Chapter 5: Blasphemy

Tarin

The rain lasted through the night.

By morning, the field had drunk its fill. The cracks were gone, the ground was dark with mud, and the air smelled like wet straw. Tarin woke to his son's shout, the kind that starts somewhere in the ribs and bursts out before sense can stop it.

"Papa! Papa! Look!"

Jori stood barefoot on the threshold, pant legs already soaked, grinning at the world as if it had personally apologized to him. Behind him, Mira leaned against the doorframe with a hand over her mouth, eyes bright. She didn't say anything; she didn't have to. Tarin had seen her count the stores and come up short too many evenings to mistake that look for anything but relief.

"Go on," Tarin said, ruffling Jori's hair. "But mind the ditch. It'll be full."

He stepped into the yard, squelching. The well rope was swollen and heavy. Chickens strutted with their bellies low, muttering to themselves. A skinny dog he didn't recognize slunk out from under the fence and then, thinking better of it, slunk right back.

The ring of black flowers waited in the field.

They were just as they had been in the night, slick and glossy, beaded with water but somehow untouched by it. The petals held the light wrong, as if made for a sun that wasn't here. Standing close to them made the hairs on Tarin's arms stand on end.

Mira kept her distance. "That's not Halven's work," she said softly. "Is it?"

Tarin swallowed. "I prayed to Halven."

"That's not what I asked."

He looked at the ring again. The flowers pulsed, barely, but enough to make him think of a heartbeat under the soil. He thought of the night before: the petal drifting from an empty sky, the world going soft around the edges, the rain coming down like a curtain.

Tarin remained silent.

Jori had already raced to the ditch and was skidding through it like an eel. "Can I show Aunt Salla?" he shouted. "She said her garden's dead. She won't believe this!"

"Put on shoes before you break your toes," Mira called, but Jori was gone, splashing toward the lane.

They followed more slowly. By the time they reached the road, the village was already awake and outside. People stood with their faces turned to the weather—neighbors who had shared salt and gossip and, lately, hunger.

Salla hobbled along with her walking stick, her braid a gray rope across her back. Alongside her was a middle-aged man, Kesh, whose hands were always black with tannin and dye, had his sleeves rolled up and his eyes narrowed at the clouds, suspicious as always.

"You felt it?" Salla asked, catching Tarin's arm. "It woke me. Wind in the rafters and the smell of rain like when I was a girl." Her eyes found the ring in the field and went wide. "Saints preserve."

Kesh made a sign at his chest the way you do when you want all gods—any gods—to mind their own business. "I don't like it."

"We needed it," Salla snapped.

"That doesn't make it right."

Tarin didn't argue. He led them to the ring.

They stopped at the edge. No one stepped across. Even the goats—loosed to test the new grass—came up short, snorted, and turned away as if the flowers were a low fire.

"What is it?" Mira asked. "Do we bring an offering?"

"To Halven?" Kesh said, already prickling.

"The priest will know," someone said. "We should fetch him."

"He'll say to plow it under," Salla countered, voice flinty. "And maybe that would be wise. Though perhaps not today."

Tarin cleared his throat. He felt clumsy with all of them watching. He set down a heel of yesterday's bread just beyond the ring and bowed his head. It wasn't much of an offering, but it was what he had that wasn't bone or skin.

"Whoever heard me," he said, and his voice shook more than he liked, "thank you. My boy thanks you. My neighbors thank you. If you have a name, I don't know it. If you have a price, say it plain."

The flowers did not answer. They pulsed, slow and indifferent.

Jori edged closer. "They're pretty," he said.

"Back," Mira said, sharper than she meant to.

Kesh was already turning toward the road. "I'm fetching the priest," he announced to no one and everyone. "If this is Halven's miracle, we'll give thanks proper. If not… we don't keep strange gods in the fields."

Salla planted her stick. "You'll bring him, and he'll burn what fed us," she said. "And then what, Kesh? Eat the ash?"

He didn't answer. He set off, jaw tight, his boots biting the mud.

Tarin watched him go, then looked at the ring again. The bread sat where he'd left it. The flowers did not lean toward it. They did not lean toward anything.

But when he closed his eyes, he felt something, a prickle at the edges of thought—like standing near a hive and hearing the bees through the wood.

He thought of the voice inside his head last night. Not words, exactly. A feeling, shaped like four syllables:

'I heard you.'

"Who are you?" he asked the flowers, very softly. "Are you kind?"

He didn't expect an answer.

What he got instead was movement at the lane. More neighbors. Whispers. Someone sobbing into their hands, joy-stupid and exhausted. And, as if the world were a bowl and someone had knocked the table, a new ripple ran through the morning.

People were praying.

Not just him. Not just Salla with her stubborn piety. People who hadn't bent knees in months were looking at the circle and lowering their heads and speaking to whatever had changed the sky.

Tarin didn't know if that was a good thing.

He did know that he hoped, with an ache that surprised him, that whoever had heard him last night would not be cruel.

He took Mira's hand. It was cold and strong and human, and he held it as if he could anchor them both to the honest earth.

"Whatever comes," he said, mostly to himself, "we'll face it together."

Across the field, the flowers pulsed—once, twice, as if counting.

And then, from the direction of the shrine, the temple bell began to ring.

Not a celebration. Summons.

The kind of ringing that says: Come! Explain yourselves. Pray the right way.

---

Isaac

The threads alerted him.

They alerted him the way a door slamming alerts a sleeping house.

Isaac had drifted up after the forest, cautious, stung by the memory of nearly becoming everything and then snapping back into one small self.

