Covenants & Contracts
I discuss some themes and scenes from Starlit Scepter here. If you haven’t read it yet and prefer to go in blind, consider this your warning. Arcane Awakening is discussed only in broad strokes… no plot spoilers.
⚖️ The Forgotten Distinction
You could be forgiven for forgetting the distinction between a covenant and a contract, but the consequences may be dire.
A contract is an exchange between equals with mutual obligation, mutual benefit, and generally some kind of mutual exit. If one party fails to deliver, the other seeks arbitration. It’s the post-Enlightenment default. Formal relationships reduced to transactions between consenting adults. We’re comfortable with contracts. In a way, they even flatter us.
A covenant is something else. It can bind asymmetric power dynamics, like a king to a vassal. Or it can bind both parties to an oath greater than either of them, like a marriage. Either way, the cost of breaking it goes beyond arbitration. A broken covenant has consequences.
The kind of covenant that inspires the Adventures of Valen is the first kind. The ancient, asymmetric, terrifying kind.
The Hebrew word is berith.1 When the Septuagint translators rendered it into Greek, they chose diatheke (meaning “last will and testament”) over syntheke, which would have meant “mutual agreement.”2 A covenant, in their understanding, was closer to an inheritance than a handshake. You don’t negotiate your father’s will. You receive it or you don’t.
The Levantine world (Israel, Moab, Ammon, Philistia, the Hittite empire) organized relationships of power through covenantal structures. Suzerainty treaties, loyalty oaths, divine patronage. The Hittite treaties included mutual stipulations; the Israelite theological tradition involved radical asymmetry.3 But the grammar underneath was the same: the powerful party sets the terms. The weaker party’s survival depends on whether those terms are kept.
Which raises a question the ancient world wrestled with: What happens when the power imbalance isn’t political but ontological?
🔥 The Gracious Covenant
The oldest recorded covenant-cutting ritual involves butchered animals arranged in two rows and a god walking between them alone in the dark. It’s stranger than fantasy.
The term is karath berith, literally “to cut a covenant.”4 In the ancient Near East, the cutting wasn’t metaphorical. Animals were split and the parties walked between the halves. The symbolism was a self-curse: may I become like these animals if I break my oath.5 Blood sealed the words.
In the Hebrew account, something departs from the established pattern. God instructs Abram to arrange the halves. Abram drives off vultures while night falls and nothing happens yet. Then God, appearing as fire and smoke, passes between the pieces alone.6 Abram sleeps. He does not walk. In standard practice, both parties would walk, binding themselves mutually. Here, only the stronger party walks. Implying that the curse of breaking that covenant falls only on the one party. God, in this case.
The stronger party has taken the full weight of the oath upon himself. The Abrahamic covenant removes the human performance requirement. What remains is trust (and waiting… a whole lot of waiting). Fulfillment comes on the stronger party’s timeline, in the stronger party’s way.
But Hebrew scripture also contains the Mosaic covenant, which looks very different. At Sinai, the terms are bilateral: “If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession” (Exodus 19:5). Stipulations, blessings, curses. The full apparatus of a suzerainty treaty. This is the covenant that most resembles a contract, and it’s the one most human institutions end up imitating.
The gracious covenant and the conditional covenant exist in tension throughout the tradition. A lot of interesting theology lives in that tension, which is unique in the ancient world. That’s also why we still talk about how it played out to this day.
Happy Easter, by the way.
💰 The Transactional Alternative
The nations surrounding ancient Israel were not atheistic. They were busy with their own supernatural obligations. Their gods demanded a great deal, and the people scrambled to deliver.
Modern readers often assume ancient polytheism was naïve. The texts suggest otherwise. The ancient Near East operated on the assumption that multiple spiritual powers were real, active, and competing for human allegiance. Certain threads within the Christian tradition identify the entities behind pagan worship as fallen angels: real spiritual powers presenting themselves as gods. While the veracity of the objects of worship is open to debate, the danger of that misplaced devotion was never theoretical.
Dagon of Philistia presided over agricultural and territorial power.7 Chemosh of Moab demanded military devotion and received it.8 Molech of Ammon demanded child sacrifice9 (which some scholars dismiss as polemical exaggeration, though recent headlines make such unpalatable accusations highly plausible all over again). The texts, at least, present these as exchanges with tangible outcomes. Which stands to reason as the text also suggests Israel dealt with a constant draw toward engaging in those deals themselves. Idol worship, that is.
But these arrangements were transactional. The power was purchased, not given. And the entities selling it had interests that didn’t align with the buyer’s wellbeing so much as with the prolonged tarnishing of the imago dei. The transaction delivered something like what was promised, even if the true cost was obscured until too late.
This pattern rhymes through European literature. Marlowe’s Faustus doesn’t bargain out of ignorance. He bargains out of impatience. He wants what the gracious covenant won’t give him on his schedule, so he finds an entity willing to deal. Lewis made the same observation in The Screwtape Letters: the enemy’s strategy isn’t to offer nothing. It’s to offer something real at a price the buyer won’t see until the bill comes due.
The world of Omon lives on this spectrum. Instead of reinventing superheroes in the ancient world or attempting to revive a mythos that no longer resides in our cultural psyche, I’d rather borrow from the deep foundations we still build on.
