107. Lily
LILY
It was a tomb. No, “tomb” wasn’t it, though it was clear the room housed bones.
“Temple” was closer. “Shrine” was better, Lily realized, as she swept the flashlight across the walls of the circular room.
She spooked as the light caught a statue, flawless white marble, in its beam.
Lily had never seen a painting of Selene van Bergen, but this exquisitely carved likeness had to be her.
Windermere had her rendered as a goddess of the moon in sweeping robes, whose folds were so convincing that Lily had to reach out and touch them, marring them with a smear of her blood.
She wore a crown of stars and reclined on a crescent moon, chin tilted to the sky.
If her face and the proportions of her body hadn’t been so full of human realness and imperfection, Lily might have thought she was a nebulous stand-in.
But Selene’s forehead was a little big, her chin a little weak. She had a straight nose, and even in marble, her eyes were a challenge. Lily felt the urge to get on her knees and supplicate.
She examined the rest of the room. The walls were intricately carved with alchemical scenes and processes.
The frieze above the door depicted the alchemical wedding, and Windermere’s seal was carved into the floor.
Flanking Selene, there were two marble braziers that seemed never to have been used.
On a short pedestal below Selene’s dais, there was a marble sarcophagus roughly the size of a toaster oven.
With shaking hands, Lily set the flashlight down and knelt before it.
The lid was heavy but slid off easily. Inside the sarcophagus were two things: a wooden box and a large chalice.
The chalice was silver, maybe, and deeply tarnished.
No jewels encrusted its surface, only an engraved line of alchemical symbols spiraled around the circumference of the chalice.
She wanted to examine them; she didn’t have time.
As Lily reached down and picked up the chalice, her blood seeping into the symbols, a gong sounded.