Chapter Text
The void was a cold and dreary place. The boy knew that.
Since he woke up that night, not seeing the familiar streets of his hometown but finding himself in the endless width of the void instead, the freezing grasp of the place would not release him.
He knew about the legends around this place and it's marked ones. A handful of people wearing his mark and wandering through a world no mortal would enter before their death. People with mighty powers, who almost always had to pay a terrible price for them.
The people feared him, the outsider. The man with eyes as black as coal.
He met him. Almost.
His trip into the void had found a sudden end, when this pair of eyes had spotted him. Since then he didn't got sucked into that strange world, where everything was so different from what he knew.
The boy suspected that his stay in the void had been everything but intentional. Different than the numerous priests, working in secret while being not half as hidden as they thought, he didn't try to attract his attention. There were shrines to honor him all around the town, undetected in abondoned buildings and hidden blind alleys. The citizens knew that every kind of ritual act in his name was prohibited and a punishable offense but they didn't care much. The shrines outlasted.
One of these shrines was located in an old abondoned factory. The boy could hear the subtle song of the whalebones wherever he went.The shrine had stood there since he remembered. One day he and his mother had discovered it on their way home. Strange voices seemed to come from the unprofessional carpentered wooden construct and his first impulse had been to draw near, to reach out and check if the dull humming could be felt. But his mother had pulled him back quickly and called the wardens to report the shrine as soon as they got home.
Less than two weeks after that the shrine was rebuild at the very same place.
This procedure has continued the same way since then. Once the shrine was removed it never took more than two weeks until it would be consecrated again. But the boy hadn't visited it once.
He didn't had a reason to. The cult of the outsider was prohibited and his mother had done her best to keep him away from social marginal groups. And up until now he hadn't had any connection to the cryptic god.
But now things were different.
How do they say? Once you see something you cannot simply unsee it.
The legends told about an outsider, who was above time and space, allknowing and ever so neutral. There was nothing unknown to him, neither the future, that would happen, nor the future that might be happening under certain circumstances. And still, when the black eyes of the leviathan spotted him in the void they had shown a certain level of surprise.
Since this night the boy had return to the shrine. Not intentional of course; his feet had brought him back to it over and over again these days, without his head meaning to. Sometimes he walked so mindlessly on his way home, that he had to bump painfully again the wooden boards of the shrine to see where his feet had lead him again.
Considering that one could hear the whalebone runes well enough until his homeplace, one could have thought that the noises would be much stronger directly in front of the shrine. But even here the deep humming stayed an ambient noise, that had a more relaxed effect than it should have had.
But as much as it itched him to reach for the runes he never dared to.
It was a shrine, a holy place, no matter to whom it belonged to. To take sacrificed items from there seemed like blasphemy to him, especially since he didn't even had a use for them. In fact had he always wondered what the exact use of the rune artifacts was.
Some of the cult members sacrificed food and wine, arranged carefully on plates of copper. Others brought jewellery and precious frippery. All of this seemed far more useful to the boy than a few old whale bones. But what did he knew about the needs of a god in a world full of nothing. Nothing but coldness and desolation.
He remembered clearly the frosty temperature in the void. He had only stayed for a short time but it had cost him ages to warm up again after he had left. He didn't want to imagine how bad it was for the outsider.
The boy blinked and made a choice.
In the dark of the night he sneaked through the streets, from shadow to shadow, and tried to avoid every other person that perhaps was strolling through the night. He arrived unseen at the old factory and slipped through a small opening into the run-down building.
A little further in the back of the hall under a half-collapsed staircase was the shrine. Opulent panels of blue fabric where attached in between the niche and next to the purple glow of the lamps the whole construct only appeared more out of place.
The boy came slowly closer. Since the last time he visited someone had brought a new lamp and if he wasn't mistaken there was one of the rune artifacts missing. But the new empty place on the shrine was only convinient. Without a word he put the padded blanked he brought from home onto the wodden surface and stepped back. A few moments passed. Nothing happened.
He didn't knew what he was waiting for. Not that he had waited for some kind of reaction. Also there were so many shrines around the town that the outsider impossibly would say thanks in person at every single one of them.
Or he just prefered the old whalebones.
Slowly the boy made his way home, still avoiding to be seen by anyone. No soul took notice of his ramble, only one pair of eyes he could not escape.
A pair of eyes as black as coal.