Chapter 10 Elena
ELENA
The others have grown afraid of me. Perhaps it is out of reverence, but frankly, these fools do not have the spine to venerate me. They refuse to meet my eyes. Even the shadows do not dare creep closer.
—from the diaries of Priestess Nomu of the Fire Order
Elena tried to focus on the scrolls, but her thoughts, treacherous and twisting, returned to Samson. The hot brush of his breath against her cheek. His fingers on her pulse.
You are as much a god as me, Elena. You can destroy me too.
Despite the warmth of the temple fire, Elena shivered.
She had no desire to go against a god, let alone destroy one.
What would her people think, if she crushed their Prophet?
She had seen their awe, their hope. It brought forth an ugly feeling, twisted, emulous, and though Elena tried to swallow it down, she could not push away the image of her people following a foreign Prophet.
Where would that leave her?
Without a throne, without a people, without a kingdom.
Alone, again.
Out of habit, she clasped Yassen’s holopod.
What would you do? She rubbed her thumb across the pod’s scratched surface as if it could answer.
Of course, it would not. It was not the first time she had wished Yassen was here, but now, Elena wished for it so strongly that her want became an ache that squeezed her chest until her breath became a thin rasp.
He would have found a way. Yassen Knight always found a way. With his gentle smile and quick hands, he’d manage to balance the scale between queen and Prophet, between her people and his. Yassen Knight could do anything.
But he could not come back from the dead.
Elena shuddered. She remembered the torn, forlorn look on Samson’s face.
I loved and lost him too.
She did not know what to make of his grief.
He, with his blazing swords and cursed eyes and vicious fire, inflicted misery.
But for a moment, she had seen something broken and exposed, something awfully familiar.
She had seen her pain reflected in him. It was unbecoming, like putting a bow on a tiger.
The diyas guttered, the temple fire whispering.
She half turned to listen when Kruppa sighed. The priestess set down her scroll, wincing as she cracked her back.
“Holy Bird, these old bones,” she muttered.
“Careful. Say it near our Blue Star and he might behead you.” Elena meant to keep her voice light, sarcastic, but it came out tired and worn, a pathetic accusation rather than a tease.
Kruppa rubbed her chin, her eyes slinking to the Phoenix statue. “He really means to tear down my temple, then?”
“No—maybe. I—” Elena shook her head. “I think we have more pressing matters to deal with than razing an old temple.”
“Old?” Kruppa snorted. “These walls shine better than any of the holy homes in Rani. Name one temple more spotless.”
Elena scraped her finger along the floor and withdrew ash. “I think you missed a spot.”
“That is from the holy fire.” Kruppa skimmed her hand along the edge of a diya, raking up the black ash, and then reached for Elena.
She dipped her head, and Kruppa drew a tilak on her forehead.
“There,” Kruppa said. “Now who would want to behead a pretty face like that?”
Elena smiled at the priestess’s attempt at humor, but a cold, clammy sensation prickled her skin.
She imagined it: her kneeling in the ruins of the temple, Samson’s urumi glinting over the soft skin of her neck as her people raised their hands for his offerings.
She pushed the image away. No. Samson would not kill her.
She was of Agni—he needed her. But the fire swelled, and the flames whispered, and she thought she heard its voice, soft and spiderlike, skittering across her skin like a warning.
To what end? it said.
Elena turned and picked up another scroll.
She forced down the disquiet clotting her throat.
The scroll was old and laden with a thick layer of ash.
Blowing off the dust, Elena found it to be a journal entry from Priestess Nomu, dated before Alabore.
Ash flaked off as she peeled back the edge, and Elena thought of the hundreds of thousands of scrolls and books burned during the invasion, the amount of her people’s history—erased.
She felt a great unwieldly loss, one whose shape she could not see or trace, but which spread through her with grey, phantomlike limbs.
She should have read more. Asked more, listened to her mother more.
There was so much more she could have done, so much she wished she had asked.
Her mother had tried to transfer the scrolls to digital records, but that effort had ended after her death, when her father had sealed the royal library to everyone but themselves.
Grief led one to strange pursuits, but in her family, it induced them to do awful, ruinous things.
“‘The inferno quakes with a different temper today,’” she read aloud.
“‘The high priestess says it’s a sign that the Sixth Prophet will be chosen soon and take the flames. What a shame. I do not want it to leave. I’ve grown quite fond of the inferno’s spirit, even if it mostly tries to spit sparks in my face. ’”
Kruppa chortled. “She makes the Eternal Fire seem like an abusive lover.”
“I suppose it is,” Elena said, thinking of Samson standing before the inferno, the wrath scraping across his face as he forced the flames to bend.
She returned her attention back to the scroll when something struck her. “Wait. I thought the Sixth Prophet created the Eternal Fire. Why does it seem like it existed before her?”
“Because it did.” Kruppa flipped through the prayer book, the pages rustling like the soft susurrus of sand against skin, and settled on a passage.
“‘And thus the First Prophet spoke: “This fire will burn in my stead to protect the land.” Within the heart of the temple, the people saw a spark flare to a great inferno that burned the eyes of the sinners and healed the weak and the blind.’ See? The Eternal Fire has been here since the dawn of time. Since the Phoenix and First Prophet.”
