Chapter One - Evie #2
The only ones who had spoken to me were the Luminants.
They were the lowest, the cleaners and carriers.
At a distance, they looked most human until they stepped into the light.
Their skin shimmered, not like glitter, but like wetness, like they’d been dipped and didn’t have time to dry.
They carried trays of too-perfect food and goblets of drinks, and they moved like the hall had taught them how, quietly and quickly.
When one of them brought my first tray, she didn’t look at me. The smell of the food hit me harder than it should have. It was sweet and sugary, almost nauseating. My mouth watered, and my throat tightened at the same time, like my body couldn’t decide whether it wanted to eat or be sick.
She set it down with careful hands and kept her eyes fixed on the floor, as if meeting my gaze might be forbidden. Then, she left just as quickly.
It was always the same. Every few hours, one would appear with a tray of soft rolls that steamed without cooling. Fruit sliced into perfect crescents, jeweled and dewy. Little honeyed cakes dusted in something that glittered like sugar and sparkled like diamonds.
It all felt like a… preparation, like everyone was being kept ready for something I didn’t understand, and that was when the sounds would start again. They were soft at first and reverent and broken.
“Oh, God.” “My Lord.” “Holy Father.”
The words spilled from mouths that sounded proud to shape them, and I could feel the swell of that pride in Him, rolling outward like heat.
He always answered, voice gentle, almost tender. “Such a good little lamb,” He would murmur. Or soul. Or believer. Each word landed like a blessing and a chain.
Sometimes, He entered the alcove while the Votaries readied His doll, and after they left, the murmurs thickened into something low and fevered.
I tried to see. I always did. I would part the curtain a fraction, lean into the glow, strain for edges and angles or even reflections—anything that might show me what was happening beyond my own fear.
It never worked.
Light bent where I needed it to be clear.
Bodies blocked one another at just the wrong moment.
A Votary’s robe would drift into the exact line of sight, or the Guardians would shift, serene and deliberate, until all I could see were hands moving with ritual care and the suggestion of a body beneath them.
The rest dissolved into warmth and sound, occluded as if the hall itself refused to witness too closely.
From what I could make out, the alcoves lined the outer edges of a large room, one after another, as far up and as far wide as I could see.
There seemed to be a central atrium awash in white, gold, and relentless light.
I tried peering through the gauzy curtain over my room’s entrance, careful not to let too much of myself show, but the view always felt wrong somehow, softened at the edges, as if the room had been deliberately arranged to blur itself.
He liked to put things on display. One thing I could make out was a bed in that central atrium up on the dais, large enough to make my stomach turn.
He would take His place up there in a gilded chair patiently waiting as the Votaries arranged people there for Him.
Sometimes He stayed in the chair and watched. Other times, He got up and took part.
It was like a child’s game gone rancid, as if they were all dolls dressed and posed for His pleasure only able to submit.
I would shift from one side of my alcove opening to the other, chasing a clearer angle, always caught between perfectly placed pillars interrupting the view at every turn, not that I wanted a front-row seat to whatever He was forcing the others to do.
Through all of it, here in my little room away from the circus, my body still betrayed me. My knees softened whenever I heard His summoning of others. My palms burned with the urge to lift, to offer, to present myself. Words rose in my throat without permission to worship Him.
He was breathtaking, and yet, looking at Him made my skin crawl. Every conscious part of me recoiled from Him. I wanted to scream and fight against it. Disgust curdled behind my teeth and still my body leaned. The shame of it was suffocating.
And that would bring me back to the quiet, taut pulse of the tether that lived inside me pulling towards Luc, steady and undeniable, like a second heartbeat I couldn’t quiet.
It didn’t matter that I didn’t know where he was or how far apart we were.
My body still needed him, craved him—the way lungs needed air.
When I reached through the bond for him, it was like my soul putting out its hands in the dark and begging the universe to give him back.
Luc.
The sound of his name inside me was clean.
