distractedly at the other acolytes she passed on the way to her room, unmindful of her own continued nakedness or of that of the others when they were not in the temple's garb. She imagined herself dressed in gleaming armor astride a horse, bearing a shield emblazoned with Shevlana's symbol. Perhaps next to her, clinging to her leg would be a loinclothed hero, oiled and glistening bronze skin pressed against her...

She shook her head. That was the picture of adventure known by children and fools. She heard enough about the exploits of campaigners from the temple's healers who dealt with them. Theirs was a life of blood, much more of that from blistered feet than wounds from battle -- and those wounds they did bear often became ugly scars only after avoiding infection through the grace of the temple's charity. Adventurers were not all heroes. By number, they were mostly mercenaries, killers and thieves. Could she fit among such sort of people? Delyssa had never drawn blood, though doing so was not taboo to Shevlana: while the goddess made no condemnation for violence struck in defense of self or others, lives taken from a place of anger or hatred was one of the religion's few sins, and Delyssa wanted to do nothing that would put her in that position.

She thought of long days spent marching under the sweltering eye of Gra'tan's unforgiving sun; tense, cold nights spent keeping watch for the strange beasts and unhuman bandits that lurked in the wilderness; cramped caves that stunk of smoke from torches and the monsters that guarded forgotten treasures. The treasure itself, that strong motivator for the Campaigner's Guild, held no allure to her. How could it, when Shevlana gave her everything she wanted? How could she fit into such a life?

Everything that she knew would be replaced with something terrifying. The warm pool she had just shared with Allarane would be exchanged for short baths in whatever streams the party happened across; her bare feet, so used feeling the soft grass and cool flagstone of the temple's grounds would have to become used to the feel of leather walking boots over uneven paths in dark forests. The familiar faces of her friends and fellow acolytes would be replaced by gruff strangers, who, unlike everyone she encountered during her day, might not care at all for the goddess to whom she had devoted herself.

Delyssa stopped in the middle of the hallway near her room. She could picture herself in this life. In fact, the ease with which she could imagine that life for herself startled her. The idea of venturing out of the temple with strangers was so shocking when Mother Corporeal suggested it, but now that she allowed herself to really think about it, that sense of panic began to ebb away. It was still a frightening thought, but that fear was accompanied by a rush of excitement that Delyssa was only familiar with from when she first began Temple services over two years ago. She lurched into her room, unsteadied by these realizations.

The room was almost as bare as she was. Separated from the rest of the hallway by a thin curtain, and with only a thin slit of a window to let in light, she spent very little time here. There was a narrow bed pressed up against one wall, a plain chest at the foot of that bed, and a simple desk on the other side of the room, beneath which was tucked a small stool. The desk itself had a few dwindled candles that rose out of little mounds of hardened wax, surrounded by the scrolls of obscure scripture that Delyssa had meant to read but as yet hadn't.

Her first instinct was to sit on the edge of her bed and to continue pondering the life of an adventurer. It was so easy to believe that she could just sit in one place and spend her time thinking, and that that would be akin to the experience of doing. Instead, she threw open her chest and pulled out her few garments and tossed them onto the bed. She chose the initiate's robe that she barely wore and pulled it over her head. There was a deep pouch sewn onto the front, and she swept the candles from the desk into it (she had no idea how dark the inside of the Mausoleum would be) and wiggled her feet into stiff sandals that she had pulled from the bottom of the chest before stepping out again into the hallway.

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When the greatest of poets speak of muses, they say that the divine places a call within their soul, a vectored urge that pulls them towards their fate. They say that this call starts off small: pensmiths call this the inkling. It grows with time, a longing to work -- they say this is "finding the purpose." Only very rarely does this calling start as a clear vision of the final result; more often it's a thought that comes again and again until it takes a firmer shape. In all cases, though, great artists agree that muses were rare gifts that lead to great acts of Destiny. Though Delyssa had only just begun to realize it, her muse was one of adventure, and the goddess Shevlana had sent it to her. Delyssa's destiny was to be the chosen of the pleasure goddess. Her future was waiting before her, open and ready for her to embrace it.