Chapter Fifty-Three
Fifty-three
When they whisper, I hear.
When they whisper, I come.
When they whisper, I wake.
—PRAYER (ORIGINAL)
A NEW PLACE. HEAVY AND jagged. Thick with the unfamiliar—shapes, sounds, feelings. Words that come later. I know only that I was called, and that I came.
And I am not alone. More like me, waiting, welcoming. I am not alone.
I am not alone. The emergence from beyond—that’s where it begins. I see and feel Osiron’s petition, feel the dense anchor that drags me down (flesh), the aching turbulence of my birth (pain)…
But these are Tempestra’s memories. Not mine. Those remain intact. I remember kneeling on the floor of the Cathedral, looking up
looking down into the eyes of a child, and seeing death staring back—
No.
I careen through two sets of memories, images mashing together, voices a syrupy, fervent buzz and… beneath it all, a heat. A raging firestorm that threatens to consume me.
I won’t let it.
Stop resisting.
Tempestra.
We’ll both be lost.
Right… yes. I remember that now. The memory of a face comes together, the reason to not fight this tearing and reweaving of thought, of my very soul.
Nolan. Nolan needs help.
save us we can save him
but it hurts… it hurts so much…
I do not want this feeling. The Goddess pours into me—a torrent of power and yet… a weak, fluttering thing. A moth with shredded wings. A heart, struggling to beat…
Osiron takes me by the—the word what’s the word—hand. A hand, a foot, vein and bone. Fleshy things, fragile but I can fix them, make them stronger, infuse them with…
Stop. Please stop.
Think of Nolan
I stop. Stop fighting.
My siblings surround me. Their faces change, skin tiring. Needing replacement. So does mine, but within we are the same, we are the power this world needs…
Tempestra is a spreading fever. I give in, let it take me. Their memory, their light, their power—the full onslaught of divinity soars like a firebird ascending higher and higher above the leaden deficiencies of my primeval humanity…
Too high. I feel control slip away because Tempestra does. Their power has already been pushed so far… bent… no, broken.
Broken…
They are too weak. I am too, the battered casing of my flesh—the one thing they actually need that I can offer—overfilled and failing, splitting along its corporeal seams.
Lys…
Too many memories, too fast, too fractured. And the light, flickering without focus or control. Tempestra fades, a candle about to be snuffed out, taking me with them.
No. NO.
I did not make a deal with one god, and then another, for them both to go to shit. Maybe I’m dying, but I am not weak. I wasn’t before the Goddess claimed me, and I’m not now.
I call the Flame.
At first, there’s no answer, the divine power that has infused me since I was a child a distant, papery thing, tied to a near corpse lying on a cold stone floor.
I reach for it, straining into that growing ashen darkness without letting it take me.
My own memories rise—that first rush of divinity, the slice of a blade through my skin, the feeling of sinking sickles into flesh.
A taste of a gifted pastry. The loss of a very good horse.
The first time Nolan laughed and meant it.
I stop calling the flame and demand it. This time, it answers, an ocean wave of burning blue, orange, and red.
The blaze envelopes me, wraps around me like a new flesh, bringing Tempestra with it.
Dragged from whatever place a dead goddess goes to, their existence folds back into mine, their divine light infusing the entity of us.
I let it happen. I make it happen. Because out in the world I’d so wished to leave behind, there is someone that needs me.
And all it costs me is my freedom.
Now, finally, Tempestra gets the full measure of my hate, my desire to be rid of them and embrace what little bit of independence I had during my time with Nolan. There is no judgement; as we merge, they understand. They disagree, but understand.
I have always loved you. All of you.
And we loved you. But only because we had no choice.
You still. Not us. I feel our minds weave together, but the threads remain their own colors.
Not forever. Eventually we will be one.
But not now. I have time.
I have time. And I have myself.
Now shut the hell up and heal us, “Mother.”
It is already happening. In that faint feeling that is my… our body, blood begins to pump again; skin stretches and knits itself back together. The gray cold recedes behind the warmth of the Flame, which drives death back to a place more distant than ever before.
And oh, oh, there’s more… The world feels like a garment around me, tight in some spots and loose in others, itchy and rough, silken and fine, and when I press back against the discomforting spots I feel it answer, try to obey my will.
Such awareness of the stone, and the bone, and the dead things I—they once called children.
And life too… little flickers of it… still fighting to remain.
Nolan is there, blood singing, but so quietly now.
And something else.
Lys, daughter, it is almost…
I know. I sit up, body again in full working order, and stronger in ways there’s no chance to contemplate.
Because something else is here. Someone new.
And they are looking at me through Nolan’s eyes.