The title landed on me with the unseen, crushing weight of a collapsing mountain. Prophet of the Great Eye. It was a brand, a claim of ownership, and I could feel the indifferent, ever-watchful gaze of the System turning towards me, a celestial scribe preparing to chisel the unwanted moniker next to my name for all eternity. A cold dread, sharp and swift, cut through the satisfaction of my successful lesson. A title like that wasn't a reward; it was a leash. It came with expectations, with a spotlight, and spotlights in a world like this were how you got shot.
I did not like that title. Not at all.
My mind, a frantic abacus of risk and reward, calculated the immediate danger. To be a prophet was to be the singular source, the fountainhead of all belief. If I made a mistake, if I failed, if a bigger, meaner god showed up and proved me wrong, the entire structure of my carefully constructed plan would shatter. A prophet can be killed. A prophet can be discredited. But a god? A god was abstract, resilient. A god could survive the death of its messengers.
I needed a higher power. I needed a buffer. I needed a corporate structure for this burgeoning faith, and I had no intention of being the CEO.
At this moment, my burgeoning faith, a concept I was still trying on like an ill-fitting coat, had only one name: the MourningLord. I had seen the proof of Her power in the golden, sanctified light of Samuel's circle. I had felt the clean, ordered peace of his Consecrate Ground. Compared to that tangible, verifiable miracle, I was nothing. A charlatan. A clever mimic. But I could try.
Before Gnar's declaration could fully cement itself in the minds of his crew, before the System could ratify my unwanted promotion, I acted. It was a desperate, instinctive gambit, a prayer born not of faith, but of pure, strategic self-preservation.
I dropped to one knee in the mud and gore, an act of sudden, shocking humility that instantly silenced the rising tide of their adulation. I brought my hand up, mimicking the sequence of gestures I had seen Samuel perform countless times by the fire. It was a fluid, deliberate motion, a piece of stolen choreography. Two fingers touching my forehead, where the mind resides. Then drawing them down to my heart, the seat of the soul. Finally, extending them outward, an offering to the world. My goblin-illusioned hand, shimmering and unreal, performed this small, holy rite in the flickering, greasy light of the goblin fire.
The effect was immediate and profound. The fanatical energy that had filled the small clearing vanished, sucked into the vacuum of my strange, silent gesture. The goblins stared, their savage cries dying in their throats. Their world was one of fists and teeth, of snarled commands and brutal action. This quiet, deliberate ritual was a foreign language, a piece of alien culture that held no place in their understanding of power.
Gnar, his own declaration still hanging in the air, took a hesitant step forward. The fire in his eye was banked, replaced by a deep, furrowed confusion. He had just anointed his prophet, and his prophet was now kneeling in the dirt, seemingly paying homage to something else entirely. It did not compute.
"What… is that?" he grunted, the question rough with uncertainty. "What you do?"
I remained kneeling, keeping my head bowed for a moment longer to let the drama of the moment build. This was my chance. This was the pivot. I could either be their god, or I could be the one who showed them the path to a real one.
Slowly, I raised my head, my expression carefully arranged into one of serene, humble devotion.
"I pray," I said, my voice quiet, imbued with a reverence I did not feel but could perform with absolute conviction. "I pray to the one who grants the true sight. The one whose eye you have just looked through."
I rose to my feet, brushing the filth from my knee. I looked at the ten confused goblin faces, my new, unwilling congregation, and I began my second sermon.
"You call me Prophet," I said, my voice resonating with a gentle, corrective authority. "But I am not. I am merely a Speaker. A servant. I can read the words of the Great Eye, but I am not the one who writes them."
I pointed a finger towards the dark, starless sky.
"There is a greater power," I declared, my voice swelling, taking on the cadence of a preacher. "A Goddess of the Clean Light. The one who brings the dawn after the long, bloody night. The She-Who-Watches while the world sleeps. We call her the MourningLord."
The name, spoken in the common tongue, was alien to them, but the concepts were not. Clean light. The dawn. An end to the bloody night. These were ideas that resonated with a deep, primal yearning in creatures who had only ever known filth and darkness. I was offering them not just power, but purity. Not just strength, but salvation.
