Chapter 1
Chapter One
Milo
Ishould have known I would find her in the temple.
Nascha was an intelligent woman. She'd spent her life studying every book in House Avus’ library and scheming to get her hands on those outside of it. She knew things about our world, about Sanctuary, that others never even considered. But she had one thing, one vice, that defied all logic.
Religion.
It wasn’t the Geist my grandmother worshiped.
She knew better than that, though she came to the temple to ensure it appeared as though she did.
But I knew who she really prayed to. She worshiped deities only she seemed to believe existed.
The old gods, she called them. I hadn’t a clue what that meant or where she'd even heard of them. They weren’t in any of the books she’d ever loaned me and any mention of their followers had been scrubbed from history, if they’d existed at all. Still, she persisted.
At least she was quiet about her faith, having only tried to recruit myself and Olympia as far as I was aware.
The others wouldn’t appreciate her allegiance to a false god.
They didn’t understand. They were still so blinded by the Geist, and Cosmo was going to use that against them as a weapon more effective than any sword.
So I couldn’t understand, when we were on the verge of fighting a religious war, how my grandmother could be so devout.
“Do you intend for all of us to shift our allegiance?” I asked as I approached her where she knelt at the carved golden altar.
We were alone and could speak freely. The priests always allowed the leaders of this city to worship unattended.
“Is that why we fight against the tyranny of the Vipers? To free ourselves of the chokehold that is the Geist only to shackle ourselves to other absent deities?”
“I have no intention of indoctrination, hafid,” she replied, rising from her ancient knees and turning to pat my cheek, sympathy in her tone as she called me by her preferred term of endearment.
I wasn’t sure where it came from. A remnant of an ancient language, most likely.
My grandmother did enjoy her linguistics.
She passed me then, hobbling toward the temple doors. I followed her through rows and rows of burning candles which illuminated the otherwise darkened sanctuary.
“And faith is not a shackle,” she called back as she walked on. “At least, it doesn’t have to be.”
I didn't agree but kept my mouth shut as we stepped into the glorious sunshine. Nascha paused, lifting her face to the beams radiating down on us from above. She did that more often lately, stopped to take in that which was around her. It was endearing, if not a little unsettling. Though I appreciated how much she was stopping to smell the roses lately, I couldn’t help but wonder what had inspired the change.
Nascha had always seemed to anticipate the future in ways that bordered on the supernatural if one believed in that sort of thing.
Her taking the time to enjoy the world around her more often could only be seen as foreboding at best. It meant that whatever she saw in the future, it was such that either the sun or she was no longer there to share in this exchange. I wasn’t sure which frightened me more.
“Have you found anything?” My grandmother asked. Her eyes were still closed, weathered face still raised to the sun.
“You know I haven’t,” I grumbled in reply.
It was my ultimate failure, a botched test of the task I’d dedicated myself to my entire life.
When my grandmother had given me the book filled with the ravings of an ancient madman, I’d laughed at her.
I’d tossed it aside and claimed I didn’t have time for a study of our ancestry.
But she’d picked it up again and pressed it into my hand, and so I read it.
It was fanatical and crazed, made up entirely of the incoherent stream of consciousness of a lunatic, and yet, answers to some of my most confounding questions had been found within the text.
Reading between the lines, skipping through the madness, one could find explanations for the very world itself, for the system that was Sanctuary.
I’d made some miraculous discoveries since I’d begun studying the book.
That the Cullings weren’t an original design of the gods.
That our ancestors had given up the world outside of Sanctuary in exchange for freedom of a different sort.
That there was a world outside of Sanctuary.
But Nascha didn’t care about any of that.
She’d come to me with a very specific question, and I’d yet to find the answer.
“It shouldn’t be so difficult,” I sighed as we strode from the temple back toward House Avus.
“Theoretically, it should be there. So much else is. And I’ve even identified a few passages I think discuss the…
incident. But the man was insane. He skips through time like a child hops about a garden.
It’s muddled and inane and impossible to follow. ”
“That’s because you’re thinking like you,” my grandmother replied, opening one eye and somehow narrowing it in my direction. “You need to think like him.”
“I need to lose my mind then? Should I start talking to the walls and rocking myself in a corner?”
“Eximius saw something he wasn’t supposed to. He knew something the Geist themselves didn’t want him to know. What was it?”
“It isn’t written in the book.”
“It has to be.”
I sighed. We’d been through this before.
My grandmother’s fervent belief of some vital information being contained in the rantings of a madman was forever at war with my steadfast assurance that I’d read it all and hadn’t the faintest clue what she imagined could be in it.
I knew she was searching for something else, something more than what had driven a former patriarch of our House mad in his middle years, but she wouldn’t tell me what.
I’d grown so frustrated with researching without knowing what I was looking for that it had become a source of conflict between us.
I’d never been opposed to my grandmother before, but I’d also never been so certain she was keeping secrets from me.
Despite our quibbling, I knew there could only be one reason Nascha was pushing me so hard lately.
“What’s he done now?” I asked warily. I didn’t truly want to hear the answer but, as the Heir of my House, I had a responsibility to. Whatever the patriarch of House Viper was up to would affect us all and my position was such that I could not afford ignorance.
“He’s got the priests on his side,” she replied, voice soft, quiet.
I blinked at her.
“I thought he already did,” I said. “We’ve been planning for his takeover of the church for years now. After that display right before Adrian and Dante’s ninth trial, I thought it was obvious.”
“There were some still holding out, some who still had concerns about Cosmo’s methods, but they’ve joined the others now. I don’t know what he offered them or what line of bullshit he’s feeding them now.”
I reeled back in surprise. My grandmother never swore.
As she began climbing the steps up into the glass-encased greenhouses of House Avus, robes billowing out from a body more frail with age than she would admit, I could see how upset she was for the first time.
I rushed forward to help her, reaching for one hand while she rested the other on my shoulder and climbed the aging stone steps.
“They serve him now, the lot of them,” she grunted with her first step forward and frowned.
“I haven’t helped relations with the church, serving my old gods, I know that.
But the truth is a hard thing to set aside, even for appearance’s sake.
And they hate old Raghnall even more than me. They think he’s lost to his greed.”
“He is lost to his greed,” I muttered.
Nascha looked down at me from the top step with a frown.
“We’re all lost, boy,” she said, shaking her head. “And if we keep our heads buried in the sand, we’ll never be found again.”
I watched her as she took a few steps forward, stretching her old legs and striding among her beloved herbs and spices. She paused to examine a sprig of thyme and I walked dutifully behind her, hands clasped together at the front, a posture which displayed patience.
“The only way out is together,” she said after a moment, an expression of rigid determination settling onto her features.
“Out?” I asked.
She turned back to me and gave a sad smile.
“The old gods speak more than the new, hafid,” she said and there was something in her tone that called to my very soul.
A deep, profound sorrow, a recognition of something lost, something which might never be regained.
Did she truly love her old gods so much?
And what did she mean by their speaking more than the Geist?
I opened my mouth to pose those exact questions when a cousin of mine came sprinting into the greenhouse and skidded to a stop a few feet from our grandmother.
His eyes were blown wide with fear and he was panting.
He’d obviously been sent to fetch one of us, likely Nascha, and had expected to run much further past the greenhouse to the temple but had found us here instead.
“Breathe, Colby,” Nascha spoke, raising placating hands as she addressed her grandson. “What is it?”
“It’s Olympia,” he gasped, bent over and breathing hard to catch his breath. “She’s gone. Again.”