Page 170 of The Cerulean Sister
The doors fling open and light ripples across in bands, out into the space and seemingly beyond the temple.
99 drapes himself on top of me until it stops, and from under his bicep, I can see the creature’s back at the altar.
In the next blink, it shoots up into the air, through the open-air crack in the ceiling in a beam of light and flapping wings.
My ears pop at the sudden silence.
The opening of the temple is empty, as if there were no fight at all, the enemies gone as if the creature incinerated them and left us all behind.
As 99 finally lets me go, I stand, stumbling to my feet to get closer to the crater’s edge.
"Thea!"
The hole is dark, empty, and goes on forever into the floor, the ground, and Cosima itself.
I know she is gone.
I stand, stalking to the elder who cowers behind a pew. I hear others pause their murmurs and 99 calling out my name.
"What was it?" I scream at the elder before I reach her. "You will tell me why it was kept behind a ward!"
The elder screams as I grip her chin with my hand, my light hooking into her like little thorns, keeping her still.
"If the ward around the city has fallen, then I know she is dead." The elder’s answer is delirious, her eyes unfocused, like she did not hear my question.
I shake her. “Tell me!”
"She kept it locked away, the only way it would not intervene," she says.
"What was it? First Mother damn you, what was it?"
"The creature holds the scales of nature, rights the imbalances, and you freed it. It will balance every scale we tilted. So many of the priestess order will die. You will too when it sniffs out your false divinity."
I raise my arm to slap her, to make her focus and not speak in such riddles, but 99 shouts my name, the tone letting me know something is very wrong still.
"It took Cosima's stone," he says low.
Calliape stands next to the altar, completely pale and looking down at the two remaining stones.
I stare down at the empty spot, where the velvet indents and where I placed them, where Cosima's stone has never left in all of our history.
"You need to seal the doors, bind it," Selene says and walks to the back of the temple and opens the door where my sister is hiding with the other women, instructing them that they need to come out.
"The ward is not back up. It did not work." I grab onto 99's forearms, hoping he understands what has happened.
"We go to the ship now, in case there is another attack," he advises.
I glance at the aisle where Calliape is walking down, but she looks as dazed as the elder, her legs moving slowly and trance weary. August sees her, leaving the guards, who continue to protect the entrance.
His expression breaks, the way it did when I saw him kneel over her in the grand hall, making sure Crixa did not kill her.
Her balance gives out the moment she reaches him. He catches her and then they are gone, folding the distance together, going somewhere else in an instant.
99 rushes the rest of us toward the entrance, making the Viathans open the doors again. I make sure my sister is right by my side as we sprint down the aisle of my former temple.
The doors are slammed as we exit, just enough for me to see a momentary sliver of the cracked, broken space I once loved. The floor I spent countless hours praying on, the windows I stared out of dreaming of how much better my life would be if I ascended. And the altar of the stones we retrieved, the ones I placed when I realized my life had changed, but not in the way I thought it would.
"Seal it, Ferren!"99 shouts through our tether.
