Worship Through shadow, to the edge of night

And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder
One of the four beasts saying, 'Come and see.' and I saw.

Raymond was off-balance.

It was a strange and unsettling feeling for him who had lived so much of his life with perfect certainty, secure in his purpose and his abilities. His was a simple life with simple needs. He did not suffer such things as regret and trepidation lightly. But either through the rift's insidious venom or the vast, sprawling tameness of Novus had gotten a claw in under his bright copper skin, and suddenly he was asking himself questions he could no longer readily answer.

His hooves carried him away from the noise of bodies and into solitude, toward grounds stained with the fervor of others' worship. Not because he wanted to pray - he wasn't really the type - but because he wanted to shed his masks and his uncertainties together like a serpent sheds its skin. He wanted half-healed, never-healing wounds to close. He wanted to be alone, but also not; the thought burned in his chest.

He wanted Ruth, but she was dead. A thousand years dead, in a world and time far distant from here, and thanks to Florentine's foolish mercy he could not let her rest. Perhaps that was why...that was why...

Tell me that your soul will always remember mine.

It would, oh it would, for what mighty oak could hope to forget the scorching kiss of a lightning strike or how its heartwood smolders and smolders in the aftermath? Raymond had not forgotten the face of his father; he would not forget Calliope, even if a thousand desperate gods sought to part them, and in so doing he understood that at the moment his oath would be tested, he could not be sure to strike the promised killing blow.

No path through the lands of the Peak seemed to suit his restless feet. To whom do the godless turn when their hearts are quaking? For his kind, prayer was inward, self-reflective, turned toward the self and the parts that came together to form the whole. But there are not many ways one can bring the inner self out, and the rendari did not pray lightly.

Standing proudly before him was a stone: not elegantly carved into the form of an ethereal beauty, as the statues of Novus' gods are, but rough and honest and truly stone. Here was the earth proud and defiant before him and bearing its heart as he could not. If he could not supplicate himself to the will of a deity by name, he would worship in the way of the rendari ancients.

His tail blade flashed once. Twice. Two equal, shallow gashes opened along the planes of his shoulders, spilling forth a deeper red than his crimson flesh that traced dark rivulets along the contours of his muscular forelegs and stained the bitter mountain grass at his feet. The red stallion touched his muzzle to each stinging wound, murmuring the proper ritual words just under his breath, and drew with his life's blood an arrow upon the sentinel stone.

"By my blood, and the blood of my forebears," he touched his red-streaked nose carefully to his chest, "grant me clarity."

@Random Events

and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around