Nobody knew where she'd come from or who left her there.
Only that the pointy eared child was small- almost impossibly small for something that seemed to carry the stars of the night sky within its eyes- and that she had been placed on the temple steps by someone who could not keep her, but could not bear to dump her in careless squalor either. Wrapped in a plain linen cloth that smelled of sweet pine resin and woodsmoke. No note. No name. Only a single cord of braided silver thread looped around one of her tiny wrists, almost like the kind that pilgrims sometimes wore when they came to make offerings at the Moonmaiden's altar.
It was Sister Ingrid who found her, just before dawn, when the mist still clung to the forest floor and the last stars were paling at the horizon. She noted that the child had not been crying. That the babe had simply been lying there, awake and watchful, her bright blue eyes open to the sky, patiently waiting for something to happen.
When the high priestess had finally decided that she would stay, they named her Rhiannon and raised her alongside the other young temple acolytes.
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Rhiannon grew up between the burning smell of temple incense and crisp forest air. She saw the other acolytes as her siblings- learned to read from their borrowed prayer books, learned to count the hours of service, and always knew deep within her soul that the Moonmaiden watched over her every step down paths that no one else could see. She'd absorbed it all the way moss absorbs water: quietly, thoroughly, completely, as though this faith had always been a part of her, simply drawn to the surface by her life in the temple.
Sister Ingrid became the closest thing she had to a mother- a tall, unhurried woman with silver-streaked hair and an unshakeable patience. It was Ingrid who first placed Rhiannon's small hands on the hilt of a wooden training sword, telling her that Selƻne's light did not only tend to wounds; but that sometimes it had to stand between the wounded and the dark. It was Ingrid who had taught her that devotion was not some passive thing she could carry with her. That faith, practiced truly, held iron in it.
A shepherd does not only lead the flock, she used to say, her voice low and even in the candlelit training hall. They stand at its edge, placing themselves between the meadow and the tree line. Loyal. Alert. Determined.
And Rhiannon had listened.
She was unusually quiet as a child- watching and listening to others more than her tongue spoke words. Taking everything in, creating her own kind of armor, feeling the weight of it more than she showed. The other acolytes sometimes mistook her stillness for coldness, her careful composure for distance. They were wrong in their assumptions, but she rarely corrected them. Rhiannon had learned that these feelings were hers to keep; that the faith burning deep within her bones did not need an audience.
Selƻne, she had decided, was audience enough.
_
At just seventeen summers old, in the light of the full moon, Rhiannon had finally spoken her vows. She meant every word of them, down to the marrow of her bones. By age twenty-two she had been ordained fully as a cleric of Selƻne, bound for a life serving at the House of The Moon in Waterdeep.
She had barely gotten through the gates of the city the day she'd arrived. The Nautiloid descended without warning- a vast, terribly tentacled thing splitting open the sky above the city like a deep wound- and the world she had known for her entire life had simply ceased to exist. Rhiannon had been sealed inside of an Ilithid pod, arms bound helplessly to her sides as a parasite burrowed through the soft tissue behind her eye. The life she had so carefully, faithfully built suddenly multiple planes away.
In the end, she'd survived the crash. Found and rescued others who had survived it too- battered, furious, and just as infected as she was. Life outside of her home temple was nothing like Sister Ingrid had prepared her for. There was no safety she could seek behind temple walls, no congregation she could join around reverent candlelight. Only the wilds and the open sky and the knowledge that a ticking time bomb was currently living inside of her skull. Only strangers that she had no reason to trust, and a faith that she refused to relinquish.
It was the greatest trial she had ever faced. And it was only just the beginning.
Expect this post to be updated periodically
