You must let go.
The darkness sucked at her limbs, and she sank into its grasp.
Let go—
The darkness swallowed her.Let me drown, she thought gently.Let me sleep.
But then she saw it.
A light flaring at the far end.
With the guttural instinct of those prone to surviving, she knew she needed to climb. To grasp the light that now sparked into a flame. Her body felt clumsy, awkward. She focused on the fire and its warmth. She had known a fire like this, she remembered. She had felt it coursing through her veins once, melded it into her bones, spun it into a spear.
And these people, they had seen it too. They had taught her of love, and family, and home.
Who even are you, alone?
“I am them,” Elena told the abyss. “I am nothing without them.”
And so from deep within, beneath her grief, her anger, her loneliness, Elena called her Agni.
It came roaring. Skating up her spine, zipping through her veins as Elena found herself looking up at the Goddess. It clicked then. The inexplicable pull since stepping onto this land, since wielding Agni itself. It came from here.
From Her.
“Do you see now?” the high sister said as the inferno spun around them. “You were always one of the three.”
How had she not seen it before?
Elena fell into the final form of the dance, the Goddess, and the inferno sighed as if it had been waiting all this time. It enveloped her, gently. Colors burst and flared, brilliant and vivid and unlike anything she had ever seen, shades and hues she could not name. She heard the flames clearly for the first time. They told her about the fire thrumming through the temple, and the small, distant ones flaring through the capital. They told her of hunger, and anger, and loss, but beauty too.
The Goddess’s inferno sang to her with a song as familiar to her as her own heartbeat. Was this what Samson heard when he commanded the Eternal Fire? A song of his own being? Elena swayed, overcome.
The high sister steadied her and gestured to the Goddess above.
“The Goddess, the Serpent, the Phoenix, their power is everywhere. It is the prana of the universe. The Triagni can bend it to their will. They can even take it.”
Elena touched her navel chakra, feeling, for the first time, its power. “What is the Triagni?”
“The three wielders of Agni. The three manifestations of the fire goddesses. You, the one they call Prophet, and the third. You are all connected. Created from the same ancient spark of the universe. The core spark spoiled when the Great Serpent betrayed Her sisters. She imprisoned the Phoenix and put our Goddess into a deep sleep. But there was a consequence. The Great Serpent was imprisoned in a cage of Her own making. You must break that cage for the third to rise and the Triagni to be complete.”
Elena turned to the priestess, and as she did so, her vision split. It was as if she was looking at the priestess from two views: through her own eyes,and that of her Agni. She saw the heat centers in her body, the warmth in her veins. Her chakras and nadis were a glowing map. Elena wondered if she could pluck…
The high sister clapped her hands, and the inferno returned to the bowl, morphing back into white sand. Elena blinked as her vision centered. There were no scorch marks on the floor, no ash, no sign of an inferno. It was as if it had never existed.
“Not yet, little queen,” the priestess said firmly. “You have only just opened your chakras. Taking prana now will hurt your Agni, but give it time. You will learn.”
Her body felt raw and aching, as if she had run for several days and had only now come to a standstill. But even through the fog of her exhaustion, Elena desired the inferno and its luscious power. She wanted it back. “Tell me how.”
The Yamni withdrew a shard of obsidian. Frozen within the rock lay a feather as thin as her fingernail and no taller than her pinkie.
“We start with this. Give it to the one they call Prophet, and his Agni can be yours for the taking.”
“Wh-what do you mean?”
The priestess smiled, though Elena could see a tinge of sorrow in it. “The Phoenix gifted this feather to our Goddess. It was once a token of friendship, but it will be a weapon for you now. Give it to the Prophet, and you will open a connection between your Agnis. Then you can start to siphon his power.”
Elena thought of Samson standing in the rain with her blood on his boots, and she imagined her Agni overwhelming his, suffocating the flames one by one.