"The Great Eye that showed you your soul-shape?" I continued, weaving my new theology into the lesson they had just learned. "That is Her eye. The numbers you saw? Those are Her words, written on the bones of the world, defining your worth. The deep-meat you consume? That is Her gift, a trial and a blessing to make you strong enough to be worthy of Her light."
I had taken their new, fragile understanding of the System and placed it within a grander, more palatable cosmology. I hadn't contradicted what I'd taught them; I had simply added a layer of management.
Gnar was struggling to keep up, his one eye blinking rapidly as he tried to process this new, complex hierarchy of power. "This… Goddess… She is the Sky-Chief of the Great Eye?"
"She is," I confirmed, seizing on his crude but effective terminology. "And like any great chief, she has her own chosen shaman. Her own Prophet. One who is truly blessed by Her."
I let the statement hang in the air, a new revelation designed to shatter their perception of me as the ultimate authority.
"Compared to our shaman," I said, my voice dropping to a tone of profound, genuine respect, "I am merely a student. A child learning to read. Our Prophet… our true Prophet… he can call down the Clean Light of the Goddess. He can make the very ground holy, a place where no filth or dark thing can stand. He is the one who speaks to Her. I am merely the one who listens to him."
The shock that rolled through the goblins was a palpable wave. It was one thing to discover that there was a secret world of numbers and power. It was another thing entirely to learn that the one who had shown them this world was, by his own admission, a low-ranking member of his own spiritual order.
Their universe, which had expanded so dramatically in the last hour, suddenly tripled in size. It now contained not just them, not just me, but a Goddess, a true Prophet, and a whole unseen hierarchy of power that was infinitely greater than their own petty squabbles.
"This… other Prophet…" Gnar stammered, the word 'other' heavy with awe. "He is… stronger than you? Stronger than the killer-woman?"
"He is not a warrior," I said carefully. "His strength is not of the arm, but of the soul. He is the one who keeps our tribe safe. His blessing is the reason we have a home to return to, a fire that is warm and clean, and food to share."
I had, in a few short sentences, transformed Samuel from a quiet, contemplative man into a legendary figure. A holy man of immense power, the true source of our strength. I had also, quite deliberately, made our cave sound less like a desperate shelter and more like a sacred temple.Faith, at its core, is a transaction. The supplicant offers devotion, and in return, they receive comfort, purpose, or power. I had offered them the latter two. Now, I had to provide the proof. I had to show them a miracle, even if I had to manufacture it myself.
"We will pray," I announced, my voice taking on a solemn tone. "We will show the MourningLord that new voices cry out for Her light in the darkness. We will show Her that you are worthy of Her gifts."
Without waiting for their response, I once again dropped to one knee. This time, it was not a desperate gambit, but a deliberate performance. I closed my eyes, shutting out the greasy, fire-lit faces and the squalor of the camp. I focused, not on any real sense of devotion, but on the memory of Samuel's quiet, unshakeable faith. I tried to emulate the calm I felt from him, the sense of being a small, stable point in a chaotic universe.
Beside me, Elara moved. I felt, more than saw, her kneel. There was no hesitation. She did not believe in the MourningLord, not in the way Samuel did. But she believed in the plan. She understood the theater of this moment. Her kneeling was a strategic endorsement, a silent, powerful affirmation that lent my performance an immediate, unassailable credibility. If the killer-woman, the avatar of death they so feared and respected, knelt to this unseen god, then its power must be very real indeed.
I began the hand signs again, slowly, deliberately, so they could all see. Forehead. Heart. World. A simple, elegant trinity of thought, soul, and action.
For a moment, the goblins just watched, a circle of confused, silent observers. Then, from the corner of my vision, I saw movement. It was Pip. The runt, the smallest and most impressionable of them all, was clumsily trying to copy the gesture. His filthy little hand went to his brow, then patted his chest, then waved vaguely at the fire. It was a pathetic, comical imitation, but it was utterly sincere.
His action broke the spell of their inaction. Another goblin, a lanky one with a scarred face, hesitantly copied the gesture. Then another. It was a slow, awkward domino effect of faith by mimicry. They didn't understand the meaning behind the ritual, but they understood that it was what they were supposed to do. They were following the Prophet's Speaker, their new guide to this strange, invisible world.
