What mercy awaits those who have forsaken Grace?

At the end of all things?

  “Novia’s bridge across the Dragon should be completed by end of Spring, Goddess, as long as it meets your approval,” spoke the priestess before the throne of the Stormmother.

  Lynne listened idly, holding an orb of water between her fingertips. Thankfully, her connection to the throne only transmitted speech; it would not betray her dour expression.

  All around, the hot springs bubbled steadily, releasing salty steam into the air. Cloudy mineral water swirled around the angel’s waist like a curious puppy, and the rolling mists swallowed the land in endless grey.

  This had once been a land of healing and safety. These springs had known laughter.

  Now all that remained were broken pools of bubbling mud and the mist that hid the scars of a cracked land.

  The splash of a cannonball broke the silence. Water surged towards Lynne, threatening to douse her, but the cresting wave froze the moment before impact.

  “Is something amiss?” the priestess in Wave’s Lament asked.

  “My Herald has returned,” Lynne remarked.

  Esmie surfaced, spit out salty water, and gagged.

  Ignoring the child, the angel continued, “Are there any other matters that require my attention?”

  “We await your return with baited breath, Goddess.”

  Rolling her eyes, Lynne ruptured the orb like a balloon between her nails.

  “Two hours and seven minutes,” Esmie announced. The girl glanced at the rune drawn in mud along the edge of the spring to be sure. “Two hours and eight minutes now.”

  “I rushed her today,” the angel of oceans agreed. She sank into the hot spring and sighed.

  “Do you have to radio them every day?”

  “I suspect they are manufacturing crises. They’re fishing for my blessings.”

  As any child would.

  “You’re making me go without your blessings!” Still a touch of petulance in her young voice.

  How easily they spoiled, and how feverishly they resisted wisdom.

  Can any claim to have resisted wisdom more than myself? Lynne chided herself. “You must first endure what you would soothe.”

  “I guess. But when we get back, there are going to be so many ceremonies! They’re so boring!”

  “I’m aware, dear.”

  Early this week, the assembled wisemen of the Plateau issued their complete rejection of her armistice. They would neither accept her as a legitimate goddess nor abandon the Lord of Peaks on nothing but the word of the enemy.

  Her city held its breath, awaiting the Tempest’s declaration of war…

  Yet Lynne held her tongue, and trade at Resting Dragon continued at full tilt.

  I ply the favor of your grandchildren, she mused. Take your hatred to the grave. I will still be here when you are gone. The slow erosion of gentle rains reshapes continents.

  Esmie wiped the rune of time from the mud and kicked to the center of the pool. She could keep her lips just above the water by staying on tiptoe. “How much further?”

  As though they marched to execution.

  “Not far now,” the angel of oceans said softly.

  “But getting home will take as long as walking out here!”

  The child sounded suspiciously happy about this fact.

  “Three weeks or so,” the angel agreed. “Is this the farthest you’ve ever been from Wave’s Lament?”

  “Yep. My brother would be so jealous!”

  “Ah?” Esmie so rarely spoke of her family, a silence seemingly born of neither abuse nor affection. Lynne remembered when that sort of independence was the norm, a child of ten almost ready for marriage.

  Then again, Lynne remembered when hammered bronze was a modern invention.

  “He wanted to join the temple too, but of course he couldn’t.”

  The temple should have accepted anyone of sound mind and body. “Why not?”

  “Because he’s a boy,” Esmie said, frowning at the obvious.

  Lynne blinked. “What is wrong with being a boy?”

  “Nothing, I guess, but only a priestess can dance.”

  The angel of oceans groaned. Rubbing at her forehead, she muttered, “My dancers are women because I like the way they move.” She opened her mouth to explain in further detail, but perhaps Esmie was not quite old enough for certain topics. Instead, she offered, “I prefer female attendants.”

  Of course, men did have a few uses, too…

  “The priestesses were very clear. No boys.”

  “If a boy wishes to dance, he is welcome.”

  “But you said no boys!”

