The lemur scratched its nose with one claw, feeling acute annoyance at the way the crowd of stone warriors looked at him. They were ancient, beautiful things, but their faces curled in anger. It was a curse how well he could understand them now. Not just their whispers, but the set of their eyes and lips. The contempt.

They saw a beast in their midst, trying to steal their goddess' favor.

He chewed the last piece of the chess-set as he sat cross-legged in the dust. His contempt for them was every bit as strong.

"They really are too proud of themselves."

The whisper made his peace-hand curl so hard the ivory pawn bit into his palm. There wasn't a single breath where he doubted it was his goddess who spoke. The divinity of her words was unmistakable.

"To them, there can be nothing more important than the divine mission I gave them; no people more important than the guardians of my temple, namely, themselves. But I had many temples and many plans. They don't realize they were a side bet, an off-hand effort I made, oh, hundreds of years ago. Honestly, I never thought they'd survive this long, much less make themselves useful to me. So it will be."

It was a cruel and cold voice, brittle with frost. A voice of total confidence. He lifted his head, searching the sky. A thin crescent of silver plate was suspended from the ceiling, etched with runes for light, an artist's approximation of the moon. The words of his goddess spoke from nowhere, everywhere, a silver chime in his mind.

"So it goes. Thousands of schemes, and every one believes themselves the most important. Nobody else sees the full scale."

The lemur knew he should have felt joy. What more had he worked for, fought desperately for, than to be blessed this way? To sit in awe of the goddess' wisdom, honored by her choice to favor him above the others?

And yet. There was a hollow space in his gut where happiness should have been.

“Finish the work. Get these idiot trials out of the way, and unseal my temple. So it will be.”

The truth was- she didn’t sound happy either. The voice was full of misery and spite, happy to talk, to hear itself. She had said nothing to him, only spoken past him.

He knew these things now. They were cold and uncomfortable to know.

The stone women brought forward the next test. In place of the chess table, they set down a basin of hammered bronze on tripod legs, bearing a pale round fruit. It was the color of candle-wax or maggot flesh, so translucent he could see the seeds within, resting shadows in the white flesh.

The chorus of stone muses built into the temple walls sung to him. “We, oh seeker of the goddess, are the Ushabti. Watchers over the sleeping world. A hundred years ago, before fire ruined the world above, our masters sealed themselves beneath the earth to be reborn when the land was healed. For all this lonely century we have stood, guarding and gardening, tending to this sacred place. Awaiting the day the Lady of the Lunar Eye would send us a champion, a sign the time was right for rebirth.”

For the first time, the lemur wished he could speak in their language. He chittered, making the sound for poison, hidden dangers, lurking ambushes. It was the closest word he had to ‘hypocrite’. They didn’t want him to succeed; they wanted their pride and their duty to continue for a hundred years more.

They barely seemed to realize he was speaking. They heard animal sounds, crude and clumsy.

The muses continued. “Before you is the fruit of the Arkborn. A poison thing, but full of healing light. These things in balance, so that one who eats lives and dies in a single breath. A true champion of the goddess must be prepared to endure pain.”

Without waiting on their ceremonies, the lemur grasped the fruit in his peace-hand, raised it to his lips, and bit down.

The world shook and shivered. The fruit dropped as his hand fell away, leaving a chunk of pale, tasteless flesh on his teeth. It melted away slowly, dissolving into a sickly liquid than ran from his mouth. The sensation was indescribable, although the lemur knew many kinds of pain; fiery stabbing pain that jolt through the muscle, and dull aching pains that live in the bone.

This was different.

He aged, his whole body growing old in seconds. His bones strained and creaked, turning thin, arthritically brittle even as they shifted inside him. His muscles wasted down as his fur turned white-grey, his eyes rheumy, his lungs faltering and making him spit up as he struggled to hold on, to be at peace within the storm. It was impossible. His body was wasting to old age, but not at once, not evenly; the different parts of him were shifting at different rates and creating a wracking, brutal tension, his own body grinding against itself as everything grew and shrank and shifted.

He leaned over and puked into the dust, and didn’t even try to rise from the puddle of his own sick until it was over.

When it ended he was young again. The fur of his peace-hand had faded back to dark, full bronze-red, the lustrous shade of spilled blood. There was no true harm. Only the lingering memory of pain, and the bile clinging to the fur of his muzzle.

The one-armed women stepped forward and reached down. The lemur saw her smirk as she lifted the fruit from the dust and set it back in the basin. It was untouched, whole, unharmed; the fruit’s healing properties allowed it to simply regrow the bite he had taken.

“You may try as many times as you like.”

The crowd was full of smirks and laughing smiles, confident he wouldn’t even try. He saw Imani among them, uncomfortable, the way she held her body trying to become small and unnoticed; she was an outsider in their ranks and she smiled at him, hesitantly, as he lifted himself from the ground.

Then the horn sounded. Every eye turned as the sound ripped through the air, and a runner came jogging from the west, the leaders among the crowd stepping forward to meet with this messenger. A moment passed and they turned back, raising their spears. “We are needed below! Abyssals are flooding into the tunnels, hunting in our lands!”

The crowd bristled and raised their own weapons, stamping at the earth.

“You two-” She swept her spear towards two in the crowd, Imani and the woman whose nose he had broken. “Watch him. He is allowed to continue the trials, for what good it will do him. The rest of you, with me!”

As one they moved out, spears held tall, flashing in the dim light of the gardens as the bodies below marched in a single formation - their stone feet thunder as they struck the earth.

The lemur turned back down, head hung low, examining the fruit. His hand. The earth.

“You don’t have to, you know.” He raised his head to find Imani speaking to him, slipping down the shallow wall to land beside him. “That- well, I don’t know what pain is like, myself. I don’t know much about this at all. I just know it looked bad, and you don’t have to try again if you don’t want.”

She scowled at the sky. “You don’t owe any god anything.”

The lemur stared at her, his yellow-moon eyes blinking. The goddess had taught him the languages of men and the meanings of many things.

But he’d never considered, for himself, that he didn’t need to listen.