The Council chamber was a small round room. Green wreaths and flowers filled the room, hanging from the ceiling and bordering the center of the chamber in concentric circles. Breaks in the circles of greenery were interspersed around each circle, creating a meandering maze that led inwards.

A series of seven plinths encircled a carved stone table set at the center of the chamber, at which sat the seven Council members. Each member was aligned with one of the plinths, and Allen supposed they represented in some manner the seven gods from the tapestries in the foyer. Allen sat in an eighth chair that was placed at the table, having been gestured to it upon his arrival. There was no plinth behind it, and the lack seemed to stand out. But perhaps it was just his imagination, as there were extra chairs between each of the seven main seats for the Council.

The priestess, Liosta, sat in one of the seven Council chairs and sent him intermittent glances with her lips pressed together. He had not been surprised when she took her seat after she led him to the room. The position as a Council member suited her.

The plinth behind her, if he understood it correctly, was marked with varying symbols of Anya, the goddess of healing. He had not yet been introduced to the other six members of the Council. Like the gods and goddesses they seemed to represent, four were men and three were women. Their clothing tended toward the colors of the various deities and each wore a medallion etched with their respective deity’s symbol. As he compared them to his memory of the tapestries, he placed the faces of the Council members with each deity and plinth.

There had not been time for more than brief whispers to pass from Liosta to the other Council members since they had arrived, and he did not think her bias had yet affected the Council.

An older man with pure white hair spoke. He wore a bronze medallion to Corian. His gravelly voice rang out clear and strong despite his age. “Welcome to the Council of the College of Priests, Lieutenant Delais. We have received the message you bore from our King, and we will do what is in our power to aid you. And of course, as happens when you are my age, there is a story to tell as well…. Liosta of Anya was sent to bring you to our meeting.”

“Thank you, sir.” Allen didn’t yet know how to address the gathering.

“But first, let us introduce ourselves,” the priest of Solen interrupted. His posture was relaxed, and he spoke slowly but surely. He seemed to be in no rush, and Allen suspected he would be slow to jump to conclusions.

“I am Ptir, called of Corian,” the priest of Corian continued, “elected member of the Council of the College of Priests, and named high priest by some.” He indicated the circle of Council members with a slow circle of his hand. “All of us here are high priests or priestesses of the true gods.” He named the others in the circle as he nodded to each.

“Hiorin of Solen….” The priest of Solen who had interrupted a moment before. A strongly built man in his middle age, with powerful forearms that rested on the table. He sent a flat glance in Allen’s direction as he was introduced but it did not seem unfriendly.

“Tylea of Kaisa….” A sharply beautiful woman of indeterminate age with silver streaks in her dark hair. A flame was etched onto the gold medallion around her neck. And a gold flame blossomed from her skin at the corner of her left eye. It was a moment before Allen could pull his attention away from it. She was the only other person with a mark that he had ever seen.

He had seen his own mark in mirrors and reflections, but this was different. It seemed to float there beside her eye with a tantalizing significance just out of his grasp.

He nearly missed the next introduction as Ptir continued around the circle. But he pulled his gaze away as the name was spoken.

“Jioric of Yoneth….” Another older man who sat quietly with his hands folded. He wore black and grey.

“Lopir of Cerias….” A man with dark brown hair and sharp eyes, who sat almost motionless in his seat.

“Liosta of Anya, whom you have already met.” Ptir nodded to her as he spoke.

He turned to the last woman at the table with a sight chuckle. “And Orisa of Alyssa, our formidable negotiator, though our squabblings do not make it easy for her.” A woman with long blond hair and blue eyes sat calmly in her seat, and nodded politely to him as her name was mentioned.

“Before we begin to ask our questions and attempt to fulfill the King’s request, let us tell you a bit about ourselves and the College, that you might know where we are coming from.” Ptir regarded Allen closely as spoke, and his gaze emphasized the points he was making. “Your presence presents us with some difficulty, for, as Liosta seems to have recognized, you bear a mark that cannot exist.”

He paused and rubbed his hand over his short beard. “Well, let us say that we hope it does not exist, and that you are truly only pretending. If you are not, it presents us with a far greater difficulty than the one you would face as an imposter.”

“What do you mean, sir?” Allen bid his time as the older man spoke. The other members of the Council seemed content to stay silent while Ptir continued.

“Ahh, so you will not make this easy for us, I see.” Ptir chuckled, and again Allen was impressed by the level of warmth in his tone.

“It is a matter of religion…and of history,” Ptir said. “You see around you seven markers to seven gods….” He waved his hand around the room to indicate the stone plinths. “And we know very well the seven symbols that these gods use to mark their chosen mortals. But your mark is unknown to us.”

