Altar

Merrin was tired. Tired of trying. Tired of begging. Tired of pleading with someone who wouldn’t listen. He’d tried everything under the sun and more. But it just seemed as though he wasn’t like the others. 

Despite the fact that they shouldn’t, they all worshipped Akna, Goddess of thieves, stealing and the likes. He could never remember exactly what she was Goddess of, but he just knew that she was the patron god of thieves. She was supposed to bring them luck: fortune in the form of jewels, gold, and whatever else could fetch a pretty price. But Merrin found her luck to be nothing more than a myth. 

He’d never been lucky. For everything good that happened, something significantly worse followed on. He finds a coin on the ground, his boots break. He finally manages to break into the safe at Anglindor Estate, he gets gouged by a broken fence on the way out. He saves enough to get both him and Zane new clothes, the roof caves in. It was one thing after another. It wasn’t as though he was trying: he was. For every five gemstones he got, one was set aside for her. Every new moon he’d do the same ritual as the others. He would pray to her whenever he got the chance. Orlia had told him to be patient, to just wait and see. But he couldn’t. She never listened, and he bet she never would. 

But he knew someone who would listen. Someone that always listened. Maybe it was because he got something out of it. Maybe it was because so few people worshipped him anymore. But Merrin didn’t care. So what if he wasn’t the patron god of thieves. So what if he didn’t bring him ‘luck’. He brought Merrin something else, something that no amount of luck could ever change. 

That’s why Merrin found himself in his garden, the moon just a sliver in the night sky, and an empty crate in his arms. He’d let Zane have the small temple in the back corner of the garden for his god of choice to worship. Merrin didn’t really care. If Zane needed his own space to worship then he could have it. Unlike Zane, Merrin didn’t mind being under the stars when he did worship. Of course that meant that Zane would always have somewhere warm and dry to stay when he was outside. If he was being honest with himself, Merrin was less worried about having a place to worship and more worried about making sure that Zane wouldn’t collapse from the cold. It was only made better by the fact that it meant Zane kept some of his more… interesting experiments out of the house. There were only so many half-dead rats Merrin could take. If they were undead rats, then maybe it would’ve been different. But that wasn’t the case. 

Merrin had already dug out a small area to use. The slabs were easy enough to lay down on his own. He’d taken a couple of the broken slabs from the last shipment of polished marble that was meant for one of the estates up the river. It wasn’t hard to do. He simply took the broken ones out of the crates, and instead of sending them off to be practically pulverised, he just took them home instead. No one cared. No one got paid enough to care. If the people at the estates could order in marble slabs for fuck-knows what, they could send some of their own men down to collect the shipment that didn’t come in until after sunset. It was the last thing any of them wanted to be doing, especially in the pouring rain. So, when Merrin said that he was going to take a few of the marble slabs, the dockmaster was more than happy to provide him with a decent wheelbarrow to help transport it, and one of the older guys helped him take a couple more. It was funny that, the sense of solidarity between them. Yes they would work with each other day after day, but throw in a couple drinks or some shared hatred, and suddenly everyone’s a firm believer of the idea that anything broken is fair game. Not that Merrin was going to complain. The more broken things he could take the better. That way people would look the other way about the fact that it’s technically stealing, as it was going to be broken anyway, so why not take it. At this point, it was the only reason Merrin could put food on the table, or clothes on their backs, or boots on their feet. He certainly wasn’t going to complain about getting any broken resources like wood planks or shattered weaponry. Certainly not when Karliah could take anything and make it into something Merrin could use. Just the other week she took  a broken sword and made him a set of four daggers, hilts and all. It also helped that even if Merrin didn’t want anything, his generosity to share the broken goods meant she was more than happy to make him anything he asked. It wasn’t like the blacksmith in Ashenport, who would spend more time asking Merrin where he got the broken weapons than actually doing any smithing at all. Karliah knew better. She knew that Merrin’s source wasn’t exactly legal, but none of her customers cared. They were there for one thing, and one thing only. 

The marble was easy to lay in the ground, he’d asked Karliah if she knew how to fix a broken slab floor. To his surprise, she did. Her idea of fixing was closer to ‘painting over the cracks’, but it worked. She used a copper alloy that was basically an amalgamation of whatever scraps Merrin brought her, and poured it between the cracks. Once it cooled, it left Merrin with a marbled floor with veins of copper running through it. Even Zane agreed that it looked like something from one of the large mansions in the west of town. 

Finding something to actually make the altar with was slightly more difficult than just acquiring broken slabs. A regular rock would have been too rough to actually use as an altar, the grooves would’ve been useful to hold candles or gemstones, but it wasn’t an ideal surface. Not to mention the fact that it would mean somehow getting a large enough rock up from the beach and into the garden. He could’ve done what he had with the slabs, but getting a whole rock onto the wagon would’ve been difficult enough with even the wagons they used for the heavier materials. 

No, that wasn’t a good idea. Instead, Merrin thought that he could repurpose the altar that he had made for Akna. It’s not like she cared about it to begin with, so why should he have to get a completely new one. It had taken a few weeks and a lot of chiselling, but Merrin was able to redo the altar. Each day he worked at chipping down the sides to remove any of the symbols that had been meant for her. He was actually grateful that he didn’t try to create deep lines when he first made the altar as it meant he had less work to do both times. It even meant he had time to carve effects into the borders of the stone, leaving the centres blank for if he wanted to eventually fill them with new symbols. It wasn’t that he really cared too much about the symbols. Instead, he’d worked to bend some old copper rods into runes that he could stick onto the sides of the new altar. 

There was a time when Merrin thought about moving the old altar to a different location. Maybe to the corner where he was less likely to be disturbed. But then again, who was going to disturb him other than Zane, who didn’t care anyway. If anyone came looking, Merrin could always lie and hide anything too suspicious beneath flowers he could pick from the woodlands. 

[to be continued]