Dima - Origin of the Temple of Continuance

The temple was established by a small homesteading community near Jafah, a tiny village in rural central Hazar, although back then, it was less of a temple, and more of a solution to a problem. In far out of the way places like Jafah, most folks weren't too worried about the red fatigue plague, if they had even heard about it at all, but this didn't mean that everyone was spared. Dima was a girl sixteen years of age, the oldest of nine siblings. She was the smartest of her siblings, too, the only one her parents had been able to spare to get a full education instead of working on the family farm. The semi-arid land was dry and tough, but not impossible to work when you had as many hands as they did. Dima had heard news of the plague, but like many others hadn't thought such a thing could reach a homestead like theirs, so of course it did. It's hard to say whether or not she was lucky that all it took was her parents. It took her two whole days to dig deep enough graves, one for each of them.
Dima tried to be the best stand-in mother possible, but she was still just a child herself. If she'd had just a little help, someone she didn't have to supervise, things would've been an awful lot easier. She was a smart girl, and remembered years back in her school when her teacher had taught them about magic. He didn't properly teach them any, but told the class about the wonders that could be performed with it and all the different kinds there were, including the darker ones. He presented them as a cautionary tale, and Dima had always been a cautious girl but also had a mind for math her parents had always appreciated, and knew how to calculate risks.
It would take two years, she and her siblings surviving more than living, and Dima spending long hours pouring over what books she could get her hands on. Her dad went first; he'd always been a larger man, a foot taller than her mamma and strong enough to haul around just about anything that needed hauling. His muscles would be long gone by this point, but Dima would take what she could get. He could only do simple tasks and only one at a time, weeding the garden or collecting eggs from the chickens, but once he was set, Dima didn't have to worry about him until he was done, and he could work all day long without tiring. A few days later, her mamma would join him.
Dima tried to keep what she'd done a secret from the neighbors, and considering the nearest was over a mile away, it wasn't terribly hard, and it was an accident when one of them found out after a year and a half. Dima offered to teach them what she knew in exchange for their silence, and they accepted, not in small part out of fear of what she could do to them if they didn't. Their shared secret only grew to be less of a secret from there on out. It would be two centuries after Dima's passing at the age of 77 before the families still utilizing her notes and research came together to build their first formal temple building.