Page 121 of The Lost Reliquary

Mine. My secrets are safe.

But I am breaking.

Visions begin to rise, blood screaming to blood, ofthem—Tempestra-Innara. The Goddess whom I have betrayed. The mother who gifted me with their divinity. I taste salt and copper, in memory and in flesh, mine and theirs. Blood swirls, entwines itself with agony, and begins to pulse. Heartbeats.Mine.A great, distant drum as the Goddess’s light begins to shine. So bright, so warm. It burns, turning the edges of my agony into blackened cinders. Then, the gripping chill recedes, and with it, the pain.

I am small. A tiny, worthless thing staring at the stone floor trod for centuries by offerings to the Goddess. Shivering, I lick the last of their gift from my lips as their divinity spreads with wildfire hunger, filling me with heat, rewriting those weak, human parts of me.I am nothing.The vessel that is my flesh tenses with the sheer ecstasy of it, appalled by the understanding of how frail and empty I was before.Nothing… made something…

And when I finally raise my eyes, my blood mother stands above, gazing down with an emotion I have never truly experienced before this moment:love. The intensity of it buries the heretic I used to be even as, deep in some shadowed part, a seed takes root. Later, anger and resentment will sustain it, but now, it, too, feeds on the holy light.

I stand, achingly proud, over my first kill… watch blood flow under the pleased gaze of Tempestra-Innara.

I bear witness to their consuming justice, basking in their invigorating light as ash swirls like snow in the Cathedral air.

I desire, desperately, their love and approval as they entrust me with the most important task of my lifetime, and hate myself for it.

Caius’s gift rifles through me, picking me apart by pieces, by memory, by every shameful lust and longing.

I kneel before Tempestra-Innara, gazing into their eyes, drinking the whole of them in and soaking every fiber of myself in their divine light. More… I want more… I want to drown in them.

In their love.

And mine.

The world tears again. No, it stitches back together, resolving into filthy cobblestones spotted with blood and spit. My muscles tremble asif I have a deep fever. I want to cry—with relief, with joy, with defeat… I don’t know.

I don’t know.

“I don’t understand.” Caius’s voice, above me.

His feet come into focus. A hand tangles in my hair, jerks my head up. The Arbiter’s face is red with exertion and anger, and tight with confusion.

“It’s not possible,” he says, as if by spitting that observance at me, I willmakeit make sense.

As if I could.

“You betray our blood mother. And yet, you… your love…” He cannot finish.

The morning fog has begun to clear. Around us, faces fill windows, roused from sleep by the commotion. By my screams.

“I don’t understand,” Caius says again, and throws me back to the stones, where my elbows skid against the rock. But the physical pain is nothing, blunt. Welcome compared to the Arbiter’s touch. I push myself up, force myself to meet his gaze.

“That… was…” I gasp, still trying to catch my breath. “A rude way… to wake the neighborhood.”

And then I begin to laugh. And sob, a hemorrhage of emotion, borne by the mirror Caius held up, and its truth.Thetruth. That I am a traitor to my Goddess, my blood mother.

Just not the traitor I want to be.

Caius, eyes hollowed by anger, draws a dagger. Raises it. I see the strike coming.

And then.

Nothing.

I wake with one hell of a headache, in a dark little chamber that smells like salt and wet burlap left to mold. Nausea jostles my gut, almost pleasant compared to the splitting sensation pushing at the seams of my skull, especially in one spot near my temple. But when I try to raise my hands to examine that pain, I encounter resistance. My hands are manacled. So are my feet. The chains are bolted into the floor and wall,reinforced by more iron. What slack there is barely allows me to sit up. The chamber is empty, save for a door, one filthy porthole, and a darkness heavy with abandonment.

After a few minutes, I realize that the faint rocking sensation isn’t a side effect of my head wound. I’m on a ship.

Great.If I had the energy to give a damn, I would. Because being on a ship can only mean one thing: We are going back. To the Cathedral of the Enduring Flame and Tempestra-Innara.