He meant to keep a respectful distance and think very studiously about not getting vaporized.

Then the village began to pray.

One thread, then two, then four at once. He felt them flare in the east like sparks leaping from a fire. They were not the same—none of them was—but they shared a shape now, a slant.

Not to Halven, that warm, distant presence he was starting to recognize in the way you acknowledge the sun on your neck. Not to any name the prayers knew how to hold.

They aimed at the ring. At the fear and the gratitude knotted together. At him, without knowing him.

Isaac flinched.

It didn't hurt, exactly. Each thread brushed his awareness and left a residue—mud on boots, a child's laugh, Mira's quiet, iron patience; Kesh's distrust like a splinter under the nail; Salla's long memory unwinding back to rains in a different century.

They pressed against him with need and naked relief, and a hum rose in his head that wasn't sound, wasn't light, but was so intensely human he had to force himself not to recoil.

He almost reached out.

He didn't.

He learned from last time: the more he pulled, the more solid he became—and the more noticeable. Somewhere above and behind this, the gods hung like weather. Isaac could feel it now, a high heat on a cloudless day. If he answered a dozen prayers at once, he might as well paint a target on the sky.

'Easy,' he told himself. 'You don't know the rules.'

He watched instead.

Watching turned out to be its own kind of power.

By thinking about a thread, he could follow it to its source, the way you follow the smell of bread to a kitchen. He stayed high enough that the village was only lines and motion and the bright ping of thought, but it was still… intimate.

Bread set at the ring. Knees in mud. Lips moving. Names that weren't names: Stranger. Rain-Bringer. Black Bloom.

'Black Bloom.' He grimaced. "Could be worse."

He tested another limit.

He sent nothing like rain. Not even a breeze. Too big. Too obvious.

He sent calm.

Not command—no voice that said sleep or kneel or believe. Just an easing, a hand on the back of the neck. He aimed it at the jagged edges of fear until Kesh's thread stopped stinging quite so much. He eased the knot in Mira's chest.

He did not touch Salla—she ran on a different engine altogether, and he had the sense to respect old engines.

It worked. A little. The hum dropped from a frantic buzz to something like… expectation.

His awareness drifted toward the field again. The flowers were "brighter" now.

Well, maybe not brighter, but more present.

If he concentrated, he could taste the water in their stems, the mineral-rich soil beneath. And under that, a coolness that wasn't any plant he'd known. Anchor, he thought again. Doorway, maybe.

The bell rang.

It cut through the threads, crisp and intentional. Isaac turned his attention toward it and felt, for the first time since arriving, a sense of method.

Where the villagers' prayers were literal—'please'—the bell drew their thoughts into shape, gathering and focusing them. The shrine was a giver-of-forms. A priest stood at the center of that pull, old habits making channels in a crowd.

Halven's attention, not a person, exactly, more a pressure, shifted curiously. Warmth brushed the village.

Then it tasted the field.

Isaac recoiled.

The gaze was not out of malice but from scrutiny, bright, impersonal, and far. The harvest god's notice slid across the ring like a magnifying lens. Isaac felt that heat from the inside this time, the way you feel a cough coming before it bites the ribs. He did not have lungs, but something within him wanted very badly to draw in, go still, and blend into the background.

He thought of the forest of roots and networks and the way the black flower had made his sense of things… layered.

He gambled.

He turned his attention to the ring, not outward but in. He sank into the cool that wasn't plant, into the between-space the flowers seemed to make.

He did not ask them to hide him, but he hewed his outline down to a thinner version, a sketch of himself rather than a painting. If there was a way to be less than a whisper, he reached for it.

Halven's warmth passed over the ring.

Over him.

Paused.

The pause lasted less than a breath.

For gods, maybe less than thought.

And Isaac, who had no heart anymore, still felt it stutter.

The last time a god looked in his direction, it nearly tore him apart.

Isaac held very, very still.

Somewhere in the village, the priest raised his hands. His voice climbed, and the crowd's murmur climbed with it, and the bell rang again, closer now, and the warmth sharpened.

A different presence woke.

Not distant or warm. This one came from the edges of things—the borders where fields met forest, where laws met exceptions, where prayers slid off names and went wandering about.

It felt him.

Not a glance. A look.

The black flowers pulsed in answer.

They drank in the moment like a tide going out, and for a second, the air smelled faintly of crushed sage and stone.

Isaac did the only thing he could think of: he slid down the thread to Tarin.

He did not speak. He did not dare.

He showed Tarin, in a shiver of impression, the ring as he saw it from above, the attention gathering towards it, the shape of a choice: kneel to the shrine and let this be folded into what was already allowed—or step sideways and risk being wrong in public.

Tarin could feel the priest's presence drawing closer. This was the moment to kneel their way. To nod, smile, bless Halven, and pretend the rain came exactly as it was supposed to.

But that would be a lie.

And if he lied now, if he handed over this miracle like it belonged to someone else, who would listen next time?

He looked to the ring. To the bread, still untouched. To the god who had said nothing, but heard him anyway.

Tarin's breath caught. Isaac felt it. Felt the man see the two paths and not like either of them.

Then Tarin did something very human.

He stepped forward.

Knees in mud. Head bowed. But not toward the shrine.

Toward the ring.

The crowd's murmur broke out!

The bell rang a third, fourth, and fifth time, hard enough to make the air ring.

Halven's warmth turned razor sharp.

The other presence smiled without a mouth.

And Isaac, hiding inside the quiet of his own mistake-made flowers, realized that whatever happened next would not be quiet at all.