Father Drost had served the Rootmother for forty years.
He remembered when the blessings were warm. Not the mechanical warmth of divine energy passing through soil and into crop-root — the *actual* warmth. The personal kind. The feeling that settled into his chest when he knelt at the shrine and spoke the spiral prayer and meant every word of it with the uncomplicated faith of a man who'd never had a reason to doubt.
Forty years ago, the wheat had grown golden. Not the standard gold of mature grain but a luminous, almost translucent gold that caught the morning light and turned the fields into something that looked painted. The Rootmother's Growth domain at full expression — concentrated, attentive, personal. Every seed Drost planted, the goddess touched. Every field he blessed, the goddess blessed back. The relationship was bilateral. He gave faith. She gave grain. The grain fed the village. The village's faith fed the goddess. A cycle, clean and eternal.
