“We shouldn’t be here,” Elena repeated, for what must have been the tenth time in the span of a hundred heartbeats.  “Nobody should be here.”

I ignored her, as I had been doing while I set up my ritual materials.  They’d taken most of my draza to collect and no small amount of side-trips on the way home.

“You spend one cycle at that school and you find an old map.  And it leads us here.  But that doesn’t mean it’s a good plan,” she said again, looking up at the statue.

It was an impressive statue.  Sariandi, the Bound Goddess, in her most traditional representation.  On her knees, arms straight behind her, bound at the elbows and the wrists, strappado, with chains stretching up behind her.  The thing that separated this representation from the more common one seen in alcove nooks of the Nine was her face.  In most modern depictions, Sariandi is humbled, her face down, often covered by her hair.  In this one, her eyes are covered by a blindfold but her chin is up, and somehow, the smile on her face is unmistakably one of victory.  Like this is her place, and hers is the control.

“I need another drop here,” I say, and gesture to a spot on the ground where I’ve clustered infused charonite, purple clouds swirling beneath the orb’s surface.  Elena sighs, walks over to the spot, folds her hands together and then separates them.  A drop of liquid essence sits in midair, suspended over my rock-sphere, its white light bleaching away the purple-and-black that broil in the stone beneath it.  That makes nine of them, and the circle is complete.  On one hand, I am tempted to think this type of old ritual is mostly unnecessary glitz and glamor to impress the simple-minded.  On the other, I’m following the old leaflet by the step, because on the tiny, miniscule chance this works, and it is not some long-forgotten prank from a long-dead student… well, I’m not going to fail because I didn’t follow the directions.

“Are you sure—” Elena begins, and I cut her off with a raised eyebrow.  “Stupid is…” she mutters, but I turn back to the statue, kneel myself to mirror it, place the leaflet on the ground in front of me, and begin to read.

Here, I lose confidence.  I’m sounding out the script phonetically, but I have no idea how these words are pronounced or what language I am miming.  At best, I hope the Goddess herself is able to understand me, and she has to be a bit lonely down here.  Those that revere Sariandi are scarce on this continent, and I’ve never seen an entire room devoted to her, much less the palatial settings Elena and I have discovered.  It was almost too easy to find, for something so long lost, and I hope that the discovery is a boon of the Goddess herself, showing me favor in my endeavor.

After all, Sariandi is reputed to meddle.  That’s why her name is so rarely spoken, her worship so rarely public.  Most people don’t want the attention of the divine.

“Wait!” Elena screams, and I ignore her again, until she snatches the paper out from in front of me.  I look up, furious, and then I see it.  The statue is growing.  Previously, it dominated one end of the large room, carved from a single stone of unknown origin and massive size, and now—No, I correct myself.  Not growing.  Moving.

“WELL?” a voice deep yet feminine echoes from every direction, “DO NOT STOP NOW, LITTLE ONES.  I HAVE NOT HEARD THAT SONG IN MANY, MANY TURNS.”  I gather to my feet and leap backwards, only to impact my own barrier.  The droplets have disappeared, replaced by a nine-sided thin line, and when I try to reach past it, my hand hits an invisible barrier.

Elena screams and wads up the leaflet, throwing it at the statue.  It disappears, then I hear her choking.  She stumbles and falls, and I rush to her side.  She is clawing at her mouth, and I reach in and pull out the leaflet.  She gasps for air as if she had been drowning for much longer than a few heartbeats, then lays on her side.

I turn to the statue.  “A boon for a sacrifice, that is the bargain!” I say, forcing myself towards bold words.  “I am prepared!”

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The immeasurably deep voice sighs, “ALWAYS WITH THE BARGAINS.  HUMANS.  I SUPPOSE YOU WANT POWER OR WEALTH OR MAYBE THE LITTLE PRIESTESS THERE?”

“No,” I yell, as an audible hum has taken over the room, rising in volume as it lowers in pitch.  “I wish a chance.”

“A CHANCE?” the voice replies, and this time, I see the statue move.  The corners of its mouth begin to tug apart, the previous satisfied smile stretching to an inhuman width.  With that subtle motion, all the rest of the wrongness of the statue comes into relief; that her neck is a bit too long for a human, her elbows too high up her arms, her stone hair too fine for any artist.  “MAKE YOUR OFFER.”

