Blind devotion to a jealous Goddess

The Church of Aelith In a world still healing from a war that killed thirty-two gods, a new goddess is born. She does not arrive with thunder or proclamation. She arrives because one man spent twenty years praying into silence — and one evening the silence answered. Her name is Aelith, goddess of light. On the night of her first year, a blind elven infant is left on her altar. The child grows up within the quiet halls of the church: raised by a priest who becomes a father, and watched over by a goddess who slowly becomes something closer to a best friend. Her name is Lira. Blind since birth, she learns to navigate the world through warmth rather than sight, mapping people and places by the heat they leave behind. By the time she is seventeen she has become Aelith's oracle — not through ritual, but through a childhood of whispered conversations beside a stone altar. Then she leaves. Lira registers as an adventurer and walks out into a world that is far less gentle than the church she grew up in. Gods are rising again. Churches compete for power. And some of them are willing to spill blood to claim it. Behind her, Aelith waits. Not passively. A goddess who has only ever existed as warmth and light has been promised something. A body. A morning. A chance to walk the same world as the girl she has watched grow up. And when that day comes, she intends to find Lira.