Page 82 of Property of Prophet

When the light changes, I move.

Chapter Twenty-One

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Prophet

Calix believes he has won. I can see it in his face as the stolen grace inside him reaches for my open hands.

“You see it at last.” His voice is quiet and certain. It lands behind my sternum and unfolds there, a choir with something buried alive inside it. “The others clutch their scraps of Heaven and rot around them. You were always wiser, Witness. You understand a gift is only a gift once it is given.”

The old title in his mouth feels the way desecration feels.

“I understand what you are,” I tell him, and my voice holds. It should not hold. Standing this close to him, every instinct I have tells me to run.

“I understand what you need.”

“Need.” He tastes the word and lets it in. “Yes. Honesty, at the end. I need what you no longer require, brother. You have chosen the mud and the meat and the little burning years. Wear them. I ask only for what you were.” His hands lift, elegant and cracking, light bleeding from every seam. “Give it willingly, and I will leave your mountain standing... your animals, your woman on the roof with her clever rifle.”

He knows where she is. Of course, he damn well knows. The threat is delivered gently, the way he delivers everything, and somewhere beneath my fear, a colder thing wakes up and takes notes.

Fury told me the truth beside a woodpile.

“Take it,” I say, and bow my head deeper.

The extraction begins deep inside me. Calix pulls, and the first thread of grace tears free. Light lifts from my skin and crosses the space between us. It disappears into the fractures in his body, and pain hits hard enough to buckle my knees, but I stay on my feet.

He pulls again.

Pain arrives. Every break, burn, and scar I have ever carried wakes at once. My knees fold, and I fight to stay on two feet. Both hands shake against the sky, and frost forms on my lashes where my eyes have flooded and frozen in the same breath.

Worse than the pain is what travels with it.

He isn’t only taking my grace. He is taking everything attached to it. Every life I witnessed. Every death. Every prayer and confession carried across hundreds of years. He swallows all of it. Then the pull reaches this winter, and touches a small cabin, and a woman counting sutures by lamplight.

No.

Some walls are load-bearing. He will have everything else before he has one hour with her.

He feels the wall. Of course, he feels it. His voice arrives again, inside this time, poured straight into the wound he is making, and it has changed registers... gentler, almost kind.

‘Keep her.’ The words bloom behind my eyes with pictures attached, silver hair and gray braided together, decades laid out neat as surgical instruments. ‘I am not cruel, Witness. Yield the rest without struggle and grow old beside your mortal. You have my word.’

His word. Fury’s story stands beside a woodpile in my memory, and I hold it up against the pictures. Twelve souls are itemized across a table with their qualities listed but no names. A being who would sell his own congregation for mortar does not keep vows to inventory. The pictures are beautiful. So is he. Neither survives contact with what he is.

The stars stay enormous overhead, and the aurora pours green across them. Forty-two people kneel in the snow at the edges of my vision, watching their god feed, singing under their breath.

He is not careful.

He no longer needs to be.

The pull doubles, and the world goes white at its edges, and one thought keeps its footing in the flood. She is on the roof. She is watching this through her scope. Steady hands, Lily. Yours and mine.

My mouth opens, and the binding rises through me from somewhere below memory.

My mouth opens, and the binding comes. I have not spoken the words in centuries. I do not need to remember them. They remember me. The Khorvath seal is a child beside this rite, and most of what my brothers know had no name when it was cut.

The first phrase leaves me in a whisper.