She forgot who she was.

In a floating void, dark dreams of disease and death haunted her. Furious voices and sirens screeched as the world slid toward hell.

Then her own voice, reassuringly confident, reminded her who and where she really was. Her memories returned, crisp with details and as emotionally powerful as if they replayed in the present moment.

Once upon a time, twenty years before the present year of 1325 WD, a girl whose name had become Ashes served as an acolyte in Lechat Leriand’s Church of Cycles, aiding in the upkeep of the room where bodies were prepared for their return to the watery womb of Keres’s Embrace.

Yes. This is me. This is who I am. The rest was just dreaming.

In that room, peat moss burned in copper braziers hanging from an arched ceiling of intertwined branches. The braziers swayed gently and cast flickers of welcome shadows across similarly-woven walls. Acolytes—Ashes and a handful of others—fluttered from station to station, tying bundles of sweet-smelling swamp roses and wild mint for drying, sweeping the gently-tipping floating floors upon which the building was constructed, and inventorying collections of fired-clay anchor stones.

The city of Lechat Leriand, seat of Leriand’s high king, dwelled in the northern reaches of The Wandering Tears. The Tears consisted of a wetlands region dominated by a system of lakes, shifting bodies of water with banks that were more suggestions than boundaries. Lechat Leriand was built on varying levels of high and low land alongside one of those lakes.

Some parts of the city sat on clifftops, others on platforms in the marshy lands at the lake’s very edge. Cylindrical towers were topped by roofs of woven living branches from the trees the city had entwined itself into. At the city’s highest perch rose the yellow- and red-ochre painted walls of the high king’s palace; at its lowest, floating directly on the lake’s surface on a platform that extended far out over deeper water, sat the Church of Cycles.

With the city located away from the frequently-squabbling kingdoms within Leriand’s uniting rule, most of the dead who passed through the church’s doors came there through natural and not violent causes. Of late, word was that the high king prepared to confront interloping tribes to the far south and drive them back across the river from whence they came. That had not yet come to pass, however, and the church’s acolytes continued their quiet days of service as they always had.

Ashes hadn’t always lived in the church—in her very earliest years she had been called princess and learned the ways of Cairbre the Water-Mother. But Ashes hadn’t been one of the very important princesses, and while most of Lechat Leriand turned to Cairbre for guidance in the path of life, Keres the Mother of Death required followers, as well. As the most expendable of the high king’s children, the girl who had become Ashes had been sent as the royal tribute.

For the most part, Ashes had become content with her fate. The goddess of cycles whispered instead of laughing, but she spoke with a great purpose. Live each moment, and with great mindfulness. The moments won’t last forever, and they will not come again.

That was the message. The girl was young enough yet, only twelve years, that she didn’t entirely comprehend how the roll of years didn’t stretch out eternally. She worked among the dead every day, but she didn’t yet glimpse the approaching darkness of her own end, and so despite her pragmatism, that inevitable darkness did not yet fully shadow her soul. She knew death would come for her someday, but she did not quite yet understand the fullness of what that meant.

That didn’t mean Ashes didn’t understand loss at all, however. Before she became Ashes, she had been a daughter and a princess, and she had lived in the light. Now, she lived in shadow and non-identity, and while she didn’t hate where or how she lived—quite the opposite—a tiny black wound of what if remained, never-healing.

What if I had not been the youngest? What if the church did not ask for the favor of a king’s tribute?

What if my father had loved me too much to let me go?

The high king’s decision, of course, had not been about love but about duty. The initial ritual for Keres’s servants required a symbolic dying from their old life, forsaking all family and belongings and even the name given by their family, all replaced by a new devotion to Keres.

A new name. A new life. A new family. In the darkest and loneliest of nights when the wound reopened and bled, those things brought Ashes little consolation.

On one of those days twenty-odd years ago, Ashes counted the disc-shaped brick anchors, cradling each in her hands and sorting them into piles atop squares of hide so that each bundle contained just the right amount of weight. Later, when Keres’s priestesses prepared the dead for burial, the anchors would be nestled into body cavities before the bodies were sewn shut and sunk into their final resting place at the bottom of Keres’s Embrace, the lake upon which Lechat Leriand was built.

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Alongside Ashes worked another girl, whose hair shimmered with red highlights much like the copper braziers. Ashes’ hair was dull brown in comparison, and her eyes were more hazel than the other girl’s deep green. Both wore the gray-green nettle-woven robes of the church, but the other girl was four years older than Ashes and stood a head taller.

The other girl, whose name had become Moss, bowed her head closer to Ashes. A strand of her brassy hair fell across Ashes’ arm. Her lips moved.

