Harleen - Ayla of Trust and Bravery. (HAR-LEEN)

I. Year 0048 – The Brave Lost Child

The tribe had no name anyone remembers. They were one of a hundred wandering bands in Avalon’s early days—herders, foragers, people who knew the sky better than any map. They moved with the seasons, following game and grass through the northern hills where future Strongsville would one day stand.

On the day everything changed, the sky was white with fog and the wind came in steady, bitter breaths. The tribe walked in a long, uneven line along a narrow mountain track. One side was stone. The other side was nothing.

Children were supposed to stay in the middle of the line. Most did.

One didn’t.

He was six winters old, with a scrap of red cloth tied to his wrist so his mother could spot him in crowds. He darted after a flash of color—a bird, or a scrap of someone else’s cloth blown loose—and his small boots lost the path.

The fog swallowed him in three steps.

At first he wasn’t worried. Adults shouted all the time when the herd moved. He followed their voices—or thought he did—down a slope of loose stone, across a skinny ledge, through scrub, always thinking the line of his people was just ahead.

Then the shouting stopped.

The wind kept going.

He called. No answer.

He called again, louder, voice cracking. Only the mountain answered, throwing his fear back at him in thin, broken echoes.

He ran.

Fear made his legs clumsy. He stumbled across a rock shelf, tripped, and caught himself with both hands on a narrow crack in the cliff—a black slit in the stone, just wide enough for a small boy to fit.

He had a choice: stay in the open, alone with the wind, or go into the dark.

He stepped inside.

The Stone Throat

The crack became a corridor, icy and tight. The noise of the outside world dulled to a low, distant growl. Stone pressed close on both sides, rough against his shoulders. The light died behind him.

He took a few more steps and realized his feet were no longer on loose scree but on smoother, colder rock, polished by forgotten water. The air smelled wet. Old.

That’s when truly primal fear hit him.

He had never been inside the world before. Caves were places elders talked about in warnings and stories. Monsters lived in them. Spirits lived in them. You did not go into a mountain without a very good reason.

He had no reason now except that he was already there.

His breath came in gasps. His eyes watered in the dark. He thought of running—just picking a direction and bolting until he found light again or died trying.

One fragment of memory stopped him.

An old woman in the tribe. A fire. A story:

“If you are lost,” she had said, poking a brand into the coals, “running makes the world bigger. The bigger it is, the harder it is for anyone to find you.
Be brave enough to pick a place that feels safe.
Be brave enough to stay.”

He sank down with his back against the stone, knees pulled up, arms around them. Every part of him screamed move, move, move. Every story he’d ever heard told him the only chance he had was to trust that someone would turn back for him.

To trust them, he had to stay where he could be found.

He stayed.

He cried. He shook. He stayed.

Outside, the tribe eventually noticed.

The Turning Back

At first there was annoyance: someone had fallen behind, again. Then confusion. Then a tight, cold silence when they counted heads and came up one short.

Arguments broke out on the trail:

• “We have to keep moving; the herd will bolt if we don’t.”
• “The fog will only get worse—if we go back, we’re all dead.”
• “He’s a child. We can’t leave him.”

No one knew where he had stepped off. The path was carved into cliffs and folds of rock. They could shout all day and still miss him entirely.

The safe choice was clear:
keep going, hope he’d followed the line, tell themselves they’d done all they could.

They didn’t take it.

Enough of them chose to do the harder thing—to turn around in bad weather, to search back through fog and dangerous ledges—that the tribe split its strength. Some managed the animals, anxious and restless. Others, led by the boy’s mother and a few stubborn elders, went back.

They trusted the child to remember the old words and stay still.

He trusted them to come.

That tiny circle of risk—fear on both sides, and yet each choosing to believe the other would keep faith—stretched across the fog like an invisible rope.

In Avalon’s fabric, that rope had weight.

II. The Birth of an Ayla

Deep beneath the mountain, in the spaces where human feelings pooled like underground lakes, something new took shape.

