“How creative.” Elena returned to Nomu’s writing. For all her mother’s adoration of the priestess, Nomu’s diaries were chaotic. Dramatic even. She detailed inconsequential ceremonies, then followed up on trysts with rival priests so raunchy it would make a prostitute blush, but when Elena turned to the third entry, a scroll not as ruined by ash or dust, she paused.
“Listen to this: ‘The first priests of the order have written that a sadness resides deep within these walls. I have come to feel it. Lately, I have dreamed of burning, of golden eyes speaking with a multitudinous voice that is both deafening and soft, that thunders through my skull and slithers through me in whispers. Always, there is a shadow within the flames. I think the inferno senses my unhappiness, because it has stopped spitting at me. Today, it tried to reach for me in what I thought was a comfortinggesture, but it was a warning. The shadows were stirring. One snapped at my ankle, and I was overcome with such a vicious chill I thought my bones would freeze and break. But then the inferno gave a great roar that had all the others come running in. The shadows fled. Sister Madhu told me later how I had fainted, and when I was asleep, the fire raged for so long it took hours for the high priestess to calm it. But I have felt its sadness. It grieves for me, and I do not know why.’”
The entry ended there, but Elena flipped it over, her heart beating erratically in her ears. There, as she had suspected, was a signature.
A. M.
The Eternal Fire does not rage because it is angry; it rages because it grieves.
Her mother had read this scroll. She too had written not of the Eternal Fire’s fury, but of its grief. And Elena still did not know why. She read the entry again. Held it up to the diyas, to the temple fire, but no secret passage appeared, no errant scrawl. The scroll remained markedly the same.
Kruppa carefully closed the prayer book.
“You know, sometimes, during my prayers, I can sense the inferno’s sorrow too. Sometimes, it just curls into itself. The day you freed Magar, it became so small that I thought it would vanish.” She stared into the temple fire as it crackled softly.
“If I were the Phoenix, locked in a mountain, forced to appear only after humanity had degraded itself to something monstrous, I would grieve too. I would mourn for all the things that have been lost, all the things I could not stop.” She kissed the cover of the book and returned it reverently to its stand. “But then, that is Her duty. To give us hope when we have forgotten what it feels like. To remind us that we are soft and human too.”
That is too simple, Elena thought. She looked into the glittering eyes of the Phoenix, at Her beak opened in an eternal frozen scream. What must it feel like, to watch for centuries as the people you loved and nurtured turned on themselves? She thought of her father welcoming Sesharian refugees and not giving them the means or resources to survive in a new home; the mother screaming as the terrified boy clutched his father; Samson smiling as her people bowed to yet another leader, another conqueror. It was the same cruel cycle. The ruinous march that led to new faces, new characters, but the same wicked fate.
She did not feel grief.
She felt rage, deep and dark and enduring. Centuries old, as dense as the desert, as unending, the kind stoked by unpunished sins and unrequited honesty. It echoed through her. Settled into her bones and began to make its home.
The Phoenix and Her Prophet were meant to inspire hope, to create justice, and with sinking, final clarity, Elena knew it was not her. She could never be her people’s Prophet. How could she create hope when her Agni tasted this vicious?
The flames quivered. She turned to listen, but when she reached for them, they shied away, as if afraid.
I have read of a deeper, darker power. It imprisoned the Phoenix in a dark, stony hell.
Shadows danced around them, as if stirred by the wind. When they scraped her feet, Elena did not feel a chill like Priestess Nomu. She tasted salt and earth, something raw and untamed and at once grimly familiar.
And for the first time, Elena considered the shadows as they curled around her, kept back by only the faint, wavering hem of the inferno’s light.
There are three types of fire, her mother had written. One had trapped the Phoenix.
Maybe that was why the Eternal Fire always raged when she came near. Maybe that was why it had tried to attack her.
What if my Agni imprisoned the Phoenix?
She could feel her Agni pulling beneath her fingers, itching to rush forward, to conquer, like all the ones who had come before her.
You are as much a god as me, Elena. You can destroy me too.
Samson’s admission was also a warning. He could destroy her as well. Already her people were turning away. Already they called on another god. If Samson Kytuu truly saw her as an equal, then she needed to balance the scale.
She needed to make the Prophet bend.
CHAPTER 11
SAMSON
The urumi has become the symbol of Sesharian resistance. Thus, the Jantari have banned the weapon. To own one is punishable by imprisonment, to wield one punishable by death.
—from chapter 43 ofThe Great History of Sayon
Though verdant forests limn the horizon green, a new light rises in mountains where the gods convene. Two points past the scar, left by a man to consecrate the stars.’” He swept the holo to Visha. “Send it to the Cyleoni.”
“What is this?” she asked.
