Divine Beginnings

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Aine liked the irony of using a funeral urn to draw water for the herbs in her healer’s garden. It was a beautiful urn, large and graceful, with a ridged lip and a curved handle balanced off one side. The scene painted around it was framed in black, as was typical for Epona’s funeral urns, but it seemed to Aine that there was something especially lovely about this one. The Goddess’s Chosen reclined with her outstretched arm motioning regally to the line of supplicants that stretched around the urn before her. A riot of auburn hair cascaded like water down the priestess’s back.

It was ridiculous that something so beautiful be relegated to the dreary job of pouring libations on graves, or worse, holding the ashes of the dead. So Aine had “rescued” it.

Too bad there would be no one to rescue her from the dreary job she’d taken.

“No,” Aine muttered. “It’s not the job that’s dreary. It’s the place.” She sat at the edge of the herb bed and looked around her. She’d been at Guardian Castle for a little over five full turns of the moon, but she still wasn’t used to the overwhelming grayness of everything. The castle was gray. The pass through the mountains the castle had been built within was gray. The autumn sky was gray. Aine sighed. “Epona’s shield! Even the people are gray.”

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