  Lynne sighed. She was trying to be subtle with a ten-year-old. “I shaped their flesh, dear. As you should be learning with your runes, the application of Will is transcendent.”

  Esmie flushed bright red. “You turned them into girls?!”

  Teach a human to turn mud into gold and watch them proclaim power to the heavens. Suggest for even a moment that the flesh and mind might be similarly malleable and…

  “But they would see everybody naked in the showers!”

  “You’re naked right now.”

  “That’s different! We’re both girls!”

  “I have been a man.” She once led a peasant revolt against the Peak while wearing a body almost identical to Hylas’ own. It had not ended well.

  Esmie grimaced like a toddler with a pickle.

  “As have you.”

  The child swooned and squeaked, “No, I haven’t!”

  “Did you think the soul confined itself to one gender? One face? One time and one place? Little Esmie, you are so much older than you know.”

  “Let’s talk about anything else!” the child objected, kicking her feet.

  “Very well. Why does my temple forbid boys?”

  “Well, there weren’t any boys when you left, and the Lord of Towering Peaks only had boys, and you hated him, so everybody figured you’d return and smite the city again if a boy joined the temple!”

  Smite the city again.

  Such small words to stab Lynne in the heart.

  The angel of oceans drew in a deep, meditative breath. “I see. Another thing to correct.”

  Her list grew by the day, and she dawdled among the broken springs rather than face her fate. She flinched once more from the necessity of her duty.

  “Esmerelda.”

  Her young priestess drew herself out of the water. “Yes?”

  “This is where you turn back.”

  Esmie’s lower lip began to tremble. “What?”

  Lynne raised her hands like a woman attacked. “I have taught you what I can in the little time we have shared. When you return to Wave’s Lament, send a missive to House Mishkan in Ruhum. The Lady of that House will guide you. She will continue your training.”

  “I’m not looking for another foster family!” Esmie shouted, the tears welling. “I want to stay with you!”

  “Child…”

  “You’re going to leave the hard, boring part of rule to me!”

  Sharp truth from a child’s tongue. “Esmie, this place is a tomb. A crypt born from the conflux of three powers. Donovan has been drawn to the origin of sin, and he grows in the arcana every day. I cannot promise you that I will win.”

  The Tempest of old would win. Had won, the eldest against her united siblings.

  And where did that get us, hmm?

  “Then why fight?” Esmie shouted. “Who cares about this guy?!”

  I swore to a duty, child, and the angel of oceans has abdicated her every responsibility for long enough.

  “The priestesses all hate me,” the child sobbed. “They don’t listen to me! I can’t rule without you!”

  You must learn to be cruel, warned the Verdant. Verdandi, the seer, who sank even now into Reverie amongst her jungle.

  Should I forge myself into a weapon, little sister? Lynne wondered. Yet what becomes of my people when I become that brilliant terror? No, Verdandi, I will trust my own currents.

  “You harbor hidden strengths, Esmie,” the angel reassured.

  “The second the priestesses realize you’re not paying attention, they’ll find some way to get rid of me!”

  “They will know better.”

  Esmie kicked the water. “How are you so strong?!”

  Face red as a tomato, verging on a total breakdown.

  This dear child despairs before me.

  Too often had Lynne abandoned her Heralds to their fate, hadn’t she?

  Esmerelda spoke the truth. The temple was eager to be rid of this young interloper. A handful of weeks was simply not enough time to impart the bearing of a queen on a child. Alisandra had trained since she could waddle, and that girl still leaned too hard on her noble name for comfort.

  The angel of oceans knew herself for a creature of impulse, but she could not bring herself to believe that an impulse born in love was wrong. She would not become like Sebastian – a broken, sad creature shuffling between chores until the stars burned out.

  Too often have I ignored what is plain before me lest I become polluted with their lives.

  Lynne crossed the cloudy pond and hugged the child. “If it is strength you need, then strength I will grant. Lay flat, child, on your belly.”

  Esmie stretched over the nearest flat rock, and the angel knelt beside her. Scooping water from the spring, Lynne settled the minerals from within with her nail.

