Sefa had grown up believing the temple on the mountain had always stood exactly where it stood, until the morning she woke to find the whole peak gone and the temple itself receding slowly across a sea of gold clouds, riding the back of a tortoise larger than the village she’d been born in.
She was the only one who chased it. The other monks called it a sign to be studied from a safe distance. Sefa had never been especially good at safe distances.
She caught up three days later, breathless, at the tortoise’s slow but relentless pace, and called up toward the temple she could see nestled in its shell like a jewel.
A dragon’s head — pale, ancient, coiled loosely around the temple’s base — lowered to regard her. “You followed on foot,” it said, something like amusement in the rasp of its voice. “No one has followed on foot in longer than I can properly remember.”
“Where are you taking it?”
“Wherever it’s needed next. This temple was never rooted to that mountain, child. It was rooted to whoever needed shelter enough to build it there in the first place, and it moves on once that need is answered elsewhere. Why did you follow?”
Sefa thought of her sister, three villages south, in a town with no shrine and a sickness moving through it that no local remedy had touched. “Because I think it’s needed somewhere I know.”
The great tortoise turned, ponderous and certain, changing course south without being asked twice. Sefa walked beside it the rest of the way, and arrived home three weeks later not with a miracle exactly, but with a temple — which, she was beginning to understand, might be the same thing, given enough time and the right kind of asking.