Page 1 of The Lost Reliquary
One
When they whisper, we wake…
EVERY DIVINE EXECUTION BEGINSpretty much the same: with me, bored and sweaty, staring down at the worn patch that sits before the altar of Tempestra-Innara, last living goddess of the Devoted Lands.
I hate that spot.
Even from the highest gallery of the Cathedral, it stands out like a stain, darker than the stone surrounding it, burnished smooth over centuries by the knees of countless devoted, conquered, and condemned. The Cathedral’s apse curls around it like an embrace, oil lamps on spidery chains flickering among the golden, bejeweled bones that line the walls. Some of those bones’ owners knelt too. I’m not sure they would have taken it as a compliment, having their flesh stripped away, skeletons gilded and set with gemstones, but that’s the honor the Goddess bestows upon their worthiest of enemies: a tacky eternity as the Cathedral’s most striking décor. From this angle, I can’t quite see my favorite skull—the one with its front teeth missing and jeweled daggers in its eye sockets—but it’s there. I named it Alastair.
Like the apse, the Cathedral is crowded with bodies, but fleshy living ones, which is why I am melting like a damn cake left in the sun.Even as high above them as my fellow Potentiates and I are, practically wedged into the skeletal ribbing of the vaulted ceiling, there’s no relief. It must be worse in the gallery below ours, which, despite the upcoming entertainment, remains sparsely occupied by our superiors in the Orders—some huddled Priors oozing bureaucracy, a pair of Bellators in their snappy military garb, one rather wilted-looking Cleric of the Blood. And I can’t imagine the pure torture on the floor, where a lagoon of onlookers churns endlessly, their perfumes and sachets long ago congealed into a smothering overripeness that I can practically taste.
Somehow the corporeal bouquet does nothing to temper the unwashed-armpit smell of my helm. We may not put on our ceremonial armor often, but the least the Dawn Cloister attendants could do is give it a good airing out before we do. Unlike those in the Orders,wedon’t get a choice in attendance. For Potentiates, an execution is a requirement. But for the devoted, it’s their lucky day, the culmination of a pilgrimage to the holy city of Lumeris—garish, throbbing heart of the Goddess’s empire—and that slight chance to find themselves in Tempestra-Innara’s revered presence. Thousands of the less fortunate wait outside the sprawling Cathedral complex, prayers on their lips, regret for not successfully talking (or bribing) their way past the guards in their hearts, and still hoping, hoping, hoping for a glimpse of the Goddess’s glory.
“At this rate,” I say under my breath, shifting uncomfortably as a trickle of sweat runs down the small of my back toward my swampy nethers, “we’ll be dead before the condemned is.”
To one side of me, Jeziah lets out a brief yip of laughter, as fox-like as the creature his helm depicts. On the other, Morgan is silent, but I can sense the simmering annoyance beneath her hawk, which stares unflaggingly at the Cathedral’s apse. It would probably take me literally exploding into flames to break her focused, ever-obedient attention.
“Lys!”
I turn my head slightly at the hiss of my name, down the line of my fellow Potentiates to where a warning expression flashes beneath Prior Petronilla’s hood. There and gone, her face shadowed again, but the message is clear. Especially when her attention snags fleetingly onthe gallery directly across from us, where the Potentiates of the Dusk Cloister stand:Do not embarrass us.But if the Dusk Potentiates or their Prior noticed my indiscretion, they give no indication, as straight and still as the statues honoring our distinguished predecessors that line the halls of the Cathedral complex.
We are a mirrored set, the gold-trimmed ebon gray of their armor contrasting with the polished red and gold of ours in a perfect theatrical duality. I don’t know the names or faces of the Dusk acolytes, and they don’t know ours. There are only helmed facades: raven, wraith, weasel, serpent, and, at the very end, a demon, with horns that curl as delicately as seashells. Until we join the higher Orders, we are nameless, faceless things to everyone outside our Cloister, our sole purpose to train and learn to serve the Goddess to the highest degree. Within the Dawn, competition to be the best is fierce. But Prior Petronilla never lets us forget that, no matter how we excel, the Dusk Potentiates might be that much better, that much more devoted. I expect her counterpart seeds the same expectation about us, forcing not an ounce of potential to go unrealized.
But anonymous or not, pitted against one another or not, we are all the children of Tempestra-Innara. Their Chosen. Every one of us once knelt on that infamous spot below and received the gift of the Goddess’s blessing: our communion of blood.
A shiver runs through me. But not from the memory.
Tempestra-Innara has arrived.
Instinctively, I stand straighter, discomfort forgotten as a sudden, diminishing sensation takes me. I am small, smaller even than when I first beheld them, when their gift trickled its way over my lips and into my veins. That shared blood sings now, their holy presence like a rush of fever as the bones in the apse shift, revealing the hidden door to the Goddess’s sanctum in the Cathedral spire. Below, the crowd cries out with pleasure, fear, awe. They clutch the reveries that hang around their necks—tiny representations of the holy flame wrought in gold, silver, marble—and reach out for a touch that will never deign to grace them. There is no acclimating to the arrival of the Goddess, not even for those with their divine gift. I’ve stood in their presence countless times, and still it overwhelms, turning my mouth dry and making me acheto throw myself down onto the weathered stone below, to supplicate myself. To bask and bathe in their godly power.
They glide forward. At the edge of the dais that marks the boundary between the apse and the Cathedral’s nave, the Goddess stops and raises their hands. Flames appear, filling their palms with a clean, white blaze. I feel the trembling in my legs again. Many in the crowd fall to their knees. I hear whimpers. I see tears.
I get it. For most, it’s their first time this close to the Goddess’s glory. Do they see the same thing I do? The unnerving amalgamation of flesh and divinity, familiar and alien at the same time? Describing Innara, the chosen vessel, is easy enough: tall and slight of frame, with a light complexion and brown hair.
But that is not a description of Tempestra.
They tower.
They radiate.
They glow with the cold brightness of a full moon, their tresses flowing with the power of a river swollen by spring thaw. And their flames… even from a distance the flickering tongues of divinity feel hungry with a need to cleanse the impure.
When they whisper, we wake…
The prayer begins without need for a cue, a rising swell of voices.
At their command, we follow. In their light, we are seen… we are judged…
My lips move automatically, reciting words I’ve known longer than I can remember, brought to my village by soft-tongued clerics long before a Bellator’s forces arrived to deliver their enlightenment in a more bellicose manner.
May their blessed flame find purity of faith, or else leave cinder and ash.
Jeziah once told me he thought the air seemed thinner at the end of a prayer. Lighter, as if something has been burned out of it. I agreed at the time. But it was a lie. The air seems as thick and cloying as it did before. No matter how fervent the delivery, prayers are just words dressed up fancy. And as this one tapers off, Tempestra-Innara lowers their hands, letting their flames extinguish before they address the crowd.
“Bring forward the condemned.”
They don’t waste time getting down to business. Which I appreciate,since the initial shock of their arrival has faded, and now I feel the sticky sweat again. The quicker this is over, the better.