  “Now what do we have…” she murmured, flicking through the grains that remained. “Lithium derivatives, trace sulfur, salts and salts and salts…”

  “How do you know what all the sand is?” Esmie asked, peering over her shoulder.

  “Hylas taught me,” the angel replied, “when these peaks were yet green.”

  When they were young and foolish; before Lynne learned that with the love came the rage.

  “Ah, here we are. Silver.”

  The angel of oceans pressed her hand upon the rocks and stirred the boiling waters far below. The broken springs ran for miles beneath the surface, remnants of a great river, and there was a vein of exposed silver easily within her angelic reach. Her waters scrubbed flakes from the vein, rose through the mud, and deposited pellets in her hand.

  A thimbleful of silver. Such a small price for a soul.

  “Esmerelda…do you understand what you ask?”

  I grasped for power, and I became the sea. I took the mantle of the fickle winds, and I bore the sin for each drowned sailor. They died inside me.

  If she had understood the nature of aspects, the price of angelic power, the slow turn of eternity, would she have chosen to drown with her family in that storm? To allow the wails of wives to be no fault of her own?

  “Before I grasped the heavens, I could claim indifference. When the waves rose and the ships sank, that was merely the way of the world. Yet with power comes duty, and what I can gift will share that weight. You may regret such a choice.”

  “I want to stay with you,” the child said softly.

  As Lynne wished to be wanted.

  “Then it will be.”

  I will give you everything you need to rule, Esmie. May you carry the Maiden forward if I should fall.

  She sprinkled the silver across Esmie’s back, swirled the granules into abstract patterns, and dwelled upon the girl beneath her fingertips.

  Esmerelda the dancer. Toned by training, gifted and jubilant in motion, free on the tips of her toes. By the time she could walk, the girl pantomimed the Dragon’s Dance. She dreamed of the river, the serpent, and the song.

  Lynne swept a long spiral of silver around the girl’s spine, letting the excess splatter. Then you will challenge the air itself to bear your weight.

  Esmerelda the listener. Skittish of crowds and slow to speak. She held her secrets like jewels, close to her breast, and flinched from the publicity of the Azure-blessed. She kept every harmful whisper from the temple halls bottled in her heart.

  Lynne dropped sharp marks inside the spiral, pillars of strength for when the dancer needed to stand her ground. Then your quiet words will bear the weight of a shout, and your feet will always find the path forward.

  Esmerelda the brat. She heard what others missed, and so she knew more. Learned her catechisms quickly and scorned the girls who struggled. Balanced on her tiptoes by eight and resented taking classes with simpletons who could not keep pace. Raced forward, always the fastest in the room, and stoked private fantasies of superiority for meeting the simple challenges of adolescence slightly ahead of schedule.

  Lynne hesitated. This pattern she knew. Brittle superiority, the rush of outrunning one’s self, and the inevitable collapse. Pride and the fall.

  The angel painstakingly traced a trio of songbirds into the splatter swirling around the silver spiral.

  May they whisper wisdom in your ear. Learn from my mistakes. Let them guide you when you go astray.

  She leaned back on her heels and regarded the sketch. Flowing water, hidden strength, and fluttering wisdom. It was a beginning.

  Any mortal could reach this far and call the allusions in a sketch, though, and the angel required something deeper.

  Esmie deserved more.

  Lynne’s memories waited, a treasury of sins unblemished by time.

  For Esmie, she walked them – a thousand years in the blink of an eye. Among the foolishness, buried in the mud of her past, there were little insights and fragments of wisdom. These she snatched, racing ahead like a thieving magpie.

  She brought her sin to the surface, and she let her fingers adjust the sketch on their own. Let one of the songbirds shelter in the spray of the spiral waterfall while another spread its free wings; the pillars meld into the girl’s own spine; the speckles expand and flicker with every breath. By subtle degree, she transformed paint into Art.

  The Tempest coiled in the back of her mind, bored with this subtle work, and her freshly roused ghosts demanded the reckoning.

