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She dragged a skull out of the sand.
She had stepped inside a dead man’s jaw.
She shrieked and fell backward. Her vision pulsed black. Her eyes were open but they had shut down, refusing all sensory input. Bright flashes of light swam before her eyes. Her fingers scrabbled through the sand. It was full of hard little objects. She lifted them out and brought them to her eyes, squinting until her vision returned.
They weren’t pebbles.
Little bits of white stuck up in the sand everywhere she looked. Bones. Bones, everywhere.
She was kneeling in a massive graveyard.
She trembled so hard the sand beneath her vibrated. She doubled over onto her knees and gagged. Her stomach was so shrunken that with every dry heave, she felt as if she had been stabbed with a knife.
Get out of the target line. Was that Altan’s voice echoing in her head, or her own thoughts? The voice was harsh, commanding. She obeyed. You are visible against white sand. Take cover in the trees.
She dragged herself across the sand, heaving every time her fingers rolled over a skull. She shook with tearless sobs, too dehydrated to cry.
Go to the temple. You’ll find the way. All paths lead to the temple.
Paths? What paths? Whatever walkways had once existed had long ago been reclaimed by the island. She knelt there, staring stupidly at the foliage.
You’re not looking hard enough.
She crawled up and down the tree line on her hands and knees, trying to find any indication of something that might have been a trail. Her fingers found a flat rock, the size of her head, just visible under a veneer of grass. Then another. And another.
She hauled herself to her feet and stumbled along the path, holding the surrounding trees for support. The rocks were hard and jagged, and they cut her feet so that she left bloody footprints as she walked.
Her head swam; she had been so long without food or drink that she hardly remembered she had a body anymore. She saw, or imagined, grotesque animals, animals that should not exist. Birds with two heads. Rodents with many tails. Spiders with a thousand eyes.
She continued following the path until she felt as if she’d walked the length of the entire island. All paths lead to the temple, the ancestors had told her. But when she came to the clearing at the center, she found only ruins among the sand. She saw shattered rocks engraved in a calligraphy she could not read, a stone entrance that led nowhere.
The Federation must have torn down the temple twenty years ago. It must have been the first thing they did, after they had butchered the Speerlies. The Federation had to destroy the Speerlies’ place of worship. They had to remove their source of power, to ruin and smash it so completely so that no one on Speer could seek the Phoenix for help.
Rin ran through the ruins, searching for a door, some remnant of the holy area, but she found nothing. Nothing was there.
She sank to the ground, too numb to move. No. Not like this. Not after all she had been through. She had almost begun to cry when she felt the sand giving way under her hands. It was sliding. Falling somewhere.
She laughed suddenly. She laughed so hard that she gasped in pain. She fell over on her side and clutched her stomach, shrieking with relief.
The temple was underground.
She fashioned herself a torch from a stick of dry wood and held it before her as she descended the stairs of the temple. She climbed down for a long time. The air became cool and dry. She rounded a corner and could no longer see sunlight. She found it difficult to breathe.
She thought of the Chuluu Korikh, and her head reeled. She had to lean against the stone and took several heaving breaths before her panic subsided. This was not the prison under the stone. She was not walking away from her god. No—she was getting closer.
The inner chamber was entirely devoid of sound. She could hear none of the ocean, not the rustling of wind or sounds of wildlife above. But silent though it was, the temple was the opposite of the Chuluu Korikh. The silence in the temple was lucid, enhancing. It helped her focus. She could almost see her way upward, as if the path to the gods were as mundane as the dirt on which she trod.
The wall formed a circle, just like the Pantheon, but she saw only one plinth.
The Speerlies needed only one.
The entire room was a shrine to the Phoenix. Its likeness had been carved in stone in the far wall, a bas-relief thrice her size. The bird’s head was turned sideways, its profile etched into the chamber. Its eye was huge, wild, and mad. Fear struck her as she looked into that eye. It seemed furious. It seemed alive.
Rin’s hands moved instinctively to her belt, but she didn’t have poppy with her. She realized she didn’t need it, the same way that Altan had never needed it. Her very presence inside the temple placed her halfway to the gods already. She entered the trance simply by gazing into the furious eyes of the Phoenix.
Her spirit flew up until it was stopped.
When she saw the Woman, this time she spoke first.
“Not this again,” Rin said. “You can’t stop me. You know where I stand.”
“I warn you one more time,” said the ghost of Mai’rinnen Tearza. “Do not give yourself to the Phoenix.”
“Shut up and let me through,” Rin said. Starved and dehydrated, she had no patience for warnings.
Tearza touched her cheek. Her expression was desperate. “To give your soul to the Phoenix is to enter hell. It consumes you. You will burn eternally.”
“I’m already in hell,” Rin said hoarsely. “And I don’t care.”
Tearza’s face twisted in grief. “Blood of my blood. Daughter of mine. Do not go down this path.”
“I’m not going down your path. You did nothing,” said Rin. “You were too scared to do what you needed to do. You sold our people. You acted from cowardice.”
“Not cowardice,” Tearza said. “I acted from a higher principle.”
“You acted from selfishness!” Rin screamed. “If you hadn’t given up Speer, our people might still be alive right now!”
“If I hadn’t given up Speer, the world would be burning down,” said Tearza. “When I was young, I thought that I would have done it. I sat where you sit now. I came to this temple and prayed to our god. And the Phoenix came to me, too, for I was his chosen ruler. But I realized what I was about to do, and I turned the fire on myself. I burned away my body, my power, and Speer’s hope for freedom. I gave my country to the Red Emperor. And I maintained peace.”
“How is death and slavery peace?” Rin spat. “I have lost my friends and my country. I have lost everything I care about. I don’t want peace, I want revenge.”
“Revenge will only bring you pain.”
“What do you know?” Rin sneered. “Do you think you brought peace? You left your people to become slaves. You let the Red Emperor exploit and abuse and mistreat them for a millennium. You set Speer on a path that made centuries of suffering inevitable. If you hadn’t been such a fucking coward, I wouldn’t have to do this. And Altan would still be alive.”
Mai’rinnen Tearza’s eyes blazed red, but Rin moved first. A wall of flame erupted between them. Tearza’s spirit dissolved in the fire.
And then she was before her god.
The Phoenix was so much more beautiful up close, and so much more terrible. As she watched, it unfurled its great wings behind her back and spread them. They stretched to the ends of the room. The Phoenix tilted its head to the side and fixed her with its ember eyes. Rin saw entire civilizations rise and fall in those eyes. She saw cities built from the ground up, then burning, then crumbling into ash.
