Chapter Forty-Seven
Forty-seven
Please… I will go quietly. To be purified by the flame cannot be worse than the judgement that condemned me to it.
—LAST WORDS OF THE HERETIC MIKOLAUS, IN THE ERA OF TEMPESTRA-INNARA
ENGULFING… SEARING… AGONY…
Descriptors that are too small. Decimation begins behind my eyes, flooding my throat, threading through my veins to the soles of my feet.
Divinity turned violation, a torrent that shoves reality aside and sends me careening into some incomprehensible realm of semiconsciousness.
I still sense the fleshy parts of me—knees aching against the hard stone, scream locked behind my teeth—even as my inner self is flayed open and turned out by the caustic invasion that is Caius.
I can feel him, his mind throwing itself against mine, bruising wherever it lands.
There’s no resisting; I might as well be a sheet of paper trying to stop the thrust of a sword.
He breaks through, a lumbering, unyielding force that ruptures into uncountable icy shards, shredding its way through memory.
They are mine.
Through it all, that tiny clarity: An Arbiter cannot read thoughts. Only feelings. Intentions.
Mine. My secrets are safe.
But I am breaking.
Visions begin to rise, blood screaming to blood, of them—Tempestra-Innara.
The Goddess whom I have betrayed. The mother who gifted me with their divinity.
I taste salt and copper, in memory and in flesh, mine and theirs.
Blood swirls, entwines itself with agony, and begins to pulse.
Heartbeats. Mine. A great, distant drum as the Goddess’s light begins to shine.
So bright, so warm. It burns, turning the edges of my agony into blackened cinders.
Then, the gripping chill recedes, and with it, the pain.
I am small. A tiny, worthless thing staring at the stone floor trod for centuries by offerings to the Goddess.
Shivering, I lick the last of their gift from my lips as their divinity spreads with wildfire hunger, filling me with heat, rewriting those weak, human parts of me.
I am nothing. The vessel that is my flesh tenses with the sheer ecstasy of it, appalled by the understanding of how frail and empty I was before. Nothing… made something…
And when I finally raise my eyes, my blood mother stands above, gazing down with an emotion I have never truly experienced before this moment: love.
The intensity of it buries the heretic I used to be even as, deep in some shadowed part, a seed takes root.
Later, anger and resentment will sustain it, but now, it, too, feeds on the holy light.
I stand, achingly proud, over my first kill… watch blood flow under the pleased gaze of Tempestra-Innara.
I bear witness to their consuming justice, basking in their invigorating light as ash swirls like snow in the Cathedral air.
I desire, desperately, their love and approval as they entrust me with the most important task of my lifetime, and hate myself for it.
Caius’s gift rifles through me, picking me apart by pieces, by memory, by every shameful lust and longing.
I kneel before Tempestra-Innara, gazing into their eyes, drinking the whole of them in and soaking every fiber of myself in their divine light. More… I want more… I want to drown in them.
In their love.
And mine.
The world tears again. No, it stitches back together, resolving into filthy cobblestones spotted with blood and spit. My muscles tremble as if I have a deep fever. I want to cry—with relief, with joy, with defeat… I don’t know.
I don’t know.
“I don’t understand.” Caius’s voice, above me.
His feet come into focus. A hand tangles in my hair, jerks my head up. The Arbiter’s face is red with exertion and anger, and tight with confusion.
“It’s not possible,” he says, as if by spitting that observance at me, I will make it make sense.
As if I could.
“You betray our blood mother. And yet, you… your love…” He cannot finish.
The morning fog has begun to clear. Around us, faces fill windows, roused from sleep by the commotion. By my screams.
“I don’t understand,” Caius says again, and throws me back to the stones, where my elbows skid against the rock. But the physical pain is nothing, blunt. Welcome compared to the Arbiter’s touch. I push myself up, force myself to meet his gaze.
“That… was…” I gasp, still trying to catch my breath. “A rude way… to wake the neighborhood.”
And then I begin to laugh. And sob, a hemorrhage of emotion, borne by the mirror Caius held up, and its truth. The truth. That I am a traitor to my Goddess, my blood mother.
Just not the traitor I want to be.
Caius, eyes hollowed by anger, draws a dagger. Raises it. I see the strike coming.
And then.
Nothing.