Finally, Gnar, his face a mask of grim concentration, lowered himself to one knee. He was the last, the most skeptical, but also the most committed. His gesture was stiff, angry, a demand as much as a prayer. He was challenging this new god to show him something, to prove that his faith was not misplaced.
And so we knelt. Two humans wrapped in lies, and ten goblins wrapped in a fragile, newfound hope. A bizarre congregation in a temple of mud and bone, offering a silent, clumsy prayer to a goddess who likely had no idea they even existed.
I expected nothing. My goal was the performance itself, the act of shared ritual to solidify my control and their belief in the structure I had built. I was the priest, leading my flock in a hollow rite whose only purpose was to bind them closer to me.
But the universe, it seemed, had other plans.
It began not as a sight, but as a feeling. A subtle shift in the air, a change in the pressure against my skin. The oppressive, damp cold of the night didn't just recede; it was actively pushed back by a gentle, pervasive warmth that had nothing to do with our pathetic fire. The stench of filth, of blood and rot, which was the constant perfume of this place, was suddenly… gone. Replaced by a clean, crisp scent, like the air after a thunderstorm, a smell of ozone and wet earth.
A soft gasp came from one of the goblins. Then another. I opened my eyes.
A single mote of dust, caught in the air above the center of our circle, began to glow. It shone with a soft, golden light, a tiny, impossible star born in the darkness. Then another mote beside it caught the light, and another, and another. A chain reaction of illumination spread through the air, the points of light coalescing, weaving together into a soft, shimmering sphere of pure, liquid gold.
It was not the harsh, angry light of a spell. It was a gentle, living radiance that pulsed with a slow, steady rhythm, like a great, sleeping heart. It did not cast sharp shadows; it seemed to soak into the world, making the darkness less absolute, the filth less foul. The light dripped from the sky, pooling on the ground in the center of our circle, a puddle of impossible, holy luminescence.
The goblins were frozen, their faces upturned, their eyes wide with a mixture of profound terror and ecstatic awe. They were seeing a miracle. A real, undeniable, world-breaking miracle. This was not a story. This was not a promise. This was the Sky-Chief, looking down at them with Her Great Eye, and showing them Her power.
And then, as the golden light reached its gentle, overwhelming crescendo, the notifications slammed into my mind, stark and brilliant against the backdrop of the celestial display.
[ The MourningLord has acknowledged your piety. ]
My breath caught in my throat. It was real. She was real. And she was listening.
[ The faith of new supplicants has been felt. Their crude but sincere devotion has reached the Empyrean planes. ]
The goblins. Their clumsy, mimicked prayer had been heard. Their desperate, selfish hope had been registered as faith.
[ For acting as a conduit of faith and bringing new, albeit unlikely, souls into the light, a blessing is conferred. ]
[ Title Awarded: Blessed One ]
The irony was so thick, so potent, it was almost comical. I had knelt to avoid the title of Prophet, and in doing so, had earned a new one, bestowed not by a pack of ignorant goblins, but by a literal god. I had tried to deflect power, and had been rewarded with a direct, divine endorsement. I was no longer just a Speaker. I was the [Blessed One]. The title felt like a warm, heavy weight settling over my soul.
The golden light held for a long, timeless moment, bathing us in its impossible purity. Then, as gently as it had arrived, it began to fade. The motes of light winked out one by one, the puddle of luminescence on the ground shrinking, until all that was left was the grimy mud and the flickering, smoky light of our fire.
The cold and the stench rushed back in, a sudden, shocking reminder of the reality of our world. But the memory of the light remained. The miracle lingered in the air, a ghost of warmth and cleanliness that had changed everything.
The goblins did not move. They were prostrate, their faces pressed into the dirt. They were trembling. The ones who had been merely followers were now true believers. The ones who had been skeptical were now terrified. They had not just heard the word of their new god; they had seen Her face, and they were undone by the sight.
Gnar, the proud, cynical leader, was shaking like a leaf in a storm. He slowly pushed himself up, his one eye, when it finally turned to me, was filled with a new, terrifying emotion. The respect was still there. The ambition was still there. But they were now dwarfed by a profound, soul-shaking reverence.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. What could he say? He had challenged a god, and the god had answered.