There was one remaining member of the bandit crew. He did not hear our approach.

I shouldn't need to say more.

We looted the corpses, the graves. The dead have no need for anything, and the living can find some use in even the most mundane. Some will buy skulls for gold.

I found books, writings of the gods, amongst the decaying temple. They may have been forgotten or lost. They may be useless or foolish.

Yet they still sparked my interest. I am a conduit for some god's power, after all. It could be my damnation to discard any morsel of information that could tell me more of who I am, or what I serve.

The Unclaimed - This story was one of a priestess who worshiped the Lady of Loss, Shar. The goddess of the moonless night, the sister-twin of Selune.

This priestess sacrificed everytyhing for her faith, her beliefs. Ultimately, even her own memory was discarded for what she felt in her soul was a deeper purpose.

The only thing she had left to her was passion. The belief that she was a part of something greater than a single individual. That she was a servant to a higher being.

Blind faith.

The story did not end with her death; it went past her demise.

She arrived at the final domain, the place the goddess she had given her very existence to should claim her soul. She would be rewarded for her actions in life. Her devotion.

She stood at the Wall of the Faithless, awaiting salvation.

And there she wait. Forever.

Shar never came. Service was expected, not rewarded.

Her soul cried in tormet as her sense of self rotted to nothing.

Her eternal reward was not thanks, appreciation, or even a continuation of her servitude.

It was the knowledge, the experience, that the pain of forgetting everything that made her mortal paled next to the pain of being forgotten.

Perhaps I have walked this path. I have no memory; maybe I have given it for my own faith.

The continuous urges gnawing at my mind fit with what I know of Shar. She is a goddess of greed, loss, destruction.

If so, maybe my lack of memory is its own blessing. I can push against the worst of the urges, make sure I don't succumb entirely to monstrous instincts.

Perhaps I should keep my former faith obscure, to not wonder overmuch. I am unsure if I'd like what I'd find.

My own interests, my own concerns, will take priority. I will not worry for some higher power. If they wish to have my gratitude, they will need to earn it anew.

In death, I want only myself to blame. Not the abandonment of one I trusted.

Death & Divinity: A Godly Guide - This story discussed Death as a concept, and how it was too powerful for a single god.

The ultimate, the changing of state from living to unliving, needs an overseer. The various causes of that change, the various deaths, the process, sheers away from the overseer. They merge, combine, split. Different gods claim their own domains, argue over edge cases, fight amongst themselves.

But the overseer was above it all.

Jergal, the Lord of the End of Everything - the god who this temple may have honored at some point - held this position since time immemorial.

Until he grew bored.

He relinquished the bulk of his responsibility to three younger to-be deities: Bhaal, Bane, and Myrkul.

Myrkul oversaw death.

Bhaal, the most cruel of its forms, became Murder Incarnate.

Bane... was there.

If I had to guess why he was considered part of the triumvirate, despite not having anything to do directly with death, it was... a metaphorical association. He owned tyranny, oppression, hatred. He represented the death of freedom itself.

Jergal, his duties claimed, had finally freed himself. He passd on.

There is one final warning in the book. One I am confused as to its inclusion.

Everyone can die, even the gods. Those closest to death - meting it out or overseeing its various aspects, should keep this in mind above all others.

I am not a god, but perhaps I should take note. It could caution me, to keep me away from my instincts, lest I fall prey to their darkness and live - or die - through their consequences.