Jasira’s voice came softly. “Is this a shrine?”
“More than that,” I said, my breath caught in my throat. “This is a throne room. A seat. The Vireyan scriptures stated that some devoted people carved temples into the earth itself, allowing its power to sleep beneath them. They weren’t just places of worship; they were channels.”
The heat enveloped me, a tangible weight against my skin.
The flowers trembled slightly in the rising steam.
And suddenly, I wasn’t sure they had abandoned this place at all.
Bran growled low. The hair on his back stood up.
The mark on my forearm, the one from the glade, flared under my sleeve. It was a light throb, warm and faint.
Only I could see it.
The others had already begun moving again, passing the statue carefully, reverently, their footsteps light.
I lingered, rooted in the space as if something had wound itself around my ribs and refused to let go.
Vireya loomed above me, half-broken and crowned in scorched marble, her expression long weathered into something unreadable. The soot-stained runes at her feet glimmered faintly beneath the rising steam. If the others had heard whispers here, they didn’t say.
I did. But not words.
That feeling I had back in the glade, like a presence curled beneath the surface of the world, watching, waiting.
I turned my head and caught the curve of another chamber branching off from the main path. This one was smaller, more intimate, and hidden from view.
Pulsing.
I stepped in alone.
The air in the alcove felt heavier. Dust moved slowly through the heat, lingering in the still air, and the walls here bore older carvings than those outside. Someone had burned the symbolsinto the rock so deeply that they looked melted. A fresco stretched along the inner wall. Cracked with age, but the paint still clung in patches of crimson, gold, and soot-black.
I moved closer, my heart rising in my throat.
It showed a woman robed in flame and crowned in light—Vireya, unmistakably. Her arms stretched out atop a pyre in glory. Fire bloomed from her spine like wings as she tilted her head back. Around her, carved runes spiraled like solar flares—the old language for ascend, devour, become.
Beside her, a second figure was kneeling: a man robed in dark threads of moss and silver, his hands pressed to the earth, as if anchoring something she’d abandoned. Someone had carefully etched his eyes in pale gemstone, but now deep gouges blackened and scraped them out. As if someone had tried to erase him entirely.
His face, too, had been marred by intent.
Someone had clawed it away.
At the mural’s edge, the last image stopped me cold.
A dying god, draped in fractured silver and broken light, knelt at the base of a shattered altar. The woman stood beside him again, but she wasn’t weeping. She wasn’t reaching back. She was rising.
Not mourning…but ascending.
Her flames curled toward the heavens. His roots curled around the cracked foundation. One had chosen fire. The other had stayed behind.
And between them, a divide no carving could heal.
She rose in flame while the god withered into dust.
My hand trembled as I reached up to trace the spiral mark carved beneath her feet.
It matched the one on my arm.