Avalon was already alive. Zion’s first act of will had filled the world with the potential for gods and spirits to condense out of human thought and experience. Nelenia, Ayla of Greed, would rise from hunger sharpened into obsession. Others would come from war, from love, from ambition.

Harleen formed from a different pressure.

It was not just the boy’s fear, or the tribe’s love. It was the decision they shared:

I will be brave enough to hold my ground.
I will be brave enough to turn back.

Fear did not vanish; it was acknowledged, carried, and still they chose.

In that decision, a pattern clicked into place: trust that requires bravery, bravery that requires trust. Not blind faith, not reckless courage, but the razor-edge where you risk yourself on someone else.

That pattern became a presence.

It started as warmth in the boy’s chest that didn’t match the cold of the rock. The darkness around him felt… less hostile. His sobs slowed. The shaking didn’t stop, but it lost its teeth.

In some tellings, he opened his eyes and saw a faint shape sitting across from him—tall in the cramped space, wrapped in something like a traveling cloak woven out of night and distant starlight. No crown. No armor. Bare hands, palms up.

The figure did not say “Do not be afraid.” It did not lie to him.

Instead, it spoke inside his thoughts with a voice that felt like his own courage, just a little louder:

You are afraid. Stay anyway.

He did.

Outside, searchers walked past and then back again, calling until their throats burned. The fog swallowed their words, but not entirely. One man, older than the rest, stopped near the crack in the mountain. He couldn’t say why. He just did.

He leaned close to the stone and thought he heard something. Not a shout.

Breathing.

They pressed into the crack one by one, scraping shoulders, feeling with their hands. When they touched the boy’s hair, he was too tired to startle.

They dragged him out into the fog and held him tight. His mother wept into his neck. Someone laughed a hysterical little laugh and said:

“He was so brave.”

Someone else said:

“He trusted us to come back.”

Those words, spoken over a child’s head in the cold, were the first human names for the thing that had just been born.

Above them, unseen, the Ayla took his first true breath.

Harleen Claims a Heart-Place

What had formed in that moment was no minor spirit.

Harleen wasn’t a ghost, or the boy’s “guardian angel.” He was an Ayla—one of the powerful manifestations of human nature that Avalon and Bethel could sustain. From his first instant, he sat only a step below the great triad:

• Zion’s original will,
• Avalon’s living body of land and sea,
• Bethel’s mirrored realm.

He was as strong as greed, war, love, and all the others who would follow.

But his nature was quiet.

He felt no urge to tear the sky or demand worship. He belonged to the thin, dangerous line where people made choices that no one else saw.

The mountain where the boy had waited, where the tribe had turned back, was soaked with the feeling that had birthed him. It was the perfect anchor.

He sank into it.

He did not make a temple. He made a promise:

This place will always be where trust and courage are weighed.
Whoever walks here will feel that weight.

Over years, water seeped into cracks and froze, breaking rock along lines Harleen favored. A small hollow in the stone’s throat widened into a cavern. A spine of rock resisted erosion and became the narrow bar over a growing void. Stalactites lengthened. The drop beneath deepened into a darkness that swallowed sound.

The world saw natural geology.

Harleen saw an altar taking shape.

III. The Quiet Road-God

In the centuries that followed, Harleen’s work stayed small and stubborn.

He did not rule cities. He paced roads, passes, bridges, cliff trails. He moved wherever people stood at edges and had to decide whether to risk themselves in the name of trust.

• A group of hunters agreed to cross a creaking ice field roped together. Harleen walked with them in the way the rope didn’t quite fray when it should’ve.
• A woman chose to believe the stranger at her door and hid him from pursuers; Harleen was the strange calm that let her unbar the door instead of bolting it.
• A caravan leader stopped one more time to search the dunes for a missing boy, against all advice; Harleen tilted the wind just enough to uncover a small, waving hand.

He did not always intervene. People still fell, still betrayed, still ran when they should have stayed. Harleen wasn’t a shield; he was a constant question:

Will you trust?
Will you be brave?

Sometimes the answer was no.

Sometimes it was yes.

