Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-Adventurers — Paladin (or cleric) whose relationship with their deity has gotten kind of weird
The archer watches as Malia tucks the last skein of faintly screaming fibre into her knapsack.
"Is that safe in there?" she say dubiously.
"That's what she said—"
"Malia."
The wizard pauses, head cocked. "For me or for them?"
"For you," the archer says sharply, "always for you," and she turns away without waiting for an answer, head down and tread heavy.
The paladin settles a hand on Malia's arm as she rises to follow. "Give her a minute," he says softly.
"Arlo—"
"How would you feel," he says, quiet, "if you'd gone on ahead, and came back to find bandits gloating over Steady's insensible body?"
The wizard looks at him, expression mild and distant. "I would do such terrible things," she says, soft and simple.
"Aye. Well." He jerks his head after the archer. "Give her a minute. Then go. And—" he hesitates. "And I'll speak to you, later, about something."
She clasps his shoulder, and turns her steps after the archer.
Later, in the evening dimness, after Malia has sat near their campfire and run a brush through the archer's hair until she tumbled, boneless and already half-asleep, into her bedroll — the colours of the sunset sky glimmering unnoticed in her hair — the wizard settles next to Arlo, hands in her lap. They stare together at the heaped, glow-hearted wood.
"Aye?" she says finally, and he sighs.
"You asked what kind of paladin I am—" he says, and breaks off as she immediately scoots closer and threads her arm through his.
"There's only one kind, Arlo," she says. "I've little enough good to say about your fellows, but listen to me this once: there is only one kind of paladin, and that's the kind their god chose. Chose, Arlo. You're not an accident or a fraud or any of the things you think; any fool could put on that tabard as a disguise, but it wouldn't fool the god into doing miracles."
He's silent a while.
"No," he says finally. "I mean, you're right, but — you're also not wrong that I'm not the right kind of paladin for the god. If I were, I'd not countenance—" and he waves his hand around a little, at them all.
"Arlo." She squeezes his arm. "The god of the Ordo Pacificus. That's a god of home, in some of its aspects, aye? Of belonging. Of welcome."
"Aye."
"Is it so hard to think," the wizard says, "that that god saw you — a man desperate enough to disguise himself as a paladin to escape himself — and saw in you the things a god might want, if only you could find a home in them; and that a god of home and belonging gave you that home and belonging? That even if the god isn't your god, in the end, that it saw it could give you what you needed to become the man you are? Even if that means letting you loose to find a home of your own, after."
He's silent a long while; picks up a stick and pokes the quiet fire into bright new hunger.
"Why?" he says, eventually, fingers white around the branch.
"Why not?" Malia shrugs. "I think the god's been fortunate to have you act in its name."
He exhales raggedly, and puts his hands in front of him, cupped. "Look," he says, and she looks at the moonstome gleam of godlight in his palms.
"Aye," she says, and he reaches with trembling hands for the symbol at his throat, unpins it and lays it carefully beside him; shrugs out of her arm to stand, pulls off the Pacifican tabard; sinks back to sitting.
"Look," he says, cupping his hands again.
It's hard to see in the light of the fire; faint. But shimmering dimly in his hands, still, illumination: not the Pacifican god's pearly glow, but something like the colour of pale flesh with the bright sun behind it; something like roses.
"It's — something else, not the god." he says. "Not that god. Someone else. I can feel it," and he turns troubled eyes to her. "Is this you? Did you do this?"
She looks at him, mouth wry, eyes ancient. "Do you think I have the power of a god, Arlo?" she says, gently sardonic. "Do you think I have the ear of a god?"
"I think," the paladin says, hands still shaking, "those aren't answers to what I asked. I don't know what it is, this god—"
"The first people in the world didn't know the gods, when they looked up at mountains and asked whose chairs they were. It didn't keep them apart." She touches his face. "It didn't keep them from coming to know them."
"Malia." He tries to search her drowning eyes. "Did you do this?"
She leans forward and kisses his cheek, his brow, his mouth. "Don't look to wizards for answers," she says quietly. "Answers are what gods are for," and he knows that she will never tell him what she knows.