  Ignoring both, Lynne carried the current of her own life forward and into the girl.

  A life was not a history, though both beginning and end were known. What wisdom was there in such obvious signs? Any fool could pair the beginning and the end, the light and the dark, and call it wisdom. What use to carve a brand to run in a straight line?

  Lynne would not force Esmie to dance to another’s tune. Would not sentence her to stasis, ten years old until the need to grow broke her. Would not see that mistake repeated!

  The Maiden flared, summoning the still waters.

  A brand that dances and breathes, a living thing as brilliant as your smile.

  The girl’s flesh began to sizzle, and the silver upon her skin began to dance.

  The mists ceased to churn.

  The Tempest flared, pledging the fury of the storm to the girl before her.

  A brand that crowns you, proud as the sun.

  Both rushed into the girl, body and soul, and carved their place.

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  The world silent and still.

  Then Lynne slumped, reeling, with the taste of silver on her tongue and condensation across her hands.

  I might throw a river from its bed with a twitch of my hand, she marveled. But to move a soul an inch?

  Her fingers shook.

  Esmie shifted onto her haunches, and the brand shifted with her. As her back wrinkled, the spiral danced; the silver folded to form fleeting runes:

  Youth love belonging rule.

  A magic to dance as she danced; to grow as Esmie would grow.

  She will not suffer as you suffered, Alice, the angel thought in relief.

  Curious, Esmie stroked her own back. “Healed.”

  “Because you accepted it.”

  Their eyes met, and all the reverence of a priestess for her goddess was banished. Replaced by something softer and true.

  The child stepped forward and hugged Lynne around the neck.

  Lynne squeezed her back.

  “Are you okay?” Esmie asked. “You’re shaking.”

  “I will endure,” the angel promised. “Now put on some clothes.”

  They dressed in silence. Without prompting, Esmie twirled to allow Lynne to tie the ribbon at the back of her skirt, and the angel’s heart fluttered happily.

  “You know the way now, child.”

  “I do.”

  “You remember what food to forage?”

  “I do.”

  “And to send a missive to House Mishkan?”

  “I do!”

  “Then off with you, Esmie.”

  One more hug for good measure, and the Azure-blessed departed the spring to fetch the horse.

  Alone, Lynne clapped her hands. “Enough dawdling.”

  She let her aspect surface, and the mists swirled into her cloak of dewdrops. It was heavy today, the droplets soaking into her dress. Perhaps that was appropriate – that she should return to the origin of sin weighed by the waters.

  She contemplated a moment if she should conjure her spear…

  No. We will at least give the fiction of parley a chance.

  She wound barefoot through the muddy springs, easily finding the ruined path to the grand stairway. The cruel ages had stripped the ancient stairs of their grandeur, leaving a set of moss-coated notches jutting from the cliff. The delicate murals were reduced to faint indents in the stone, and the procession of heroes was only a set of rotted plinths.

  She climbed the broken stair, trailing her fingers over the sheer drop into roiling fog and reminiscing.

  When she finally breached the mists, she beheld the mesa islands, dead and gnawed by acid rain. The mists swirled below, and the grey clouds rumbled overhead. Indistinct clusters of rock may once have been dwellings, but they were faint as memory in this lost land.

  A place abandoned by three gods. The rains, the soils, and the seeds all turned against what once lived here.

  All of their works long gone, but of course the trophies of bone remained. These had been their greatest kills, titanic skulls with a dozen eyes and a hundred hungry teeth mounted on pillars of obsidian and jade. The columns had toppled, and the monstrous skeletons towered in heaps of ribs like old trees and shells like hills. There was a small, stagnant lake where the great shell of Wave’s Lament had rested.

  All was well as long as we fought for survival.

  Common dangers; shared distractions.

  Until there remained nothing to hunt but each other.

  Lynne thought of the Gamchicoth and smiled sourly. Ah, how we played with our food. We never cared if something slipped away. Only that we appeared godly in the act of the chase. The warning signs of our hubris were everywhere, staring us in the face as we mounted our latest kills for all to see.