Every yes drew his attention the way metal draws lightning.

Harleen and the Other Powers

Harleen’s existence did not go unnoticed among the Ayla.

Nelenia, Ayla of Greed, felt him most keenly. Their domains crossed constantly.

• When a merchant chose to cut his guards’ pay and pocket the difference, that was Nelenia’s whisper.
• When another merchant chose to pay a fair wage even when she didn’t have to, trusting that loyalty would protect her more than hoarded coin, that was Harleen’s hum in her bones.

They were not at war, but they were never aligned.

Greed said: Keep. Survive by having more.
Trust and bravery said: Risk. Live by sharing what could save only you.

In council, when the Ayla gathered in those rare high moments where their interests intertwined, Harleen rarely spoke. But when he did, the others listened. He carried the weight of every cliff-edge decision humans had ever made in his brief existence.

He never took a mortal shape for long. When he appeared, it was usually at distances:

• A figure on a ledge, watching a crossing.
• A presence behind a frightened soldier who must step out of the trench first.
• A hand on a shoulder that isn’t there when the person turns around.

The mountain near future Strongsville remained his personal seat—the place where he was strongest, and where his earliest fragment of memory lived: a child staying still, a tribe turning back.

IV. The Long Silence and the Growing Cavern

From 0048 to 1016, the mountain saw countless footsteps but few stories important enough to lodge in myth.

• Small hunting parties sheltered in the outer caves.
• One early clan tried to carve a safer pass and gave up when too many of their number slipped in the fog.
• An old man came there to die alone and did not—he turned back at the last moment, remembering a promise he’d made to his grandchildren.

Harleen watched all of it.

Inside the mountain, his altar refined itself. The hidden hollow widened. The stone bar over the abyss became more sharply defined. Moisture slicked the rock, then dried, leaving a faint polished path where a future traveler’s boots would go.

He knew someone would come.

Not because prophecy demanded it, not because he had to arrange a chosen one—but because humans are drawn to edges. Eventually, someone would find the throat in the stone and keep going long enough to reach the heart.

When that happened, he would offer them what he’d offered the boy:

Not safety.

Opportunity.

V. Year 1016 – The Test of Telo Haperneeni

Almost a thousand years after the Brave Lost Child, a tired scribe climbed the northern range with ink-stained fingers and a book in his satchel.

Telo Haperneeni was not a hero. He was nobody important by any kingdom’s measure. He walked because his feet would not settle; he wrote because his mind could not stop watching other people.

He had seen the sharp edges of human nature: cruelty, greed, cowardice. He’d also seen the softer, rarer things: a crust of bread shared, a risk taken for a stranger, a guard pretending not to see a theft that kept a family alive.

Those small acts haunted him. He had begun to write them down in a book he called “Give Sometimes.”

Harleen had been aware of him for some time—a distant flicker of attention, a man whose life orbited the questions Harleen embodied. But it wasn’t until Telo neared the Strongsville range that their stories intersected.

Harleen did very little.

The weather turned just enough that the lower passes looked dangerous and blocked. The track that hugged the cliff—rarely used, often forgotten—was the only one that felt even slightly possible.

Telo took it.

Fog clung to the stone. Wind pressed at his back. Ahead, the rock split into the familiar crack: the mountain’s throat, waiting.

Harleen did not push him into it.

He simply let Telo feel something he couldn’t explain: that the path through the stone was worth exploring, even if it looked worse than staying outside.

Curiosity did the rest.

The Bar and the Book

When Telo stepped into the dark, Harleen felt the echo of the boy from 0048.
Same fear. Same loneliness. Same choice:

Run blindly, or keep going until the danger is fully known.

At the cavern’s lip, when Telo’s foot found empty air and he almost fell, Harleen did not catch him. He let terror slam into him honestly.

When Telo lit the candle and saw the narrow stone bar stretching into the vast dark, Harleen felt the old pattern resonate:

To move forward, you must trust what you cannot see.
To trust it, you must be brave enough to step.

He did not steady the bar. He did not widen it. He did not conjure handrails from rock.

