Norben Fletcher 3/7

"You mean the Ankathan Prayer Stones.  Powerful holy artifacts, sir.  Probably shouldn't even be out on this table, t'be honest, sir.  Church'll be rightful angry to see them gone.  Here, let me just..."  "Now wait, just a minute."

Norben smiled warmly as the village mayor picked up one of the soapstones, round face squinting as he examined it closely.  The carving was indeed quite crude, something a child might have done in a spare afternoon.  "Looks like a dog.  Why would a dog be a holy artifact?"  One of the many rewards of the Lord's vestments was the image of authority and earnestness.  "It's a wolf, sir.  The Ankathans...do you know the Ankathans, sir?  A sect of the Lord's faith on the other side of the continent.  Their trial of passage to become of the clergy is to send their acolytes into the wild without shelter, where they sleep under the Lord's protection during the day, and pray all night holding one of these stones, rough and unhewn, straight from the mines of their tallest mountain.  They hold it hard and they pray harder.  Then, one night, they feel the might of the Lord channeled through the stone, through their bones, through the Earth itself.  They sense forest animals put there by the Lord to protect them, animals that hunt the Demon and his agents.  The next morning, those stones are transformed sir, transformed into the images of the guardians.  When you pray at sunset, you hold that stone, the spirit of that wolf will guard over your house until the Lord's awakening.  Do you have any children, sir?"  He removed the stone from the mayor's thick fingers, before the man could damage the goods unwittingly.

"My daughter, she..."  "She'd sleep more soundly with this stone by her bedside, I would think.  But like I said, it's a high holy artifact, I couldn't possibly imagine letting it go for anything less than a substantial donation to fund another church mission to Ankatha."  He again affixed a welcoming smile as a nearby onlooker, dressed finer than most of the other matrons - perhaps she owned the bakery - begin weighing her coinpurse and slipping between the light crowd to his tableside.  The repeated sound of gold dropping onto felt-lined wood made him beam.

"The Lord bless you, child."