thirty-two #2
One in which she could make her own with Sulim.
We could go to Terra III. We’ll go back to Qahrain, if that’s what you want.
We’ll build ourselves a cottage on Lerenan Estate, and nobody will tell you to leave.
Mira would leave her birthright behind if it meant being with her soulmate and having time to grieve Sulim’s death from inevitable old age.
That was how it was supposed to happen. Mira was already cursed with a human for a soulmate. But to only know her for a couple of months? To lose her like this? With so much more death and destruction? For what? Greed?
“Asha…” Mira lifted her head, her bangs pressed against her skin from sweat—or tears she thought she had held back.
As she uttered the Julah word of romantic endearment, everything was more.
She felt more. She experienced more. It was the truth she had held back those past few days of sleep and denial.
Someone had taken her soulmate. Someone had robbed her of her romantic destiny.
And, worst of all, someone had treated these sacred souls around her as disposable. “I’ll fix this. I promise.”
Mira didn’t know what she meant by that. But the words flowed through her like water rushing from a faucet. While nobody knew who turned it on, there she was, reacting with the sentiments that claimed her conscience and curdled her bloodlust.
Yet, revenge on whom? She had killed the man responsible for the deaths in this room.
Marco? She didn’t know where he was, and the Treaty of Cerilyn said that those who entered into a binding contract with a mercenary tribe could not be legally held responsible for what happened.
Even if she had proof that he was behind the contract to somehow gain control of Gardiah Estate, there was nothing she could do but make his life hell.
So, maybe I take his life…
Would she do it? Kill again?
Mira glanced up, catching the blinding, twinkling golden light filtering through the stained glass windows. Yet it wasn’t a sunbeam playing tricks on her eyes. It was a butterfly. A real one, fluttering near her face and teasing the tresses on Mira’s head.
“You need to go,” Mira said in a hush. “Don’t get lost on your way to the Void, asha. It’s the one thing I could not bear more than this.”
The golden butterfly kissed Mira’s nose before fluttering away, leaving behind it a trail of glitter that quickly dissipated into the natural light. Mira closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.
“I promise I’ll make this right,” Mira told the butterfly still hovering nearby. “Whatever it takes. Wait for me, asha.” She didn’t know what a human soul would be waiting for. Julah didn’t return to the Void after death. They were not reincarnated. It wasn’t possible.
Yet for Sulim, Mira would do anything. Even bend the will of the universe itself.
Gardiah Estate was commandeered by the planetary Arrahite government until a line of succession was established and the scene declared clear.
The funeral for the family was held two days later at the Harksplit Temple, with Graella notably absent.
Townsfolk and surviving employees alike filed into the Temple for the viewing and to pay their respects to the family that kept the local economy churning.
Cries for retribution were heard, but what could be done?
The authorities’ hands were tied. Money was taken from the family accounts to help pay for the funeral and for their burials on Gardiah Estate.
In a terrible twist of fate, Mira met Sulim’s aunt, Lady Caramine, who had been personally brought from Yaren County on Qahrain to say goodbye to her niece.
The woman seemed more disgusted by the spectacle than the death of her sister’s only child.
Mira and the others’ things were removed from the house.
She was not there for it and trusted her mother to get everything.
Mira was too distracted by her thirst for vengeance, which ebbed from one hour to utter misery, only to once again surge with the inner cry to do something.
But with the image of her soulmate being buried in the Gardiah family cemetery alongside the others, barely given her own plot next to her husband, all Mira could do was swallow the voices in her head and hope that they gave her peace until she was of mind to do something productive.
The julah scattered to the stars now that the pilgrimage was officially over.
She didn’t know where Kema and Hannu went, but the last she saw them, Hannu’s hair had turned white, and Kema had consigned herself to living a life out on Lerenan Estate.
Ramaron returned to Marlow Estate, but Mira soon heard that he was back in Harksplit assisting with research.
And having some fling with Kanhith. Good for him. Mira wanted to scream.
She, however, refused to return to her father in the High Temple, despite there being a room in the High Priest’s apartment.
And since she was no longer a priestess, she could not be afforded her own dorm in the Temple.
Yet the thought of returning to Dunsman Estate, where her insufferable grandmother would surely use this as a lesson for moving on and “doing the right thing, now that this soulmate business is out of the way,” might make Mira even more homicidal.