He continued. “Thus, a dilemma. The simple answer, that you are an imposter and the mark is a forgery. In this way, our world stays as it has for centuries, for millennia, as it has since before the College was founded and before Aciel herself was more than a faint speck of a fishing village here in Rylar, and our great King’s ancestors were village chieftains and little more.”

“Or, you bear a true mark, and the beliefs that all of us hold in this chamber except for yourself are false. Everything that we have known, been taught as novices, and taught ourselves to our own novices, is changed irrevocably. All because of you.”

Ptir held up one hand palm-up and then turned it over slowly as if pouring water from a vessel.

“We have known seven gods and only seven gods since our history was only stories passed down from mother to daughter and father to son, from grandfather to grandson and nephew. If an eighth suddenly enters the picture, where does it leave us? Must we change what we know and have done for so long? Must we change the College, or work to change the kingdom, to properly honor this new god?”

He set his hand back down on the table. “It is not so serious outside these walls, as beyond the College grounds many other beliefs are intermixed. Gods are created daily at every streamhead and well, every river, every stone, tree, kitchen fire, and journey. One more will have little effect on the people.”

“But here, within the College, where we pride ourselves on our adherence to the ways of our ancestors and to the worship of the true gods…much worse.”

He lifted his shoulders in a slight helpless shrug. “But I lie, of course. It is a habit of old age. Truth and falsehoods both fall prey to possibilities, until the world blends into shades of grey. As Yoneth enlightens us.”

Ptir nodded toward Jioric.

“What do you mean?” Allen asked. Nothing Ptir had said so far seemed particularly emphatic. Certainly he lacked the emphasis that Liosta’s outburst earlier had driven home.

“Ahh. Yes.” Ptir smiled enigmatically. He folded his fingers in front of him. “Do you suppose it is our duty to answer our King’s request, when it might bring such grief upon us?”

Allen waited. Ptir had already implied he would answer the King’s request, so why this question now?

Ptir looked slowly around the table and into the eyes of each of the Council members sitting there before he returned his gaze to Allen.

“Ahh,” he said again. “I suppose you will not now acknowledge that you are a pretender, and that your mark is some form of paint?”

“No, sir,” Allen replied. “I would not have come had it been so.”

“Nor would the King have sent you if he thought it were so.” Ptir sighed, and looked down at his joined hands, where he contemplated his knuckles before looking back up.

“There are two things then, that we will tell you. We can tell no more to the King himself, were he to come here to ask.”

“I understand, sir,” Allen replied.

“The first is this.” Ptir raised one hand to indicate the mark by Allen’s eye. “We do not know the god who has given you that mark. Yet we are aware of a distant possibility.”

Ptir nodded across the table to Tylea, the marked priestess of Kaisa, who began to speak.

“There are rumors throughout the land of an eighth god,” she began, as she regarded Allen steadily across the circle, “one who was forgotten by history. Only fragments of the story remain…. But we are as sure as we can be…that this eighth god is not a god, but a goddess….”

She continued. “The story is called at times the War of the Eight, and it is a popular and unending cycle of bardic songs and verses. New ones are constantly created, usually pertaining to current and not historical events. After centuries of this behavior, the true history is so obscured as to be nearly impossible to discover. Yet, we are certain that this goddess is a goddess for reasons of balance.”

Her movements were fluid and seemed to trail in the air as she lifted one graceful hand and indicated the circle. “Four gods, and three goddesses. For there to be balance, there must be a fourth goddess, and not a fifth god. Everything that we know about the gods say that they created the world in a perfect harmony. Thus, we expect no less of the gods themselves but that they are as balanced as the world they created.”

That seemed a tenuous connection to Allen, but perhaps it was true. It was something, at least.

“Is there anything you know about the goddess?” he asked.

“Very little,” Tylea replied. “Your mark indicates her symbol is an ivy vine. Stories speak of a goddess locked away in the great oakwood of Nitharn…and there are certainly ruins throughout that wood that bear the touch of age…. None dare enter the forest long enough to examine the ruins, but we have heard of them in the ramblings of broken minds that have returned from there. It is said that Cerias hunts those in the forest who would spend the night, and we have no reason to doubt it.”

Nitharn was the forest that Allen had woken beside, so long before. As he had often thought on the Dhara, the forest had never seemed inhospitable to him, despite the stories. But perhaps there were parts of it that he had never seen.

She nodded to Lopir, the priest of Cerias who sat beside her.

