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Faith.
It was not a concept that Eion had put much thought into prior to her Awakening. That’s not to say she had lacked it altogether—as a child of Berath, she had always respected her god-parent. One could call that a form of faith. But if she had true, unwavering trust in anything, it was more in the Wheel and the cycle of life and death than in the god who oversaw it. When Iovara had revealed to her that the gods were the creations of kith, it had come as a surprise, yes, but as long as the Cycle remained as she’d understood it, she could handle it. It was only years later that her faith was first truly tested. It was not her trip to the Beyond, nor her pursuit of the god-statue who had sent her there that did it, but a detour to the Dead Floe, which in turn led her to the White Void.
Rymrgand was not a god who had often claimed much of her attention. Despite his surface-level similarities to Berath, he really represented the antithesis of what Eion believed in. Whereas she trusted in the continuity of the soul after death, he ruled over the end of all things, the cold embrace of oblivion. The idea that people could want that was something she would never understand.
Naturally, that made her trip through the Vytmádh complicated.
She hadn’t wanted to enter the White Void in the first place, and Rymrgand’s admonitions only made that worse, but somebody had to stop the glacier from consuming Eora, and for some reason, that duty had fallen on her party. She hadn’t let them see just how terrified she was.
Perhaps she should have known better than to make deals with gods, her dealings with Berath had always been relatively fair, and so when faced with little other choice, she’d decided to trust Rymrgand to return her to her body after they had dealt with the dragon for him. She was already freezing when she met with the Beast of Winter once more, so perhaps it was only natural for the blood in her veins to turn to ice when he told her that he had decided against letting her go, and that the only concession he would make would be to let her live out the rest of this life, and consign her soul to the Void upon her death.
What could she have done? Fight him? Fighting the dragon had been hard enough—to fight a god would only accelerate the inevitable. But to accept his offer? To give up her place in the Cycle, to forsake her parent and all that they stood for, to accept that this one life was all she had left and that death was truly the end…it was unthinkable. And yet she had no choice but to accept. Now, as she lay in her cabin on the Defiant, she found she could rely only on one thing: faith. Berath’s claim to her soul was at least as strong as Rymrgand’s, maybe stronger. The Beast of Winter had suggested that Berath would have no need for it once Eion had died; she could only hope that they would disagree.
It was a strange time to find faith, she had to admit. She had no doubt that the gods were fallible, as any creation of kith must be. Yet, so was she, and so were her companions, and they still had faith in one another every time they fought as a team. A child would have faith in their parents in the absence of any reason not to, so why should the child of a god not have faith in theirs? It was not even an all-encompassing faith, just the faith that her god would do what any good parent would: protect her, and welcome her home.
Still, this faith did not come naturally, nor easily. It was a choice, even if she had no other. She had to cling to it with intent, not for Berath’s sake, but for the sake of her own sanity, even if it took work. Yet for all her desire to rely on supposition alone, as she let sleep claim her she found herself wishing—praying—for a visitation that night, in which her god would tell her not to worry, that her soul was safe with them.