  Just beyond the crater where the shell of Wave’s Lament had slept, the dejected remains of the temple moldered. A few muddy steps led into a courtyard of marble stumps and still water.

  Donovan waited for her there, hunched on a cracked plinth. He was thinner than his description, beard patchy and eyes sunken, and he kept his maimed right arm tucked close against his belly. He wore a heavy duster, ill-sized, and a pair of jungle boots. A bandit would catch the glimmer of a strange gem in his left hand and salivate at the easy mark.

  “You finally found the courage to stay in one place,” Lynne called. “Why?”

  “I have chosen favorable ground,” the Redeemer answered, his voice hoarse.

  “And you knew that I would come?”

  “Your kind are easy to hear, once you catch the knack.”

  “And who died to steal you that knowledge?” the angel challenged.

  “No one of importance.”

  “I doubt your guardian agrees.”

  His right arm twitched. “As though the Tempest holds human life in high regard.”

  “I pay my sins one at a time, mortal. Are you prepared to pay your own?”

  Donovan produced the Archangel’s diary and tossed it to the mud. “I’ve taken my fill, Tempest. I have no more need of it.”

  “Then you are blind.”

  “Your vaunted Archangel is a coward!” The Redeemer spit. “He could have crushed the Tempest on a whim, but instead he spent his days in hiding. He could have claimed this diary while I was still blind, but instead he is content to let his mongrel chase after my shadow.”

  “Then you read without understanding a thing he was trying to tell you.”

  “Stern words from a dog. You have tracked me across the world to kill me for defying his inane edict. Tell me, what sin is knowledge? Are you not messengers from above? Am I not a divine seeker?!”

  “You have caught a dread fever, Donovan. If I leave you to burn, you will light a conflagration like the mages of old. You will reignite a legacy of devastation, strife, and atrocities enough to wake the Foundations.”

  He laughed. “The Tempest here to lecture me on atrocities?! You who sought to claim dominion over the entire world?!”

   “My dominion was wrong,” Lynne admitted quietly. “Nothing worth repeating.”

  Feral caution glinted in the madman’s eyes, and he cocked his head to listen. “I cannot hear your approaching storm. Does your conscience bother you at such a late hour?”

  “Immensely,” she said sardonically.

  “Interesting. The demiurge believes it can still feel.”

  The angel of oceans summoned her black spear.

  “I have had time to contemplate your nature, godling.” He attempted to flex his maimed arm, though the act obviously pained him. “I only waited to see you in the flesh to confirm my suspicions. An arrogant, blind, judgmental Light wrapped in flesh – you are a guardian of the Garden! The woman is long dead, and a monster wears her skin!”

  She drew her cloak of mist against her body, an armor of dew.

  “Like those other guardians, you are compelled to pursue me. To smother the Truth and all who call its name. Mankind cannot be allowed to reclaim the Garden! Mankind cannot be allowed to walk tall! The hound must come baying!”

  Donovan hopped to his feet and tossed back his duster. He had sewn the gemstones into the lining and linked them with conduits of fresh blood. He held Thea’s dimmed amber in his hand, but the greatest prize was new: a jewel of three gods, scintillating like the sun through a rainbow.

  “Can you sense the righteousness of my cause, hound? Can you feel the eyes of God burning upon your back? Or is even the memory of that human woman burned away by the callous ages?!”

  What do any of us know of God?

  “If you wish to find God,” she replied, leveling her spear, “allow me to assist you on the journey.”

  “Come then, guardian! You will not find me meek prey!”

  His constellation of stolen power shone; a shroud of fire erupted before him. It baked the muck on the temple floor to clay and hissed against her dew.

  Arrogant displays of power. Did he think to dazzle her?

  Then he shot through the flame, swinging a staff of jungle wood.

  Lynne danced to the side, batting his strike away.

  When the weapons clashed, a high ringing thundered through the Bones.

  Blessed weaponry, she noted, jabbing at his exposed back. The simple leather of his duster caught the strike with ease. And transmuted fabric.

