Stonewall was splitting.
Four hundred people in a Rootist border town, and exactly half of them were lying every seventh day.
The temple stood at the town center — a proper temple, not a village shrine. Stone walls, carved columns, a consecrated altar with the spiral-root symbol rendered in green-stained wood. It had been built two centuries ago, when Demeterra's Growth domain was young and aggressive and spreading northward into unclaimed territory. Stonewall had been a frontier outpost then. Now it was a border town watching something grow on the other side of the grasslands and wondering what it meant.
Seventh-day service. The temple filled. Four hundred people filing through the doors in family groups, taking their positions on the wooden benches, kneeling when the priest told them to kneel, speaking the spiral prayer when the priest told them to speak.
By root and branch, I return to the earth. The Mother grows, and I grow with her.