He spoke to Telo the same way he had spoken to the boy:

You are afraid. Go anyway, if you choose.

The choice was, again, all human.

Step by trembling step, Telo crossed the bar. His candle shook. Once, when a breath of cold air rose from the abyss and nearly killed the flame, Harleen shielded it—not with a miracle, but with something as small as a shift in the draft. Just enough.

He passed the test.

On the far ledge, at the heart of the mountain, Telo found the alcove that had waited almost a millennium. He cleared the stone. He made his three offerings:

• Gold, given up.
• Grain, shared.
• Ink, surrendered into the cracks.

Harleen watched the ink soak into the rock and felt it like a brand. For the first time, a mortal had named his domain correctly, in words:

Give sometimes.
Trust sometimes.
Be brave sometimes.

Not always. That was important. Harleen’s creed was never about perfection. It was about choosing to risk in moments when you could have turned away.

When Telo placed his book on the shelf and left it there, Harleen accepted it as more than just pages.

It was scripture.

Not in the sense of commandment or law, but as a witness: a plain, amateur record that said, “These choices matter,” written by someone who had just made one inside the god’s own heart-place.

Harleen did not appear to Telo. He did not speak. He did not bless him with visions of the future.

He did something more in line with his nature:

He let Telo walk back under his own power.

VI. The Ayla’s Story Going Forward

From that night in 1016, the shrine inside the mountain changed from a simple spiritual locus to a true seat of Harleen’s power.

Now there was:

• A physical challenge (the bar).
• A place of offering (the alcove).
• A written philosophy (Telo’s book).

Together, they formed a triad that matched Harleen’s own nature:

1. Risk – Crossing the bar.
2. Trust – Stepping forward in the dark.
3. Bravery – Leaving something valuable where no one might ever see it.

Over the centuries to come:

• A handful of wanderers would find the throat in the rock, drawn by rumor or accident. Some would turn back at the cavern’s edge, deciding the risk was too much. Harleen did not punish them. Not everyone is called to that kind of test.
• A very few would cross. Those who reached the far side and stood in the alcove would feel a presence like a held breath—all the weight of promises ever kept. Some left offerings. Some only touched the stone and whispered their own fears.
• Telo’s book would grow brittle at the edges but stubbornly intact, oiled leather and careful placement keeping it from rotting away. Each reader would add their own understanding of “give sometimes” to Harleen’s domain.

Stories about a god of leaps, crossings, and “staying when you want to flee” would slowly seep into local faith. Not an organized religion at first—just sayings:

• “Harleen walks the narrow ways; step true.”
• “If you’re lost, sit still. Let Harleen guide them.”
• “Trust once more than you think you can. The Ayla of Bravery is watching.”

In distant temples, scholars would argue whether Harleen was as strong as the other great Ayla. In practice, his power showed not in lightning or earthquakes, but in the simple fact that civilization itself—roads, alliances, friendships, families—depends on people making the kinds of decisions he embodies.

Every time someone chose to trust and be brave when fear said “no,” Harleen’s story continued.

VII. Who Harleen Is, In the End

Harleen, Ayla of Trust and Bravery, was never human.

He was born from:

• A child who stayed where he was instead of running.
• A tribe who turned back instead of moving on.
• A pattern of risk in the name of connection.

He chose the Strongsville mountain because that was his birthplace. He shaped it into a place where others could be tested—not for his amusement, but so that humans would have somewhere to meet themselves.

He stands just below Zion, Avalon, and Bethel in power, equal to the other great Ayla, but his work is rarely flashy. He doesn’t win wars in a single stroke or topple empires with a word.

He simply stands, over and over, at the edges of people’s lives and asks:

Will you trust?
Will you be brave?

If someone answers yes—on a cliff, at an altar, in a quiet conversation where they decide to be honest instead of safe—Harleen is there.

And somewhere deep in the mountain, above a narrow stone bar over an endless drop, a worn book called Give Sometimes still waits on a rock shelf, its pages full of small, human stories that a god considers sacred.