Chapter Two
The temple was filled with the faint smell of incense and the quiet murmurs of prayer. A few worshippers knelt on pews of smoked quartz, looking ahead to a statue of Eli. Others left tokens upon an empty plinth beside him, one that Elara assumed must have been Gem’s.
She scanned the pews of devotees until she saw a priest tending to the candles.
With a twitch of a hand and barely a thought, she blended into the shadows of the temple, wrapping them around herself as she stalked through the hall.
Now utterly untethered, since she had accepted her own shadow-self, they seemed to bend to her will.
Her sight darkened for a moment, and she squeezed her eyes shut.
Strange. The same thing had happened the day before when she’d reached for her magick.
Could it be a side effect of the depth and power now awakened within her?
She’d have to explore that when there weren’t more pressing matters to attend to.
She appeared before the priest like a wraith, and he let out a faint cry before Elara cast an illusion upon the room, hiding the priest along with herself from the congregation.
‘Where is Eli?’ she demanded, gathering his robes between her fists. He had a weaselly, sly face, his skin pale and eyes a typical Castorian blue.
He peered into her hood. ‘You,’ he said in horror. ‘I-it’s you. Starkiller! Star—’
Elara hissed, her dagger already in her hand, and pressed it to his throat. ‘One more word and I’ll show you that I’m not prejudiced towards just Stars.’
The priest gulped, his breaths rapid.
‘I’ll ask you one more time: where is your god?’
She heard Leo and Merissa come up behind her, and she cast her net of illusion wider, snaring them within the sweet invisibility.
The priest’s eyes flicked to somewhere behind her. ‘You think I’ll let you kill him the way you did my Lady Gem, Starkiller?’ he hissed. ‘I’ll never tell you.’
‘Ah-ah,’ Leo tutted. ‘Too late.’
He pointed his own knife to the left, where the priest’s eyes had betrayed him, and Elara saw a fountain, the stone not quite matching the rest of the temple.
‘He’s not—’
‘Did you worship her?’ Elara interjected. ‘Gem? Did you turn a blind eye to all that she did? To her own people, and others?’
The priest frowned, and the hand that held her blade began to tremble.
That beast within her—silver and hungry—prowled back and forth.
‘Do you know what she did to me? To the lost princess of Asteria?’ Even now, Elara still woke up screaming some days, her mind fractured.
The priest tried to answer, but she wasn’t finished.
‘And you worshipped a being like that? Protected her?’ Elara clenched her jaw as that anger in the pit of her stomach ignited. Maybe it was her beloved’s flame that she felt within her, that sparked her veins alight.
‘She was my goddess,’ the priest began to shout. ‘I would follow her until—’
Elara slammed her knife into the priest’s neck.
The obsidian egg nestled in the hilt’s centre showed a glimpse of her reflection—one that, for a second, she didn’t recognize.
She blinked as Leo cursed behind her. In her anger, she’d let her illusion drop, and gasps and screams rippled across the room as the devotees watched the priest fall.
Some began to flee through the open doors while others advanced in either abject horror or anger.
She heard weapons being drawn as someone began to scream for a guard.
The first worshipper neared, Leo already drawing his sword and pushing Merissa behind him.
‘Starkiller!’ the worshipper proclaimed, pointing a shaking finger at her. ‘It’s the Starkiller! Get the guards, it’s Princess—’
Elara growled as she held both hands before her, black shadows spewing from her palms. People screamed in panic as the shadows ran off her, and, once more, her vision pitched.
She gritted her teeth as she saw flashes of people before her, some running, others trying to attack, between the gaps in her vision.
The shadows poured and poured from her until out stepped her dragun.
It opened its maw and roared—a little sprinkle of her illusions within it—and the last stragglers hightailed it out of the space.
‘The doors!’ Elara ground out as her sight flitted in and out again.
‘Elara, your eyes,’ Merissa gasped.
Elara squeezed them shut, her shadow dragun launching forwards as it slammed the temple doors shut. Leo drew across the giant bolt and leaned against them, breathing heavily.
‘Stars, Bellereve. A little warning next time.’
‘If I’d let him live, he’d have gone to get the guards anyway,’ she retorted.
‘Which is exactly why Merissa should have glamoured you before we came in.’
‘There is time for that later. I wanted Eli to know who was here.’ Her eyes snapped to the fountain that the priest had given away. ‘Now hurry—we don’t have much time,’ she said.
Leo passed a hand over his face, following her across the temple, past the pews and rows of green wax candles that smelled of honey, to the fountain.
Another snake was wrapped around it, this time its thick coils forming part of the fountain, while its yawning, fanged maw was open, holding a bowl of starsblessed water.
Elara ran a finger over a fang, the scent of rainwater strong though the temple itself was dry.
She wet her lips as she pushed. Nothing happened.
The three of them perused the entire structure, looking for a secret lever or trapdoor. The priest had looked directly at it; that, Elara was sure of. And she could feel Eli’s magick coming from it, that quicksilver charm.
With Sofia’s dagger, now slick with blood, she tried to lever up any of the lines within the stone, but with no luck. Leo took a run at it, hoping to knock it over and reveal an entrance beneath, but this served only for him to curse every Star in the sky as he rubbed his shoulder.
Merissa tried to sweet-talk it, to ask politely if it could take them to Eli.
Finally, losing patience—and precious time—Elara took her knife again, this time making a slash across her palm before clenching it over the serpent’s open maw.
‘If it works for a Stella deck, then maybe it works for this too,’ she said.
Her blood slowly dripped into the serpent’s mouth, clouding the blessed water pink.
They waited.
Just as Elara made to turn to Leo, to tell him it was futile, something moved.
When she looked back, to her disbelief, the serpent’s mouth closed.
It began to slither in on itself, its head retreating as the snake began to uncoil, its body swirling and writhing until, in its place, a hollow in the ground was revealed. No, not a hollow—a staircase.
It stretched and spiralled down as far as the eye could see, glowing green from within, an ominous invitation.
Elara looked in bewilderment back to her friends. The scent of rain, and now tobacco, washed over her again as she felt Eli’s charm slink through the room.
There was a rattle at the door to the temple. ‘Guards! Open up! We know you’re in there, Starkiller!’
Leo pushed Elara and Merissa down before ducking on to the staircase himself, and Elara looked up to see the snake slither into place above, trapping them in Eli’s lair.