Solid. Like stepping onto stone after wading through filth, like bracing myself against something real before the tide took me.
And it made the ache so much worse, because wanting him wasn’t optional, it was bone-deep and constant, one of the few things that kept me fighting.
When I reached through the bond, he answered faint as a star seen through storm clouds. He offered a thin thread of warmth that proved he was there somewhere, and yet the space between us was so vast it felt like a cruelty.
It hurt. Not sharp, but deep, like pressing on a bruise you didn’t know you had until you touched it. Like my soul was stretching toward him and finding only cold air, only the echo of him, tugging back too far away to hold.
I could feel him. I could feel his rage, his love, his longing, and I couldn’t reach him. And that was its own kind of torment, clean and endless.
I wanted him the way you want home when you’re lost. Desperately. Shamelessly. Like if he touched me, everything would be okay. But it wasn’t. And in the space where he should have been, The First Light kept reaching for me, and I hated it.
I would press Luc’s name into my chest like a shield, and still the cloying heat that bent my spine would slide through the room whenever He was near, curling into my nerves, answering parts of me I hadn’t given permission to exist. My body would soften.
My breath would hitch. And the horror of it would crash down all at once, because the pull didn’t replace my longing for Luc.
It coexisted with it, and I hated it. I hated that my body would betray me.
It wasn’t desire. It was wrongness. Something pressing into my nerves like a command, tightening whenever His voice softened near me.
My muscles responded before my mind could stop them, a breath held too long, a step almost taken.
It felt installed, like a mechanism buried too deep to reach, and my only choice was to obey.
There was only one saving grace—He hadn’t tried to touch me, not since the first time when He brought me to this place. That should have been mercy.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about what had passed through me then.
It had been something ancient, something cold and bright.
It had risen up my spine like a kraken cresting the surface, like a door I hadn’t known was inside me slamming open.
For one terrible heartbeat, He had been the one who hesitated.
I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know what I’d done, or how. Only that the weight in the room had fractured, just slightly, like something in Him had recognized something in me and recoiled before He could hide it.
That memory haunted me, and between all the counting, I tried to call it again, bring whatever that was to the surface again. But it never worked, and I started to wonder… was it a trick? Did I imagine it?
No… no. I wasn’t crazy. Something had risen in me. I did not imagine it.
And that’s what I held onto—when He’d be here, wherever this place was, with someone else, and my body unwillingly reached for Him, I clung to that moment like proof I wasn’t entirely broken. Was it coiled and waiting? Could I call it again?
I wondered what would happen if He ever dared to try to touch me.
If I could make Him stop. If that force would rise up again, cold and bright and wrong in the way it made Him hesitate.
If it would meet Him stronger and sharper this time, like a blade finally unsheathed, or if the cost of calling it would be worse than letting Him do whatever He wanted.
But… He stayed away, and it should have felt like relief. But it didn’t.
That waiting became its own kind of terror, like a stretched wire humming under my skin. Because I knew how men like Him worked. They didn’t forget. They delayed. They measured. They made you think you’d been spared, and then they arrived right when your guard started to sag.
I kidded myself into believing it was true. Like I’d been kidnapped by a god and my biggest comfort was, “Well, at least the spa goats hadn’t shown up yet.”
Sometimes I’d even catch myself relaxing, sinking down into the bed and letting out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding for days.
And then, somewhere down the corridor, a latch would click, or a light would rise, and my stomach would drop.
Because I knew. I knew it was inevitable. Eventually, He would come to this alcove. To me.
But in the meantime, I bided my time, and I paid attention to things.
The order of things. The timing of food.
The way the Guardians came to certain alcoves, those most favored by The First Light.
How certain doors opened only after certain sounds.
And I began to wonder if nothing here was random.
Nothing was impulsive. Like the horror had choreography.
If this were a system. A schedule. A method. I would find the crack in it, and I would widen it until His whole Heavenly world split wide open.