I felt like home. I closed my eyes, and I saw myself walking the hallway from outside of my room to the library. It was supposed to be the family library. Had been for the longest time. Until I found it. I fell in love. More and more of my books found home inside. Slowly, the other books had to move out. And there came to be another library for the rest of the family.
As for my library, there were just many racks, the shelves filled with books about runes and runic archaeology. The carpet covering the floor. And nothing else. I didn't need chairs or tables. I loved standing on my feet as I read the many books in the library.
I could have been home. If not for the absence of Madam Rosza. My library had all of Madam Rosza's books. There were none here. It was good. Everything couldn't be the same. I would be lost then.
I couldn't shake off the feeling that I was missing something. I could see it. It was dancing in my eyes. And I wasn't able to truly see it. I hated the feeling. Even more so since it felt important.
The first few days I had the two temples laid open next to each other. However hard I tried, I saw nothing new. Something had to change.
The next few days, I studied the temple of the heavenly war. At home. At the actual temple. I was spending hours at the temple, reading all the stories in the long arc. The stories were certainly interesting, but they weren't complete. More than half were in the ancient pictorial. I couldn't find joy knowing that I couldn't read that greater half.
Finally, I found the more correct path. I threw the temple of the heavenly war out, and filled my head with the temple of Pervue.
There were no records stating exactly when the temple was built, almost as if the Vikari didn't know. The earliest mention of Pervue was in the record of the gods, a journal prepared by the fourth high priest of the Vikari.
Vikari didn't call their religion, a religion. Instead, they referred to it as another branch of study. The most intriguing aspect of the idea was that the priests were looked upon as high scholars, and the high priest was the highest scholar. By that logic, there wasn't anything strange about a high priest preparing a record of the gods.
Myrinnke was a revered man by all generations of the Vikari. He was an orphan adopted by the temple when he wasn't even a year old. From the outside, his life was unremarkable. He studied with the other children. He made friends easily, but he never left the temple. There was no outside world to him. Just the temple and the studies. At the age of fifteen, he graduated the primary studies, same as the other children. Same as the vast majority, he joined the higher studies. Nothing else changed. He never even set foot outside of the temple. At nineteen, he finished the higher studies and joined the temple as a priest. He wasn't the youngest or the most remarkable priest. At the age of twenty five, he was named as the successor by the high priest, surprising everyone. No one realised the high priest even knew Myrinnke. From then on, he was always with the high priest. He was thirty two, when he ascended as the high priest. The rest of his life was spent confined to the temple, no different to his life from before. At fifty five, he named his successor. At seventy eight, he retired. And disappeared completely. The only thing he left behind was the journal he began writing the day he was named the successor and completed on his last day as the high priest. The record of the gods.
Pervue was one of the earliest mentions on the record. Myrinnke spoke of Pervue in a passioned and intriguing voice.
Pervue was the god of knowledge, thus occupying the highest place in the heavens. Legends said he was born from the other gods' thirst for knowledge. The heavens was a higher realm, but in many aspects quite similar to the mortal realm. The gods had different desires and aspirations, but in many primal ways the motivations were the same as people of the mortal realm. The gods thirsted for knowledge the same. It was as if they were on a quest for ascension, the same as mortals. Mortals ascended to the heavens. Where then did the gods go? It seemed like the gods didn't know themselves, or if they did, they had no intention of sharing with the lower realms. But such was their thirst, so great their sacrifice, that Pervue was born from all of it. It was said that Pervue was born in an almost complete form, a full god. But Pervue had no mouth. And no voice. All of the knowledge, all answers to all questions were within Pervue. It was up to the gods to learn the answers from Pervue by themselves. And so, Pervue occupied the highest position. In a way, Pervue was the god to the gods.
I read all of this before. I closed my eyes and I could see the books open to the pages bearing the words. Even now, I was reading from my head.
I knew I was missing something. I could only look to Myrinnke, as the representative of Pervue. He had the answers. He had no voice. And so, it was up to me to learn the answers. Over the next few days, I was only reading Myrinnke. It took me many, many days to see what was staring at my face all along. The journal was Myrinnke's record of the gods. But never once, anywhere in the journal did Myrinnke say Vikari gods.
If that variable was muted, everything became so much simpler. There were the Vikari gods. The Vikari religion. The Vikari temples. And there were the rest. The other temple. The other gods. The other religion.
The Vikari gods had no form. The Vikari temples had no walls or definite structure. The Vikari gods were free and envisioned in nature. The Vikari religion was about study and knowledge.
The other gods had more definite features. The temples were actual buildings with structures and underlying principles. The other religion was about worship and paying homage.
That implied, the other religion wasn't of the Vikari. It was alien, and the Vikari allowed it to have home alongside them. None of that was as important as the implication that the runes of the other religion had secrets that couldn't be uncovered with the Vikari runes. There was another language hidden in the other temples, the language of the other religion.