1 Chapter 1: A Contract Is Formed

A man lay down in the forest, smoking from a wooden pipe as he stared at the sky. An indistinct, blurry figure floated in front of him, seeming almost like a trick of the light. The only evidence that this figure wasn't an illusion was the way the pipe's smoke bent around it on its journey upwards. The man, "Ed", seemed unsurprised by the figure's sudden appearance.

Ed sat up as the vague figure appeared, the sword strapped to the side of his robe making clacking noises as he adjusted his position. "Hey ghost, you need something?" The blurry figure flickered as a haughty voice appeared inside Ed's head. The speaker's age and sex were impossible to discern from the voice, which sounded like dozens of different voices layered on top of each other. "I'm a god, not a ghost." Ed chuckled as he put away his pipe. "Sure, sure. Let's just agree on spirit." Ignoring the remark, the spirit continued speaking. "Someone made a prayer at the shrine. I need you to make it come true." "If you're a god, isn't that your job? I already cleaned the place up, I'd say that's enough to pay the rent for some rundown temple." "Whether you think it's enough doesn't matter, if you don't do it then you can find somewhere else to live. I can tell that you're hiding from someone, so where else would you be able to live? Just take care of it and you can go back to doing nothing."

Ed's previously smiling face shifted to a frown as he stood up. "What are you going to do if I refuse, haunt me away? You're just some bothersome ghost, I can stay here as long as I want." As Ed said this a sense of imminent danger came over him. Before he could unsheathe his sword he heard the wind roar around him as an overwhelming force slammed into his body, causing him to shoot backwards and slam into a tree. The tree let out a loud cracking noise as part of it began to lean back, ready to fall. "Gods have their ways. Stay here and whoever's after you can't touch you. Loiter here without paying your dues and you die."

A few moments passed before Ed responded. "Taking care of your errands is too much work for me. I'll take my leave." As he said this, the pressure around him grew stronger and the tree behind him crashed into the ground, unable to withstand it. "You don't understand. You don't have a choice." Despite the spirit's threats, Ed's expression didn't change. "If you were really almighty then you would've cleaned up your temple and fulfilled this prayer you got yourself. You need me. You won't kill me."

The pressure on Ed let up as the wind seemed to let out a sigh. "Gods run off of faith. We gain faith from the belief of mortals, and everything we do uses it up. As you can tell by the state of my temple, I have no worshippers and currently gain no faith. This has been one of the first opportunities I've had to gather followers in a long, long time, so I need you to fulfill any prayers I get while you're here. In exchange I'll protect you from whoever's chasing you. It's a good deal."

There was a silence between the two before Ed grimly smiled and shook his head. "Still not enough. You're getting more out of it than I am." Pressure began to form around Ed once more, like a knife to his throat, but he simply continued talking. "I want half. Half of any donations you get, half of any of this 'faith' I help you earn, half of everything. Then it's fair. After all, neither of us can benefit without the other."

The voice echoing throughout his head became enraged in response to these demands. "I'm already doing you a favor, let go of your conceit. Even if I gave you half of my faith you'd have no way to use it. It'd disappear into thin air like it was never there in the first place. Give up." "Then you can use faith from my half whenever I need you to do something. That works, right? That's fair."

This argument continued for a long time, the spirit using both the carrot and the stick as it tried to convince Ed to give up on demanding a share of its 'faith'. It offered wealth, power, and so on and so forth in exchange. Unfortunately Ed wasn't willing to give in, and eventually the spirit was forced to agree to Ed's demands. He'd get half of everything.

Of course, this argument had all been a show. The spirit had no intention of keeping its word, but if it hadn't argued then it would have been too obvious. Unfortunately, Ed realized that this may have been the case and demanded some sort of contract using the spirit's "faith" energy. The spirit insisted that there was no such thing and that they'd just have to trust each other, but Ed didn't budge. He didn't know whether it was possible, but if it wasn't then he'd just have to give up on working together. Without something to protect him he would just be replaced whenever someone else willing to work for the spirit came along. Whether this process was violent or not depended on the spirit's personality, but that risk wasn't something Ed was willing to leave to chance.

After a series of grueling negotiations drawn out over several hours, the spirit gave up and agreed to form a contract between the two. The specific details of the contract took even longer to work out, but at this point the spirit was tired of debating with Ed and didn't put up as much resistance. As long as the terms didn't cross its bottom line, it had no choice but to agree to them. It did win a small victory in taking the faith needed to form such a contract out of Ed's half of the share, effectively putting him into debt for the short-term and forcing him to work until twice the faith used was regained. On the whole the contract was incredibly fair, a situation which would make the spirit grimace if it had a face. This contract is how a partnership between a homeless swordsman and a long-forgotten 'god' began.