I wake with one hell of a headache, in a dark little chamber that smells like salt and wet burlap left to mold.
Nausea jostles my gut, almost pleasant compared to the splitting sensation pushing at the seams of my skull, especially in one spot near my temple.
But when I try to raise my hands to examine that pain, I encounter resistance.
My hands are manacled. So are my feet. The chains are bolted into the floor and wall, reinforced by more iron.
What slack there is barely allows me to sit up.
The chamber is empty, save for a door, one filthy porthole, and a darkness heavy with abandonment.
After a few minutes, I realize that the faint rocking sensation isn’t a side effect of my head wound. I’m on a ship.
Great. If I had the energy to give a damn, I would. Because being on a ship can only mean one thing: We are going back. To the Cathedral of the Enduring Flame and Tempestra-Innara.
To the end of me.
Which would be more bothersome if I didn’t feel like week-old shit soup.
My tongue is tacky, lips sour, as if I threw up at some point.
I hope it was on Caius, but that’s probably wishful thinking.
I’m cold too, flesh stiff. My coat is gone; I’ve been stripped down to a shirt and pants, both heavily stained with blood and filth.
What a huge fucking mess this has turned into.
I drop my head to my hands, a terrible move.
Hot pain stabs at my temples, taking some immeasurable amount of time to recede again.
When Caius hit me, he was aiming for real damage.
If only he’d managed to kill me outright, because I am well and truly fucked now.
I pick through muddy memories, find a better thought: Avery got away.
And if Avery got away, so did Osiron and the rest of the heretics, probably cursing themselves up and down for putting their trust—their faith—in a fool like me.
They handed over their best and only weapon against the power of the Goddess, and I didn’t even make it to the Splendid Rumor.
So much for being the only one who could stand against Tempestra-Innara. I couldn’t even stand against Caius and his goons.
Hours pass. The dirty light of the porthole fades to dark, then brightens again.
No one brings me water, or food, or a bucket to piss in, which leads to some very unpleasant contorting.
Occasionally, I hear voices beyond the door, or footsteps, but more than a day passes before I hear a faint clunk of metal.
A key turning.
I sit up, attempting to look at least a little less cowed than I feel, but when the door opens, my muscles loosen and slump.
Nolan.
His expression is that familiar unreadable page.
A tome written in an inscrutable hand. Though as he lingers in the doorway, the veil over his eyes seems to waver slightly.
There are hints of emotion, though not enough to betray any thoughts.
Maybe he’s simply nauseated; he’s pale, a thin line of sweat along his brow betraying his old friend, seasickness.
He steps inside and closes the door. Still says nothing.
The silence rates about as enjoyable as the pounding in my skull.
“Miss sharing a tiny cabin with me?” I barely recognize my own voice, a sound that stumbles and scrapes over the dry tissues of my throat.
Nothing. Not a hint of reaction. Only a probing, searching look.
“I don’t understand.” When he finally does speak, the tone is as inscrutable as the rest of him.
“Hearing that a lot lately.”
“This isn’t a joke.” Now there’s irritation. “You were going to help the heretics. Try to kill Tempestra-Innara.”
“That was the plan.” I drop my gaze, head pounding even harder as my heartbeat thuds against my damaged ribs. This line of questioning isn’t one I’m fond of, but Nolan is undeterred.
“Caius says you love them. That your devotion runs deep as any Chosen’s should and yet…” He tightens, seems to curl into himself before softening. “I want to understand, Lys. What you did… why you did it.”
“Does it matter now?”
He ignores this. “Caius thinks maybe it’s because of our gift. Confusing his Arbiter senses, making it unclear whether your devotion is real or not.”
“Yes! Exactly!” I bark, heedless of the resulting pain.
“Don’t you get it? That’s what the godsdamned problem is—I don’t even know my own mind!
I hate them, what they’ve done to me, to so many others, and yet, I…
” I swallow, bile rising in my throat. Explanation isn’t something I owe Nolan, or anyone.
But I can’t stop it. “The tiniest glimpse of them makes me ache with devotion. When they appear, I want to fall to my knees. When they smile at me, I want nothing more than to please them again and again, to be close to them, always… forever… I…”
I shut up.
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Doesn’t it?” My eyes flicker up again, pinning us both in place. “Are we only what Tempestra-Innara made us? Or what we’ve been made to do, in their name?”