Elena frowned, picking up another scroll. This one was a historical account labeled by a scrawling hand, The Last Prophet, dated after Alabore, author unknown.
“It says here about the Sixth, ‘She spoke with the multitude of her former incarnations. “This fire will protect the land. Do not let it die.” And so the Eternal Fire came to live in the heart of the temple.’”
“Let me see that.” Kruppa took the scroll and read it fully, top to bottom, thrice.
The lines around her mouth deepened. “This must be a mistake. Some priest must have gotten too high or loopy living underground in the great temple. The Eternal Fire has always existed, even before the Sixth. Priestess Nomu mentions it.”
“She never names it, just calls it the inferno,” Elena said.
Kruppa made an offended clucking sound. “It’s one and the same. Eternal Fire, inferno, great blaze. I’ve once seen it written as the Flaring Fury. You know, we priests are quite inventive in our naming.”
“How creative.” Elena returned to Nomu’s writing.
For all her mother’s adoration of the priestess, Nomu’s diaries were chaotic.
Dramatic even. She detailed inconsequential ceremonies, then followed up on trysts with rival priests so raunchy it would make a prostitute blush, but when Elena turned to the third entry, a scroll not as ruined by ash or dust, she paused.
“Listen to this: ‘The first priests of the order have written that a sadness resides deep within these walls. I have come to feel it. Lately, I have dreamed of burning, of golden eyes speaking with a multitudinous voice that is both deafening and soft, that thunders through my skull and slithers through me in whispers. Always, there is a shadow within the flames. I think the inferno senses my unhappiness, because it has stopped spitting at me. Today, it tried to reach for me in what I thought was a comforting gesture, but it was a warning. The shadows were stirring. One snapped at my ankle, and I was overcome with such a vicious chill I thought my bones would freeze and break. But then the inferno gave a great roar that had all the others come running in. The shadows fled. Sister Madhu told me later how I had fainted, and when I was asleep, the fire raged for so long it took hours for the high priestess to calm it. But I have felt its sadness. It grieves for me, and I do not know why.’”
The entry ended there, but Elena flipped it over, her heart beating erratically in her ears. There, as she had suspected, was a signature.
A. M.
The Eternal Fire does not rage because it is angry; it rages because it grieves.
Her mother had read this scroll. She too had written not of the Eternal Fire’s fury, but of its grief. And Elena still did not know why. She read the entry again. Held it up to the diyas, to the temple fire, but no secret passage appeared, no errant scrawl. The scroll remained markedly the same.
Kruppa carefully closed the prayer book.
“You know, sometimes, during my prayers, I can sense the inferno’s sorrow too. Sometimes, it just curls into itself. The day you freed Magar, it became so small that I thought it would vanish.” She stared into the temple fire as it crackled softly.
“If I were the Phoenix, locked in a mountain, forced to appear only after humanity had degraded itself to something monstrous, I would grieve too. I would mourn for all the things that have been lost, all the things I could not stop.” She kissed the cover of the book and returned it reverently to its stand.
“But then, that is Her duty. To give us hope when we have forgotten what it feels like. To remind us that we are soft and human too.”
That is too simple, Elena thought. She looked into the glittering eyes of the Phoenix, at Her beak opened in an eternal frozen scream.
What must it feel like, to watch for centuries as the people you loved and nurtured turned on themselves?
She thought of her father welcoming Sesharian refugees and not giving them the means or resources to survive in a new home; the mother screaming as the terrified boy clutched his father; Samson smiling as her people bowed to yet another leader, another conqueror.
It was the same cruel cycle. The ruinous march that led to new faces, new characters, but the same wicked fate.
She did not feel grief.
She felt rage, deep and dark and enduring. Centuries old, as dense as the desert, as unending, the kind stoked by unpunished sins and unrequited honesty. It echoed through her. Settled into her bones and began to make its home.
The Phoenix and Her Prophet were meant to inspire hope, to create justice, and with sinking, final clarity, Elena knew it was not her. She could never be her people’s Prophet. How could she create hope when her Agni tasted this vicious?
The flames quivered. She turned to listen, but when she reached for them, they shied away, as if afraid.
I have read of a deeper, darker power. It imprisoned the Phoenix in a dark, stony hell.
Shadows danced around them, as if stirred by the wind. When they scraped her feet, Elena did not feel a chill like Priestess Nomu. She tasted salt and earth, something raw and untamed and at once grimly familiar.
And for the first time, Elena considered the shadows as they curled around her, kept back by only the faint, wavering hem of the inferno’s light.
There are three types of fire, her mother had written. One had trapped the Phoenix.
Maybe that was why the Eternal Fire always raged when she came near. Maybe that was why it had tried to attack her.
What if my Agni imprisoned the Phoenix?
She could feel her Agni pulling beneath her fingers, itching to rush forward, to conquer, like all the ones who had come before her.
You are as much a god as me, Elena. You can destroy me too.
Samson’s admission was also a warning. He could destroy her as well. Already her people were turning away. Already they called on another god. If Samson Kytuu truly saw her as an equal, then she needed to balance the scale.
She needed to make the Prophet bend.