“MY STRENGTH,” I say, the choice long pre-determined.  All the legends of Sariandi’s Choice say the same thing: the more you give up, the more you receive.  When Devon Shieldshell chose to sacrifice her sight, she gained the power to predict and block nearly any attack against her.  When Flamebane took Sariandi’s curse, he gave up his knowledge for the ability to walk straight through the inferno-beasts that were torching the northern forest of the dusk elves.  Some stay he still exists, a gibbering idiot hidden away in the elfin realms, but all we really know is that the forest is still there.  And my strength?  I’d grown up in this end of nowhere hauling water and wood and shale and whatever-else the rest of the world demanded from us, and my bulk was tremendous.  Enough that it set me apart from all the thin, robe-wearing scholars at Serreset School.  Giving it up was no mark against me, now that I planned never to work for another being again, but it was the type of significant sacrifice that Sariandi should reward with a power that set me apart in my era.  I might not become the next Flamebane, but I would never have the struggle of my mother, nor her mother, nor hers, working for stale bread and mere subsistence.

“AND YOUR CHANCE?” the hum grew to unbearable levels, and I felt a trickle of liquid from my ear.  I spared a brief glance down to Elena and saw that the same affected her, the blood from her ears the pale blue of a God-blessed, her calling having been clear since the first DreamFeast after her birth.

“To know!” I shouted.  “To have no barriers to my learning!  To be able to understand anything, should I put my mind towards it!”

“GRANTED, AND INSUFFICIENT,” the voice thundered, and then, the hum disappeared.  I looked down, my hands remaining their massive and calloused appearance, hands that crushed quills and dwarfed books.  Then, I saw Elena rise.  She struggled to her feet, then began floating, a blue aura suffusing her from within.  She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.  A puzzled look grew over her face, and I saw the blindfold on the statue in front of us bunch briefly.  Like giant eyes behind it had just… blinked.

Elena’s mouth moved again, and I stared.  The silence was oppressive.  I went to pick up my foot, to stamp it on the ground, and was unable to move it.  Then, I saw the worst sight of my life.

Elena spread her arms, bowed her head, and moved her limbs behind her.  It was an eerie echo of the statue’s pose, and I tried to reach for her and found my arms as unable to obey my commands as my feet had been.  Elena's mouth opened again, soundlessly and her flesh fell away, followed quickly by the muscles beneath it, her blue blood splashing pale and silently on the ground.  In a moment, she nothing but skeleton, and all her tissue flowed across the ground towards the statue.  There, all of Elena but her bones formed back together, building from the ground up.  A skeleton-less body that looked so much like her, yet was oddly different; the arms did not join quite right, the ears were not at matched heights, and a thousand other oddities that screamed to me that this was not Elena.  Calmly, the figure reached down, peeled up a handful of stone off the floor, and shaped it like it was cloth into a blindfold, which it bound over its own eyes.

“Amusing,” a voice in my head said, “very amusing.  Regret nothing, little ones.  Your choices are your own.”  And then the figure turned away, walking towards one of the stone walls of the room.

A scream I did not know I was holding ripped from my throat, and I rushed to Elena’s bones as the ritual ring and my charonite shattered.  I reached down to pick up her up, holding her small, skeletal hand against my chest.  “This was not the bargain!  This is not what I asked for!”  Sariandi's figure turned, and the stone blindfold crinkled, like it really was made cloth.  Her mouth did not move, and again she spoke in my head.  “I see it’s already working.  You’re caring for another.  Your strength was not something that meant anything to you, and I do so detest attempts to trick me.  So I took from you what you valued most.”

“Elena?” I yelled.  “You had no right!  The gods do not dictate who lives and dies, that is for humans!”

“Oh, and you’re such the educated human to tell me what gods do?” the spectre of Sariandi, wearing the flesh of my oldest friend, countered.  “Anyways, I did no such thing.  I took from her what she most valued, and I took from you what you most valued.  From her, her humanity.  From you, your selfishness.”  She cocked her head to the side at me, “Did you not make this bargain because you believed you could get the best of the boon?  Perhaps you have.  I certainly do not begrudge you such success.  In fact, I bless your steps, for both of you.”  With that, she turned, and walked straight into the wall, disappearing through the stone.

I looked down at Elena’s skull, lolling on the end of her neck, and then dropped it with a start as her jaw moved.  The skeletal hand stayed in mine and I felt a gentle pressure around my fingers.  “It’s alright,” Elena clacked at me, her skeletal jaw somehow forming syllables without a tongue.  Each word echoed as she spoke.  “I’m just glad we made it out alive.”