Chapter 77: The Border Town
Stonewall was splitting.
Four hundred people in a Rootist border town, and exactly half of them were lying every seventh day.
The temple stood at the town center — a proper temple, not a village shrine. Stone walls, carved columns, a consecrated altar with the spiral-root symbol rendered in green-stained wood. It had been built two centuries ago, when Demeterra’s Growth domain was young and aggressive and spreading northward into unclaimed territory. Stonewall had been a frontier outpost then. Now it was a border town watching something grow on the other side of the grasslands and wondering what it meant.
Seventh-day service. The temple filled. Four hundred people filing through the doors in family groups, taking their positions on the wooden benches, kneeling when the priest told them to kneel, speaking the spiral prayer when the priest told them to speak.
By root and branch, I return to the earth. The Mother grows, and I grow with her.
Two hundred voices. Clean. Practiced. Correct.
The other two hundred mouthed the words. Their lips moved. No sound came out. They filled the physical space of worship without occupying the spiritual space, because their spiritual space was elsewhere — in a cellar on the eastern side of town, where thirty of them met every third night to pray a different prayer in a different posture to a different god.
Right knee. Left fist over heart.
By iron and fire, I stand before the Design.
The cellar group had started with five. Then twelve. Then twenty. Now thirty, and growing. They met in Tomek’s root cellar — the boy who’d started it, who’d converted eight months ago after a northern trader healed his mother’s back pain with a single touch and a prayer that felt like warmth instead of duty.
Tomek was eighteen. He was the son of Aldric, a career Rootist — shrine elder, harvest coordinator, a man who’d served the Rootmother for thirty-five years and measured his identity by the spiral-root symbol the way other men measured theirs by their family name.
The split ran through the dinner table.
***
Evening meal. Aldric’s house. Three people at the table: Aldric, his wife Margit, and Tomek.
The stew was good. Margit kept a kitchen the way soldiers kept weapons — maintained, functional, absent of anything unnecessary. The bread was fresh. The ale was weak. The silence was the kind that had weight.
"You missed the harvest blessing," Aldric said.
"I was working."
"Working where?"
"The eastern field. Drainage ditch needed clearing."
"The ditch can wait."
"The blessing can wait too."
The words landed. Aldric put down his spoon. Margit didn’t move — she’d been sitting inside this silence for months, navigating the space between her husband and her son with the careful precision of someone walking between two fires.
"The blessing is how the goddess sustains our crops," Aldric said. His voice had the controlled evenness of a man who’d had this argument before and was choosing to have it again with the patience of repetition rather than the heat of anger. "Without the blessing, the harvest drops. Without the harvest, the town goes hungry."
"We used northern plows this season," Tomek said. "The harvest would have been fine without the blessing."
Aldric looked at his son. Really looked. The way a man looks at something he built that has started developing features he didn’t design.
"Those plows weren’t made by the goddess."
"No. They weren’t."
"You know who made them."
Tomek didn’t answer. The answer was in his silence — in the way he didn’t deny it, didn’t deflect, didn’t fabricate a story about finding the plows at a market or trading for them with a passing merchant. He simply let the truth exist in the gap between question and response.
Margit reached across the table and put her hand on Aldric’s arm. Not restraining. Anchoring. The gesture of a woman who loved both of the people at this table and understood that the fissure between them was not about plows or blessings or harvest yields.
"Eat," she said. "Both of you."
They ate. The stew cooled. The silence remained.
***
Two days later, Demeterra’s missionary arrived.
She was young — younger than the village priests, younger than Father Drost, younger than the old guard who’d been managing border faith for decades. She came with energy and resources: blessed seeds in sealed pouches, healing supplies generated through the Growth domain, and a sermon she’d rehearsed on the journey from Demeterra’s core territory.
The temple filled. This time, it actually filled — attendance spiking the way it always did when something new arrived. Not faith. Curiosity. The curiosity of people who wanted to see whether the goddess had noticed what was happening on her border.
The missionary performed a public healing. An old man with a persistent cough — she laid hands on his chest, channeled the Growth blessing, and the cough subsided within minutes. Not a dramatic miracle. A competent one. The kind that demonstrated divine functionality without the theatrics that a cynical audience would reject.
She distributed blessed seeds. Three pouches per family, enough to supplement the next planting season with divine-enhanced crop variants that would grow thirty percent faster and twenty percent larger than standard grain. The blessing was real. The goddess was providing. The message was clear: I am still here. I still care. The northern tools may be sharp, but my seeds grow life.
Shrine attendance spiked. From two hundred to three hundred and twenty in a single service. The spiral prayer filled the temple — loud, earnest, reinforced by the visible evidence that the Rootmother’s Growth domain was still functional and still willing to invest.
That night, the cellar group met.
Thirty-four now. Four more since the missionary’s arrival — people who’d watched the healing and the seed distribution and felt the familiar warmth of the Rootist routine and realized, in the quiet space between gratitude and conviction, that familiar warmth was not the same as true warmth.
They prayed. Right knee. Left fist. The words spoken in the dark, beneath the stone, below the temple’s consecrated range.
Order above. Order within. Until the last flame dies, I am Yours.
Tomek closed the cellar door behind him and walked home through the dark streets. The Rootist temple’s shrine lantern burned at the crossroads — a green-gold glow that had watched over Stonewall for two centuries.
He passed it without stopping.