The message was sent. Serikan Vaul, the living embodiment of Pride, was allowed to crawl away, a broken vessel carrying a terrifying prophecy back to his masters. The Temple of the Gilded Sigh was no longer a symbol of oppression; it was a conquered fortress, the first seat of a new and terrible power.
Ravi became the silent king of a small, growing empire of ruin. News of his victory spread like a contagion through Orivalt's underbelly. The slum dwellers, who had once feared the Temple, now flocked to it. They came seeking a savior, a protector, a new god who fought for the downtrodden. They found only a silent man with empty eyes and a growing court of the devoted.
And with new followers came new, powerful women.
They were not the broken and the vengeful he had first gathered. They were leaders in their own right, drawn to the epicenter of this massive power shift.
There was Taliya Nightscourge, a fierce beast-tamer princess whose clan lands had been seized. She arrived with her last companion, a massive, scarred chimera that radiated predatory energy. She didn't see a god in Ravi; she saw an apex predator, the ultimate alpha, and she watched him with the possessive, calculating eyes of a creature looking for a worthy mate.
There was Kira Wraeth, a sadistic mercenary captain with a reputation for brutality that rivaled the Theogarchy's own. She saw Ravi's silent, overwhelming violence not as an act of justice, but as the purest expression of dominance she had ever witnessed. She lounged in the shadows of the sanctuary, her gaze a hungry thing, licking her lips as she watched him.
There was Isshya Rainveil, a blind dancer who led a troupe of assassins who used sound as their weapon. She did not need to see Ravi. She could hear the silence around him, the way it bent the acoustics of the grand hall, the utter finality in the timbre of his voice the few times he spoke. She called it the "sound of the end of all suffering" and declared her allegiance without ever laying eyes on him.
Velvara watched them all.
She stood at Ravi's side, his first disciple, his prophet, the one who had seen his pain. But her privileged position was becoming crowded. The sanctuary, once their shared space of silent understanding, was now a court. And she was no longer the only one vying for the attention of her god.
A corrosive jealousy, an emotion she had been trained to see as a weakness, began to coil in her gut. It was a cold, sharp thing, and it frightened her. She saw the way Taliya looked at Ravi, a look of raw, carnal ownership. She saw the hunger in Kira's eyes, a desire to be broken and dominated by his power. She saw the serene devotion on Isshya's face, a different kind of love, but love nonetheless.
They were rivals.
The fear of being replaced, of becoming just one of many, became a torment. She needed to solidify her position. To mark her territory. To remind him, and all these newcomers, that she was the first. She was his.
That night, she approached him in the private chambers they had taken behind the main altar. The room was sparse, containing only a bed and a single chair where Ravi sat, staring at the wall as if reading its secrets.
Velvara had prepared. She had bathed in the temple's sanctified pools and wore a simple, silk robe she had found in the Bishops' quarters. In her hand, she held a small, silver bowl containing a mixture of her own blood and crushed herbs—the components of a Blood-Binding, an ancient and forbidden ritual of ownership. A single drop on his skin, and a part of her soul would be forever linked to his, a mark only she could see.
"My lord," she said, her voice a low, seductive whisper. She knelt before him, the silk of her robe pooling around her. "They flock to you like moths to a flame. But they see only your power. They do not know you. I do."
She held up the bowl. "Let me show you my devotion. Let me bind myself to you, so that all will know that I am yours, and you are mine."
She dipped her finger into the blood mixture and reached for his neck, intending to draw a small, invisible rune on his skin.
Ravi did not move. He did not speak. He simply looked at her.
His gaze, cold and clear as ice, held no anger. It held something far worse: disappointment. As her finger, slick with blood, came within an inch of his skin, the magical components of the ritual were annihilated. The herbs turned to dust, and her blood simply evaporated, leaving her finger clean. The charm was broken with a single, silent look.
Her breath hitched. Her heart felt as if it had been plunged into a frozen lake.
"You are not mine," he said, his voice quiet but absolute, shattering the silence between them. He stood up, towering over her kneeling form. His shadow fell across her, a vast and cold thing.
Tears of humiliation and fear welled in her eyes. She had overstepped. She had made a terrible mistake.
He looked down at her, and for a moment, the coldness in his eyes receded, replaced by that flicker of ancient weariness she had seen once before.
"But I am not theirs either."
With that, he turned and walked out of the chamber, leaving her alone with her shattered pride and the chilling realization that this god could not be chained, not by love, not by devotion, and certainly not by jealousy. He belonged to no one. And in that moment, Velvara feared that meant he could, at any time, belong to everyone else.