Eternal

The temple’s glory had faded since the days of Tuka’s childhood. Warrior-priests no longer stood guard over its sloping parapets and with no more servants to tend to it the temple’s once-glistening sides were caked with mud and dirt. The grand collection plates at the base of the temple ramp, once piled high with plentiful offerings from pilgrims and dignitaries, lay bare. There was not a single worshiper in sight.

Standing alone at the base of the ramp, Tuka felt a crushing sense of loss. In his mind’s eye he could still picture the grand festivals of his childhood, the weeks and months he spent eagerly awaiting the day when he and Shinsu would accompany their mother and uncles to this glorious holy place. The lights adorning the temple walls, the smell of fresh food and offerings in the air, the fireworks painting Sanghelios’s night sky with brilliant colors. On those nights Tuka was proud to be a Refum.

Proud to be a Sangheili.

Now the temple was bare and abandoned. Refum was crushed, his mother and uncles dead, Shinsu lost. Those joys of the past were exchanged for endless war and destruction. This temple, once a holy jewel of Tuka’s homeworld, was now simply fortunate to avoid being blasted apart by an errant plasma barrage.

Passing forlornly along the temple walls, Tuka noticed a large message scrawled across the surface above him. He peered up at it, expecting to read some invective against the Covenant or the gods that had so cruelly abandoned the Sangheili. Instead all he found was a crude joke about warriors killing a kaidon and coupling with the keep’s mistress.

It was too much. Tuka could go no further. His legs buckled under him and he slumped back against the wall, overcome with grief. It was all too much. The sullied temple, the barren offering plates, the obscene inscription. It was as if all that had brought him joy as a child was being systematically crushed and thrown back in his face.

What did we do wrong? His shoulders heaved with sobs. ''Didn’t we worship you enough? Didn’t we do everything we could to honor you, to follow the Journey? We were all happy to live in service to you, yet you abandoned us all the same.''

He wasn’t sure to whom he directed his bitter prayers. The gods were false, or so everyone claimed. Long dead creatures the Prophets and those like them invented to manipulate foolish Sangheili. Now the gods were gone, their temples abandoned, and the Sangheili slaughtered each other without hesitation. Sanghelios, like this temple, lay in ruins.

''But then, perhaps the gods did not abandon us. Perhaps we abandoned them.''

Tuka tilted his head and stared bleakly up at the temple above him. Despite the state of disrepair it still towered overhead, its height making him feel small. Even with no one left to guard and sanctify it, the temple still seemed to carry a spark of the divine.

It occurred to him then that this temple, this holy place, had been here long before he had ever lived. It would continue to be here long after he and everyone else on Sanghelios was dead and forgotten, standing in silent vigil over this rocky plateau.

''It is still here. We abandoned it, yet still it persists.'' The temple didn’t need offerings or even worshipers to sustain itself. Even if no one ever knelt before it again, it would continue to offer shelter and protection beneath its eternal slope.

And so it goes with the gods.