So she rented a room in a Garlahza inn, telling only her parents and disposing of her Temple pilgrimage garb. It was strange to be wearing proper trousers and blouses again. Even the occasional dress, if the weather was right.
Mira was free. Free from prison. Free from penance. Free from the trappings of romance.
Yet she stewed. In her room. In the restaurants, cafés, and cageh houses around Garlahza.
In the salons of her former Academy friends and the parties her grandmother, Lady Yariah Lerenan, threw in the hopes of distracting Mira’s broken heart.
For while she did an admirable job of keeping the emotional manifestations of grief at bay, she knew that her body kept a score she would never win.
Eventually, it would all catch up to her, and she might not get out of bed.
What was the point of it all? Why had she been subjected to finding her soulmate, only for them to be so viciously ripped apart?
“Is it really better to have met her and lose her?” Mira asked her mother when they had a rare moment of solitude in the High Priest’s apartment. “Then to have never known her at all?”
Her father sat at the table, instantly souring the mood between mother and daughter. Yet while Nerilis kept to himself as he started on dinner, Joiya took her daughter’s hand on the table.
“Of course it’s better to have known that love, even briefly.” She looked to her husband. “Tell her, Nerilis.”
He chewed while staring at them, his fiercely paternalistic eyes already talking down to Mira before he said, “You’ll live through this.”
Mira scoffed; Joiya slapped her hand against the table. Honestly, what had she expected?
“Listen to this man,” Joiya scolded her husband, who continued to eat as if her admonishments were common at the table. “The High Priest. The king of sermons. The greatest channel to the bloody Void.” Her brows narrowed, and her nostrils flared. “A curt dipshit that I can’t believe I married.”
That was the only thing that made him look up from his food, yet it wasn’t offense or concern shaping his sharpening jaw. “What does that mean?”
“It means…” Joiya’s voice faded as she hovered over her own plate. “That we should have never been married.”
While Mira was slightly scandalized by this, Nerilis espoused a grave understanding that Mira was not privy to.
Later, when Joiya stepped out, Nerilis approached his daughter as she lounged on the sofa in the middle of the living area.
“Don’t worry—I’ll head out soon.”
He motioned for her to follow him.
It was awkward, trailing behind that man as he led her out of the apartment, down the ornate hall and past the doors of some of the top Premiers in the Temple.
None of them knew where he and Mira were going.
As long as he stays in the building… Nerilis was the most watched man on Yahzen, which meant he had come up with every trick, new and old, to avoid detection when he wanted some time to himself.
They silently went down to the apartments of the lower-ranking priests who made their homes in the Temple.
Mira didn’t know what they were doing down here…
were they going to meet someone? Even when she was a young priestess, she never stayed down here because she had a room in her father’s apartment.
The ultimate child of nepotism. That’s me.
That was why she had been assigned to a hellhole like Cerilyn.
It was why she had to lose the love of her life so soon.
She was being punished, forever and always.
Down here, where the hour was late enough that many of the priests in residence had retired for curfew, Mira felt out of place in her sapphire-blue dress that swished around her knees and bunched on the shoulders—especially next to her father in his Temple-white tunic and trousers.
We look nothing alike, isn’t that the truth?
His long blond hair, lily-like skin, and willowy features had been the face of the Temple for so long that there were generations of humans who likened Temple purity to a man like that.
Yet here was his daughter, with her blackened hair and dusky skin, lips pouty like her mother’s and eyes as amber as…
her mother’s. One could never truly dispute her father’s bloodline by sight, for Mira was simply her mother.
“Here.” They stopped before the door of a priest named Lioke Dashni, but did not knock. “This was our room before our first promotions. This was the room your mother and I shared right before and after we married.”
Mira absentmindedly scratched her arm. “Yeah? Guess you two would have lived around here somewhere…”
“Mm, yes, we didn’t have a High Priest for a father during our Acolyte days.”
Mira winced.
“That’s not the point I’m making, though.” Nerilis pointed his face toward the door again. “This is where it happened. The night before our wedding. Well, suppose it was the morning of our wedding. The very early hours. Deep into the dawn when everyone is asleep. Including me.”