Elena snapped her wrist, and the flame vanished. “What are you doing here? Did Daz send you?”
“No, I am not here at the general’s request but my own.” Sura sat on the edge of the bed. “Sit.”
But Elena could only stare. The high sister looked completely at ease despite dropping in with no warning, and Elena did not know what startled her the most. The Yumi priestess here, in her room, or the fact that she wore a plain Tsuani longcoat instead of her robes. Perhaps both.
“H-how did you get here?” Elena said, still standing.
“After you left, my sisters and I arranged for my journey to Tsuana,” Sura answered. “First across the bay to Nbru, then on a merchant trade ship to Tsuana. They really do have tasty fried okra here.”
“B-but,” Elena said, her mind skittering between the priestess’s odd appearance and her travels, “why?”
“The flames told me to,” Sura said simply. She looked around the room. “Do you have it? The feather?”
“The feather?” Elena began, and then she remembered the crystallized feather and Samson’s fading eyes. How he had fallen to his knees upon touching it. How it was the high sister who had told her to give it to him.
“You—you knew.” The priestess watched calmly as Elena trembled. She remembered the biting cold in his body, the pallid skin of his chest. But most of all, she remembered how that numbness had tried to drown her. “It almost killed him. You said it would help me take his Agni. You did not warn me—”
“I wanted you to establish a connection with his Agni,” Sura said gently. “Can you sense his now?”
Elena paused. She turned inward, searching. She perceived the ghost of Samson’s Agni, though the sensation felt hazy, as if trying to grasp a flickering shadow. The more she concentrated on it, the flimsier it became. “I—I can, sort of. It is easier when he’s closer.”
Concern ringed the priestess’s voice. “Can he lock onto yours? Have you tempered your end of the connection?”
“He did once.” She remembered the sudden rush of heat as Samson had reached for her Agni on the boat, and then how everything had faded, muted after. “We melded our Agni together to sail through the Black Pit.”
Sura inhaled sharply. “And he did not take all your Agni? Oh, Great Mother. Then perhaps there is a chance.”
“Chance for what?” Elena said, frustration pushing into her voice. “Why are you here? Who are you seeking? What is this connection you speak of?”
“I have come seeking the third, Elena,” Sura said. “It is here. I know it.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because your Eternal Fire has rejected your Prophet, and mine now burns black with the grief of the Goddess. The time approaches. You and Samson Kytuumustfind and break the Serpent’s cage. The third will wake then. Hurry, Elena. Let us go at once—”
But Elena was no longer listening. Her heart crashed against her ribs with the wild abandon of waves beating the shore. She staggered to a seat. It felt as if she were drowning, clawing for the surface, struggling for air, only for the waves to beat her down again.
Suddenly, she felt the sharp contours of the kamarbandh around her waist, the heaviness of the Phoenix and its intended purpose.Lead Samson to the beach.She had no room for priestesses and their raving dreams of gods and fire. This was her purpose. She did not care about dead gods. She did not care about unity or great divinity. Ravence was at the end of this long, arduous journey, and she was too exhausted to entertain anything else.
“Stop,” she whispered.
“—the fires will dance in unison! A new holy age shall begin! You are the Goddess’s vehicle of change and—”
“STOP.”
Sura froze. Slowly, Elena rose to her feet, and as she did so, she remembered her father and how he had told her of priestesses’ mad rants. Their incessant need toshoveupon others. Was this how he had felt, scraped to the bone, drained beyond belief, as he had listened?
“Samson Kytuu is not my responsibility,” she said. “After tonight, we will go our separate ways. Ravence does not need its god. It needs its queen, and I intend to return to build it.”
Sura sucked her teeth. “Are you afraid of divinity?”
“I am not,” Elena said truthfully. “But I am tired of these talks of distant gods. Neither the Phoenix nor your Goddess helped me when Ravence fell. The Serpent did not help us when Seshar fell. The gods are just that, Priestess. Distant, uncaring, unyielding. It is better you go back to your temple now. Your general will return soon, and I’m sure he will be curious why you will not be there to greet him.”
Sura studied her for a long moment, then said, quietly, “Do you honestly not crave such divine powers?”
Elena thought of the killdoms, of how she had reached for and wrenched out all the bright, essential parts of the captain until he had become a shriveled mess of blood and bone. She remembered the heat of power rushing through her veins then. The glory of it. The beauty of it. She closed her eyes, inhaling, then spoke. “I do. I have. On the ships, I saw the chakra points within another and could bend his heat to destroy himself.”
When she opened her eyes, she found the high sister still, her face marred with both horror and intrigue.