The stillness of the priest was only slightly interrupted by his speech, and he still seemed almost fixed in stone as he spoke quietly. “I believe it is true, but even I would not venture there. My Lord does not appreciate guests in his domain. If he does not kill, it is yet within his power to drive men mad. Perhaps he showed pity on those men who returned, and spared them their lives. Or perhaps the madness was not his intent, but rather the result of the night. There may be other things that roam the wood. Cerias is not a hunter of deer or men alone, but his arrows take the beasts and shades that dwell within the shadows that his gaze alone can pierce. Nightmares fall to his bow.”

Tylea resumed. “A common thread throughout the stories is that the goddess sleeps in the forest…and the Cerias guards her even as he prevents her from leaving. The will of the gods, it is said, bound her there, after a great battle. Of the battle itself, we know nothing. None of the stories agree.”

Ptir picked up. “That is all the answer we can give to the question of who marked you.” He nodded to Allen.

Tylea continued again, and reached up to touch the mark above her eye. “The second is this. That a true mark works slowly upon its bearer, but its progression is inevitable. In time your mind will become more aligned with your goddess, and you will serve her will without realizing it. You will do as you wish, and it will be as she wishes….” She stopped for a moment, and looked at him with a trace of pity. “You cannot fight it. You will not wish to. You will not even know it. But slowly, certainly, she will change you. You will become her champion, her hand in the world.”

“For Kaisa, with me…” Tylea’s eyes took on a distant look before she resumed, “it has not been…unpleasant.” Her lips twitched upwards in a smile.

“It is unusual,” Ptir interrupted, “that you serve a goddess. Usually a god’s mark will go to a man, and a goddess’ mark to a woman….” He paused; then added reassuringly, “But do not worry. You are not the first.”

“Just the second,” Hiorin, the burly priest of Solen, interjected.

Ptir sent him a sidelong glance. “Well, yes….”

“He sacrificed himself nobly in the Kestrel Pass, to prevent a war with the South that would have led to great casualties on both sides,” Orisa, the priestess of Alyssa, added. “He was one of my Lady’s and served the cause of peace with all his heart.” There was a yearning in her voice as she spoke.

“Would have been better to kill them all, but at least he saved some for next time,” Hiorin spoke again, and flexed his knuckles until they cracked.

Orisa ignored him.

“Don’t let that lead you astray,” Ptir said. “You’re not doomed to die nobly.”

“It just tends to be the case with the marked,” Hiorin interrupted again. “A glorious death.” Then he added, before Ptir cut him off again. “Although Kaisa’s priestesses do tend to go out in more…interesting ways than some of the others.”

Tylea, instead of reacting with anger, sent him a smoldering look that could have lit the blood of a man eight weeks in the grave.

Then she turned the look on Allen, who responded in a predictable way. He tried to school his face to hide his interest, and failed.

“Ahem….” Ptir coughed. “Yes, anyhow…. We will send the King a message detailing what little we know.”

When Allen recovered from Tylea’s flirtation, if that were a good term for it, he nodded to Ptir. “Thank you, sir.”

It was at least a start, and he would keep in mind that the mark he bore was probably from a goddess instead of a god. And the story of the sleeping goddess guarded by the God of the Hunt was interesting.

An old thought came to his mind, as he considered the sleeping goddess. How long had it been since he had walked in the Oakwood of Nitharn…? Had he stepped foot in it since he had boarded the Dhara? He had been on the shore many times…but where did the wood truly begin? Had he ever truly been in the forest, or only on its outskirts? Nitharn covered half of the North. Perhaps the goddess lay sleeping somewhere within. If so, perhaps finding her would offer him a way home.

Then he felt, not for the first time, the constraining bonds of duty and oath that bound him to the King and to Aciel. He would have no time to visit Nitharn, not unless the King ordered him to do so. And that was unlikely. He would be sent north with the 9^th soon he suspected, and his mark would serve the King well on the frontier, where blessings and perhaps the odd premonition would add to the strength of the wall.

Nitharn would have to wait. He could write a letter to Raeli, the captain of the Dhara, if he had anything specific to inquire. But he didn’t see how she could help him now, with rumors that said so little and which were already so widely known.

He bowed his thanks to the Council, and took his leave. The Council had said the mark would change him, but he did not find himself much bothered by the idea. Perhaps it had already changed him. He was no longer the young man who had left his home and woken in a strange forest. He was Lieutenant Delais of the Northern Guard…The King’s Griffin, the King’s Right Hand. Until he felt a divine tug, he would follow his oaths, and gladly. He would do so even if his heart pulled him in another direction if it were possible. At least for now, his destiny seemed to lead him away from the Oakwood of Nitharn.

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