Silence.
“Or am I a traitor and nothing else? No one else? Not the person you schemed with, fought with, killed beside?” Moonlight.
Blood. Victory. “It should be you. How long ago did you say those words?” His jaw tightens.
The whole chamber seems to contract at the mention of that resigned moment.
“Do any fragments of that conclusion remain? Can none of the respect I’ve earned be applied to who I am—who I could have been—beyond the Goddess?
What are you thinking right now, Nolan? About me and what I am? ”
He doesn’t answer.
Or maybe, in a way, he does.
I force a smirk I don’t feel. “I hate Tempestra-Innara. But it would be a lie to say I don’t love them too. So deeply that I loathe it.” I turn away from him. “It’s a wound I’ve learned to live with.”
Always there. Always festering, in its own devoted way.
I ignored it as best I could, focusing on anger instead.
That ecstasy of their presence, that craving for their approval…
for years, I wanted to believe it a side effect of their gift.
But I knew better. I knew more. That love was born as soon as I saw them, before they chose me.
The same way my hate was fed by the actions of their devoted Chosen, branches from the trunk of their divine tree.
All of it—connected. Entangled in a way that can never be undone. Maybe not even after their death.
But that was a risk I was willing to take.
“What happened to Buttons?”
“Left behind,” he replies, “with Hiram.”
“Good.”
Then: “You were going to leave me behind in Cyprene.”
“Yup.”
“You knew where to find the reliquary all along.”
“No, but I found out eventually.” I wonder if there is any point to these answers. If they are helping at all. “Avery was the heretic masquerading as a mud cleric. I lied about killing him.” I pause. “Sorry.”
He gives me another confused look. Why I’m apologizing for that and not every other way I’ve betrayed him… I don’t know. Maybe I just want to apologize for something. Even if I don’t regret it.
“I can’t live like this.” I can’t give him all the truth, but now, when it doesn’t matter anymore, I can give a little.
“Be this person. Follow this path. It doesn’t matter what I feel.
Love. Hate. I…” I sink, pressing my forehead against my knees.
Close my eyes. “I want to be free of this. One way or another.”
And soon, I will be.
A few seconds pass. “You were given a gift.” His voice simmers, anger finally making its grand entrance. “The greatest gift anyone can possibly be given. You were chosen by the Goddess, made divine.”
“I was a child,” I spit, ignoring the vicious stab of pain as my head snaps up again.
“A child whose whole world was razed before she was forced to become something she never really had a choice about.” My teeth clench.
“How could I have said no, awash in the Goddess’s power?
Of course I wanted it. I wanted it and I hated it and I craved it and even now, the thought of it makes me sick.
The Goddess’s divinity is as much a drug as the Renderers peddle.
And they know that. They know how badly we all want their ‘gift,’ their favor, and what we’ll do in order to get it.
That’s the power of the gods.” Oh, Osiron.
Oh, that wretched truth. “It’s what it’s always been. ”
Nolan says nothing.
“How far to the mainland?”
“A few days.”
A few more days to the Goddess. To the end.
“Here.” He pulls out a flask, pours the contents into a cup. “It’s only water.”
Nolan hands it over and I drink. Sips at first, then greedily. It’s empty long before my thirst is slaked but at least my mouth tastes less like something took its time dying in it. “Thanks. You sneak that in for me? Better not let Caius find out. He know about the seasickness?”
“We haven’t exactly been socializing.” Nolan takes the cup back. “I’ve kept to my cabin.”
I manage a cracked smile. “Don’t worry, your secret weakness is safe with me. Just do one thing?”
“What?” he says, wary.
“Don’t let him take the credit for all of this.
Don’t let him spin some tale to Tempestra-Innara where he’s the hero and shove you to the side.
I don’t mind being the villain so long as they know the truth—that Caius got lucky and not much more.
We were the ones that tracked the reliquary to Cyprene.
Make sure the Goddess knows that. You still deserve to be Executrix.
Or avatar, if that’s what you really want.
More than Caius deserves whatever he’s after.
And a hell of a lot more than I ever did. ”
I wait for a response, but nothing comes. The only sounds are the creaking of the ship bearing me toward my doom, and the faint rhythms of our breath as we stare at one another.
Eventually, Nolan gets up and exits, and I’m alone again.