The Temple of Myrmidia

The Great Temple of Myrmidia is, you realize, an example of what the temples in Verezzo are trying to be - not just a monument to man's stonecunning and devotion, but an almost transcendentally wonderful structure sufficient to cause a blurring of the lines between heaven and earth. White stones form the majorty of the structure, with great panels of black stone where huge engravings will render a sequence from a famous battle with details picked out in masterful gold leaf, all over the interior walls. Titanic columns on the temple's inner chamber morph into likenesses of the goddess, such that there are a dozen incredible columnic likeness of the goddess holding up the top parts of their columns and thus the ceiling. They range in their states of attire and strength. Here, she is armored and proud, holding the column up in full strength. Elsewhere, she is younger, driven to her knees by the 'weight' of it, rendered in rags on the very edge of her power's end. You have arrived after some manner of service has ended, and there is no shortage of Remans moving about the building and gazing reverentially at one piece of art or another, conversing with the black and gold glad acolytes and priests of the temple, listening in as a lectionary recites aloud from a sacred text (usually the Bellona Myrmidia, but you see other similarly exalted texts on the shelf behind the reader - The Bellum Strategia and The Book of War).

Central to it all is a great carved dark wooden altar, and above it the artifact to which Bella is drawn with breathless fascination.

"Oh my... it's... what can it be, except...?"

Above the altar, suspended in a cradle of stone leaning from a twelve foot high arch of dark granite, is the relic. It must certainly once have been a single whole stone, too large for you to get your considerable armspan around; a grey, distinctly egg shaped boulder with the kind of uniform looking exterior texture one expects from a riverworn stone rather than one carved with tools. It has been split almost perfectly in half in a bisection tallwise, with enough gentle jaggedness to the break that your eyes instantly match the shape on one edge to where it must have married to the other when the egg was unbroken. But it is displayed open with the interior facing out to the room; and within the 'shell', after about ten inches of stone either side, is are the two halves of a small cavity which is not grey stone at all, but full of glittering, violet crystals that completely cover the cavity's interior. You cannot imagine this would be a comfortable conveyance for a child, but that seems like a problem for a goddess to navigate.

"The Cradle of Myrmidia," offers a young initiate in a black robe nearby, as he sets down a wooden ladder he carried in his one remaining arm; the right sleeve hollow, folded, pinned neatly to the shoulder. He smiles a little. "From this vessel, the goddess crawled in her mortal form as a mere infant, to be found and adopted by kind Reman goatherders - and there, through her life, to learn of suffering and fragility; and then, to teach of war, and medicine. It is your first time in this temple, yes?"