Apotheosis

The story from here continues the journey of the "Locker Room" route, assuming everything that happened from that first chapter to "Hammer and Memory" is canon, and now we move forward.

BUT so that the reader does not need to go back and reread everything that happened, here is a summary of what went down:

Summary:

Up until the point that Tracy, a cruel rival, decided Renee deserved to be exposed.

Renee was tied up, exhibited, filmed. Her clothes were stolen, her body used as a canvas. She was paraded naked and bound while the entire city watched and laughed, convinced she was just an eccentric adventurer. The nickname "Reluctant Redhead" followed her like a shadow.

But the universe, or whatever ruled it, had other plans.

Renee was chosen. Not by accident, not by luck, but because her lineage traced back to Atrahasis, the man who, during the first deluge, was saved by the gods for being righteous among the unjust. And the god who chose her was Moradin, the Forger, the Lord of the Dwarves, the Prometheus who gave fire to humanity and then watched that fire burn everything he loved.

Moradin made her his host, his prophetess, his daughter in spirit. And together, they faced the frost giants who wanted to summon Poketnaru, the mad god of the waters, to purify the Earth in a new flood.

Renee fought. She, who before only knew how to cry and cower, wielded a sword forged by her own hands. She opened the earth to swallow the giants, felt the power of the mountains flow through her veins, and faced Orel, the Jotun leader, with a fury that was neither entirely human nor entirely divine. It was something in between, something Moradin awakened in her, but that had always been there, dormant in her blood.

In the end, Moradin faced Poketnaru alone. The god of the dwarves knew this would be his last act on Earth. He plunged into the serpent's maw, and there was an explosion of orange light visible across three states, which satellites recorded as an anomaly. The flood stopped. The monster died. But Moradin, the friend, the father, the forger, disintegrated his physical form, sacrificing himself to save a world he loved, but that had always been one step away from being lost.

Renee cried under the warm rain that lasted three days. A rain that smelled of iron and flowers, and left gray marks on the skin like the fingerprint of a departing god.

For weeks, she stayed silent. She sat in her backyard, staring at the sky. She barely ate. She did not speak. Her mother did not know what to do, how do you explain that your daughter carried a god and watched him die?

Then, one night, Renee picked up a guitar that had been leaning against the closet since ninth grade. And she began to sing. It was not a song, it was a lament. A melody she did not know she knew, a tune that rose and fell like the motion of a hammer on an anvil. And when she finished, she slept without nightmares. For the first time in three weeks.

Then came school, then the rumors that died down, then the reopening dance, and Izzie. A girl in a green dress who showed up at the blacksmithing club Renee had created, and who, on a full moon night, kissed her cheek with the lightness of someone planting a seed without knowing if the soil is fertile.

And then, that same night, when Renee returned home, she found the Brutal Pick, Moradin's hammer, laid out on her bed. She touched the rusty handle, and the tool transformed: the steel shone like polished obsidian, orange veins pulsed like living coals, and a voice, Moradin's voice, echoed in her mind:

"Did you miss me?"
_____________

And this is where we paused our story, and since then, a year has passed.

Renee went to college, only a few hours from home, but far enough to distance herself from both the rumors about the "Reluctant Redhead," which had died down by then, and the many speculations about her involvement in the terrifying events of Halloween.

Her contact with Moradin was limited, but real. He was alive, at least in Nidavelir. Contact with our world had been destroyed along with his physical form; the only window through which he could reach Renee now was through the Brutal Pick, which was now the redhead's. (Usei ponto e vírgula aqui, mas se quiser que eu troque por vírgula também, é só falar!)

The contact between the two was, however, quite limited. Visions, dreams, sometimes whispers. When a prophet is chosen by a god, they usually have these visions before the god speaks to them more clearly, but Renee had the opposite path: she walked side by side with a god, only to have her contact with him reduced afterward. The feeling was not one of duty or the typical glorification of a prophet, it was the feeling of a young woman constantly at risk of losing contact with a friend.

It was a rainy Friday afternoon when Renee returned to her dorm. She took off her heavy leather boots, placed them by the door, dropped her backpack next to the small sofa, and sat down with her eyes closed.

Her phone buzzed in her jacket pocket. It took her about ten seconds to find it among the many items she carried in that pocket. She had definitely become more eccentric over that year, stuffing her pockets with a series of drawings and blueprints for her metal pieces to be made at the forge.

When she finally got her phone and checked it, there were messages from her mother, somewhat worried about her daughter's study pace, which had kept the young woman somewhat absent, without giving news for a few months.

Renee sighed. She typed a vague reply, "I'm fine, just a lot of work", and turned off the screen. The rain drummed against the window, and she felt, more than heard, a deep sound coming from the backpack thrown on the floor. The Brutal Pick was about a quarter of the way across the room and did not vibrate like the beats of a hammer, it vibrated like a distant heart.

She knew Moradin was trying to say something. But the signal, as always, was too weak to understand.

What she did not know was that, that very night, two solitary travelers, a dwarf with fanatical eyes and a man who had witnessed a crucifixion, were approaching the city, each carrying their own version of what it meant to save or destroy a god's legacy.