“Spending this day stuck inside that stuffy stone building?”  Kyra snorted as she watched the villagers move inside the small church that rested near the village green.  She pulled her coat tighter around herself to ward off the cold.  “I’ll never understand humans.  This is supposed to be a holy day to them, and they spend it listening to some old man drone on.”
Breyan didn’t say anything as he walked beside her.  The falling snow felt good to him, cooling his hot blood and giving him a sense of tired calmness.  He didn’t really expect her to understand the way that humans felt, the way that humans worshipped.  She was an elf, and she interacted with her people’s gods through the environment; when she had bothered to do so.
In the face of a world, to be human is to feel small and unimportant.  Faced with the might of giants, the fury of dragons, endless, potent threats both natural and supernatural, humans had only what they could carve out.  The gods seemed to take notice of only a few; and to the humans those few were the ones who gave them their blessings, who spread knowledge to them and took their prayers to the heavens.
The clerics were a gateway to the divine; they were a gateway to mattering.  And like all other human endeavors, creating a monument, a group, a process to cling to was vital.  Farmers planted their seeds in tradition with their observations and wisdom, passed down from parent to child.  So too was the planting of their prayers.  The church was a way for them to matter, to bargain collectively with the gods.
Something he couldn’t be a part of, he thought with a frown, his fists tightening.  He felt a surging power in his hands, his dragon blood coming awake at his request.  That blood, his differences both physical and mental, kept him away from that place, that group.  Even if he had wanted to, he wouldn’t have fit in with them.
“You’re doing it again.”  Kyra made a somewhat growling noise, tilting her head at him.  “What are you thinking about?”
“The gods.”  Breyan shrugged, and the elf woman shook her head a bit, not sure what to say.  “Tell me about the rituals that your priests used, for these days?”
She shrugged again.  “Well.  These days, these cold dark days, mean something different for us.  Maybe it’s the elf perspective, or the elf arrogance, but while the humans huddle and hope for spring to come, we know spring will come.  An old elf has seen hundreds of springs, and knows that no matter how bad the winter might get, it will pass.  So we celebrate what is, not what might be.”  She looked up in to the sky.  “It’s not just about the gods; it’s really more about us, and our interaction.  Families get together.  There is feasting, and star gazing, and other such night time rites.”  She grinned a bit.  “Find a warm body to spend the cold night with, you know?  That might be a ritual I’m interested in honoring.”  She bumped her hips in to his, grinning, and provoking a grin from him.  “Why?  What’s going on in that church?  What’s the human way?”
“The winters do mean something different to us; but they still expect the spring to come.  What elves might gain from personal knowledge, they gain from community knowledge.  What they’re doing is…  Well, probably best described as remembering.  They remember what has come before.  They remember the promises of the gods, the messages of the angels, their past, to better prepare for the future.”  He kicked at some snow.  “The cold drives people inside, and there is less work to do some days; the nights are longer, so people thing.  They think about grudges, about past mistakes, and they use this as a chance to try to let go, to reconnect on a more human level with one another, and perhaps with the gods.”
The elf woman hummed as he spoke, taking in his information.  “And…  Dragons?”
“They don’t really worship their gods…  Our gods?  The gods just are, and are seen as creators, not as guiders; artists more than fathers.  I don’t know.”  He shrugged.  Maybe that was it, maybe that was the source of sudden melancholy; he didn’t know where he fit in with the gods, which ones he should hold up.  The human gods of heroism were mixed with the racist, fear mongering gods; and the dragon gods were distant, uncaring, counting the stars as though they were coins.  He believed in the virtues, but he wasn’t a part of the community; he wasn’t able to bargain with the gods through others.  Anything he had was earned through his own soul.
He felt Kyra’s gloved hands tangle with his, pulling him towards the inn they were staying at.  “Come on.  I have an elven ritual I want to teach you.”  She grinned, her eyes sparkling.  “If nothing else, you belong with me, and someone put us together?”  The words were said for his benefit, but he appreciated the sentiment.  He appreciated the fact that it didn’t matter to her, and that his soul was enough to her.
“Lets see this ritual.”