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A hyperawareness of concern envelopes Sorrow. Her eyes flip open to where a beanstalk figure hovers on the fringes, a gray braid hanging limp over his shoulder, his features burdened with anguish. Her Guide, Echo. She hasn’t seen him since this revolt began, and the drizzle of loss that she feels is eternal. Birthed from stars and growing up without parents or siblings, Guides are the closest thing to a family that a deity has.

He won’t side with her, not as Wonder’s Guide had months ago. Matter of fact, Harmony is the only mentor who has shifted allegiances, a fact that has wounded Sorrow’s peers, despite how they each hide it.

Nonetheless, Echo hustles forward, eager to reach her.

A feminine hand clamps onto his shoulder, foiling the attempt. Envy’s Guide materializes, all vivacious curves and burnished copper hair. Siren radiates empathy but also caution. Sensibly, the female subdues Echo from making a further spectacle.

Sorrow gives a silent cry. She wants Echo near, but that might inspire him to speak impulsively, thus advertising his vulnerability and endangering him.

Her trajectory shifts and spots the child idling beside the mentors, his onyx tresses mussed from when she’d shoved him inside Love’s house. A pair of lilac eyes flit toward the water where Envy had been, then to Sorrow. He’d seen Envy disappear, maybe seen the direction in which Envy had swam.

She sends him a pleading look, then sets her finger against her lips. She can’t see his response, nor Echo or Siren’s, because the mob smuggles her into a cleft within the bluffs, a braided curtain of foliage consuming her view of the only individuals who don’t wish her ill.

Because it’s on the primitive side to keep balancing her like a speared boar about to go to the spit, the world rotates. The company settles Sorrow on her feet, then hustles her into bonds of star-dusted rope. The god securing her hands behind her back wears a teal mantle and carries archery crafted of seashell; he’s part of the class who’d ambushed Sorrow and her friends in the valley. He’s also the one whom she and Envy had overheard from beneath the pier three days ago, boasting how he wanted to try Love’s weapon.

The archer fixes her with a righteous look rather than the smug one she’d anticipated. Beside him lingers the female who’d spoken with him that night. Limited vision had obscured her face that morning, but the jumpsuit and rhodolite weapons tip Sorrow off.

With Sorrow sufficiently restrained, the group migrates down a torchlit lane. The route winds into cliffs embossed in platinum, bloom stalks sprouting from the summits. Wonder had once identified them as hyacinths.

Ahead, the lane leads to a building of inlaid wood. Bubbles of anxiety pop in Sorrow’s stomach. The sight dredges up hundreds of memories, so lucid that they might have occurred yesterday: assemblies, and feasts, and festivals, and public persecutions.

The Palace of Starlight.

Colonnades enwrap the three-story edifice, branches weaving around the columns. The overhanging roofs pitch into the trees, curving upward at each corner.

Most of the crowd recedes, leaving behind only several guards and the major players. An intermission follows in which the rhodolite-wielding archeress and seashell-wielding archer step inside the Fate Court’s royal seat. Presumably, they’re about to give the rulers a thorough report.

Finally, the pair returns to lead Sorrow inside. Decorative creeks skip over pebbles, and lanterns dangle, and the flutter of a windpipe rides the air. The building’s womb opens to a fountain courtyard. From there, the group travels to a waterfall amphitheater at the back, with gardens, cascades, and a moat spanning the northern cliffside crescent.

Fronds and flowers sway in the breeze. A dais rises from the arena’s center, bearing five thrones hewn of platinum—and five luminous figures.

An androgynous female made of frost and carrying crystal archery.

An archeress with purple hair that matches her agate arrows.

A beauty whom everyone likens to a butterfly because of her gossamer gown. She’s lightness and darkness, with her pearl weaponry and ebony skin.

A male with braids as long as ropes, a hooked nose that has always made Sorrow and her friends think of a hawk, and a set of azurite archery.

An archer with lava rock weapons strapped to his back and brows so angular that someone must have stapled a pair of boomerangs to his forehead.

The Fate Court.

The goddess in butterfly gossamer approaches, folding her hands and regarding Sorrow with a peculiar expression that the other sovereigns can’t catch from this angle.

Indecisiveness? Inquisitiveness? Compassion?

These rulers weren’t born into their roles. They were once archers like Sorrow, after which they ascended, becoming Guides to their successors. And then they were selected by the stars, ordained to become monarchs of the Peaks for a term of five centuries.

This butterfly female used to be the Guide of Wonder. That had been long before Harmony. And prior to that, the ruler had been the Goddess of Wonder, eons before Sorrow’s classmate was born.

She used to admire and trust these figures. Even now, admiration wars with disobedience.

The guards urge Sorrow to prostrate herself, blades of grass crumpling beneath her kneecaps. On reflex, she inclines her head to the Fate Court, then shoots them a defiant look.

This juxtaposition causes the butterfly beauty’s mouth to quirk. “Welcome home, Goddess of Sorrow.”

“For how long?” Sorrow dares.