Ashes could not now remember what Moss had said that day. Sixteen years old to Ashes’s twelve, Moss had taken Ashes under her wing and become a sister who was more like a sister than the real ones Ashes had left behind. But although the precision of Ashes’s memories did not include Moss’s exact words, a lightness rose in her chest even to this day, a memory of emotion buried deep and irretractable despite the imperfection of Ashes’ mind.

On that long-ago day, Moss held a single white anemone bloom between her fingers. Smiling, she tucked it into Ashes’ hair.

Ashes remembered the moment not because it was unique—Moss had, even then, been doting and generous-hearted. Ashes remembered it because of what had happened after.

The high priestess had swept into the room, dressed in the same simple robes as the acolytes but bearing a sense of importance which was nearly visible, like a halo around the pinned-back gray of her hair. Her head turned as she surveyed the room. Acolytes ceased laughing, not in the startled way of students caught doing something they shouldn’t but from mere curiosity. Mother Reed was not a harsh taskmaster, but neither did she frequently swoop in among her charges for no apparent reason.

The high priestess’s gaze fell upon Ashes and stopped. The woman’s murky green eyes stared, unblinking.

Ashes did remember, quite clearly, what the priestess had said.

“Come,” Mother Reed had said. “The high king requires you.”

What Ashes heard was more than what the priestess spoke. What Ashes heard was what she wanted to hear.

Your father has not forgotten you. Your father wishes to see you.

A small, foolish hope that Ashes had all but quashed flickered to new life. All her childhood, she had learned that her father’s only use for her was as a requisite offering to the Church of Cycles. Her elder siblings were the true heirs to the kingdom, the true lights of the high king’s life. Ashes was not unhappy in the church, it was true. Keres, goddess of the natural cycles of life and death, valued the simple joys of day-to-day life over all else, because what better way to respect death than to enjoy life? But somewhere deep inside, Ashes had always wondered what her life as a princess—as a daughter—might have become, if only her father had allowed her the chance to find out.

And now he was asking for her.

With blind hope dazzling her, Ashes followed the high priestess from the room. As she moved away, Moss brushed her fingertips against Ashes’ shoulder and whispered something. Ashes couldn’t remember those words, either.

Somewhere along the way from the church to the throne room, the anemone bloom Moss had gifted to her fell from Ashes’s hair. Ashes didn’t notice. She followed Mother Reed with a lightness rising in her chest.

He asked for me. The king. My father.

But her father the high king didn’t want to see Ashes at all. She never saw him again, not on that day or any other. He had wanted only another service which Ashes, in her irrelevance, could provide.

“You will become as a beacon.” That was what Mother Reed had said. As she sprinkled real ashes and powdered herbs and flower petals into a circle on the floor, she spoke those words to a twelve-year-old, utterly naive girl. “A hope to our people.”

Of course, Ashes had wanted that. Up until minutes before that one, she had been merely the forgotten child of the high king, a servant of Keres whose true name would forever be only Ashes. If she couldn’t have her father’s love directly, then perhaps she might earn it in this way.

What Ashes had known then was very little. She’d heard the histories, of course, of the Crown of Sorrowed Brightness and the man, Berwan Dar, who had wielded it in the centuries-old War for the Shields between The Circle of Shields and the invading Iraekhi horde from the south. The destruction wrought by Dar and the crown had birthed The Drowning Grove and killed nearly as many allies as enemies. Dar and his crown had vanished after, either killed in the same catastrophe or fled to parts unknown. If not killed outright, then the crown’s bearer was surely dead by then, nearly seven hundred years after. The crown itself had not been seen since.

Now, they thought to have Ashes find the crown. Retrieve it.

Ashes. A girl little more than a child. Retrieve the Crown of Sorrowed Brightness. Her head swam with the intoxicatingly impossible possibility of it all.

She would be a hero. She would no longer be merely Ashes. Her father might love her again.

It never occurred to Ashes to ask why, when the crown had been missing nearly 700 years, it should be so important to find it now that they would entrust the task to a child—or why it was suddenly possible at all.

Mother Reed, powerful in the ways of Keres, carried an aura of deep maroon, warm but still. She moved with steady competence, weaving her circle of components around Ashes, and a sense of deep silence settled. The air stirred, a shimmering like that of deep water disturbed at the surface.

In the distance, bells seemed to ring faintly. For a moment, they reminded Ashes of the sirens which haunted her dreams. She thought it might be the palace tower bells, although she’d rarely heard them. Perhaps the sound was part of Mother Reed’s aura. Certainly the deep notes seemed something Keres would like.

But at the sound of bells, Mother Reed’s head jerked, as if she fought the urge to look away from her work. As she sprinkled a last pinch of some blackened dry flower, her hands shook.