🏛️ The Covenant Corrupted
A sacred covenant can’t be destroyed by an enemy. But they can be hollowed out by custodians who find the outward forms more useful than the inward reality. It’s a pattern Old Testament prophets never stop denouncing.
The Israelites had the Temple (even if it was destroyed for a time). The rituals continued. The sacrifices were offered. The forms were immaculate. And the prophets screamed that the whole enterprise had become a corpse dressed for a wedding: outward performance masking inward rot. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6).
I attempted to imitate that pattern in Stellentia. In Starlit Scepter, Valen arrives in Maristella during the Festival of Starlight, a week-long celebration of the Celestial Covenant. The covenant is real. The divine light on the mountain is real. But the Ivorian Empire has colonized the province and secularized the festival into a carnival.
The chief priestess Caelestis stands on a stage before a crowd of drunken revelers and recites the ancient prophecy — “The star descends its celestial throne, / Lost in darkness where light ne’er shone” — while pyrotechnics explode behind her and the crowd hoists their tankards. The faithful mutter in the shadows. The robes are costumes. The rite is a floor show. And the light on the mountain (if it exists at all, which most in Maristella no longer believe) burns on unnoticed.
Nothing supernatural failed. The covenant held. What failed were the institutions that found pageantry more profitable than piety.
Valen watches this with the detachment of a man observing someone else’s house fire. Not his covenant. Not his deity. Not his problem.
But he does get paid.
🌋 The Covenant of the Mountain
In Arcane Awakening, the covenant isn’t with a light on a mountain but with a living creature who nests inside one. And this creature, unlike a beam of starlight, can express its displeasure.
For eight hundred years, the people of High Ulvindra have warmed and protected an egg entrusted to them by a noxodon queen, an ancient winged creature whose grief and desperation forged a covenant out of what should have been a slaughter. The people sing to the egg. They tend it with their warmth. In exchange, the queen provides shelter, protection, and a mountain that breathes.
The Ulvindran covenant is conditional. Mutual benefit, mutually assured destruction. I wanted the terms to be ambiguous: the purpose half-understood, the obligations debated, the consequences unclear until it’s too late. What happens when eight hundred years of fidelity meets human ambition is the question the book asks. The thing on the other end of this covenant has talons.
🌍 The World Beneath the World
You may have noticed a pattern.
The peoples of Omon possess no innate magical ability. Every supernatural power a human wields in this world was granted by something older and stronger, through an arrangement whose full terms the human party rarely comprehends.
The sorcerer’s blindfold in Domain of Darkness. Power offered, strings attached, origin unsettling. The Celestial Covenant in The Starlit Scepter. A divine light that asks faith and gives protection. The Queen’s covenant in Arcane Awakening. A creature who demands fidelity and service and grants forbearance. Every time Valen encounters the supernatural, there’s a cosmic legal arrangement beneath it. He hasn’t noticed this pattern yet. The reader might.
🗡️ The Skeptic’s Unearned Passage
What do the faithful do when the terms of their devotion exceed their understanding?
Abram waited. He drove off the vultures. Night fell. The fire passed between the pieces alone. He didn’t understand what he was participating in. He participated anyway. The covenant was fulfilled. Not by his performance, but by the stronger party’s.
I wrote characters who face the same question. The High Ulvindrans warmed the egg for eight hundred years. The Queen was silent for most of it. They warmed the egg anyway. Faith as action sustained in the absence of confirmation, which is the only kind of faith that counts.
Valen trusts no covenant. He honors no god. He keeps faith only with the contents of his satchel and the edge of his knife. He would tell you, if asked, that he has survived by skill and luck. Not by anyone’s favor.
But the reader has watched something else. A thief who believes in nothing, standing before a sacred object, saying “I am unworthy” — and being answered. He didn’t understand what he was participating in. He participated anyway.
There’s a word for this, and it’s not “luck.”
📚 The Books
Covenants have been the engine of these two Valen stories. Arcane Awakening, the third novella, is coming soon. It’s the story of what happens when a covenant eight hundred years old meets a man ambitious enough to break it — and a thief unlucky enough to be standing nearby when it shatters. After that, Valen’s troubles will take a different shape.
If you haven’t started the series: Domain of Darkness is where those troubles begin. A barbarian prison, a death sentence, an invisible tower, and a cursed blindfold whose master isn’t finished with him. Starlit Scepter takes him south to Stellentia, where a sacred covenant has been reduced to a carnival, a governor is staging a false salvation, and the light on the mountain still burns for those who believe.
Both are available on eBook and in paperback!
Strong’s H1285. https://biblehub.com/hebrew/1285.htm
Berkhof, via Marlowe. https://www.bible-researcher.com/covenant.html
Mendenhall on Hittite treaty parallels. https://www.thetorah.com/article/significance-of-hittite-treaties-for-torah-judaism
Strong’s H3772. https://biblehub.com/hebrew/3772.htm
Jeremiah 34:18-20
Genesis 15:9-17
The Mesha Stele (~850 BCE). https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/inscriptions/what-does-the-mesha-stele-say/
“Moloch,” Jewish Encyclopedia. https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10937-moloch-molech