  He spun, swung low, and cracked his staff into her shins. The flaming staff met her dew, a gout of steam erupted, and the staff groaned like a living thing.

  Verdant-trained, she confirmed. The two-handed technique, crippled by his right arm.

  She retreated before his swipes, watching the play of his feet across the mud.

  “Do you think to test me?” he mocked.

  “Of course,” she hummed.

  After all, he waged war on two fronts. The Stormmother before him was dangerous, but the guardian of his Garden? She would be deadly.

  If Lynne was to triumph, it would be with the aid of Donovan’s own emissary to heaven.

  Donovan feinted back and abruptly accelerated far beyond the speed of a crippled man. He lunged, sending a surge of forge-hot fire into his staff, and caught her at the shoulder. The blow glanced off her dew, across his collarbone, and seared the flesh across her throat black.

  How dare he strike us! roared her Tempest at the familiar, burning pain.

  She hissed more at her own hubris than the pain. Her darker nature lurked just beneath the surface, ready to lend a helping hand.

  He jabbed again, but she threw the brackish pond-water from its bounds and into his face.

  Donovan laughed on the edge of hysteria, building his flames higher, and called, “Does the flame sting, hound?!”

  He abandoned all pretenses of restraint and launched into a flurry of inhuman blows, gemstones throbbing in time with his racing heart.

  Lynne endured strikes to her ribs and forearms, yielding ground, and watched the first of his gemstones sputter and fade.

  One down, three to go. Including the big one.

  How long would she need for his guardian to rise?

  Donovan finally paused, huffing, and considered her.

  She responded by throwing chunks of bone at him from salty geysers. Don’t stop to think! Look! You have your foe on the ropes.

  She let her bruises remain. After all, shouldn’t Donovan see how he wounded a god?

  The greater portion of my prowess resides in the indiscriminate Tempest, but even the Maiden can endure a couple whacks with a stick.

  Most mortals thought an angel’s body equivalent to their own, a machine to break with hammer blows, and she would hardly enlighten him at this juncture.

  “I dreamed of a rushing tide, and what stands before me now is naught but a witch no greater than a corner huckster!” the Redeemer growled at last. “Quit playing!”

  Lynne settled back into stance, aiming her lance for his throat. “I do not play. I exert myself to the degree required.”

  “Yet you winced at fire…”

  The covenant stone thrummed, and the angel of oceans felt the swirling ghosts of memory and sin.

  Donovan learned, eyes alight with a stolen glow. “Ah…aspects…pinpricks in the tapestry by which you steal Light…”

  The broken covenant stirred, and its woven form whispered Lynne’s secrets to the mage.

  It offered her up for judgement, and the Redeemer’s Guardian did not stir…

  “And Reverie? The sleep that is death…” He chuckled. “It grows clear now. It is not your body that must be broken.”

  The mage raised his left hand and called the mud to life. The ground rose and congealed into the shape of men, each crowned with the rune emet upon their brow.

  I’m beginning to see why the Archangel disliked mages!

  She surged into the forming men and struck for their heads. She drove her speartip into each one’s forehead, cutting the first letter from the rune. From emet to met, from Truth to Death, in accordance with ancient ritual. Without aleph, the beginning, each clay figure returned to empty mud.

  Yet even as she struck down the first ones, Donovan formed dozens more from the ample ground. He cast his fire among them, hardening their flaking skin, and bid them to advance on her with thick fingers outstretched.

  They turned to their quarry, revealing their hardened faces.

  Hylas.

  Verdandi.

  Men, women, and children, all buried in this graveyard where the Tempest finally revealed what she truly was.

  When this place became the Bones.

  Lynne hesitated, and the nearest golem clubbed her in the face.

  Staggering, she swiped at the golem’s rune, and her lance glanced away feebly. A few flakes fell for her effort, but emet remained.

  Truth was not so easily struck down.

  “Is something wrong, Goddess?” taunted the Redeemer, backing to the temple steps. “You are remembered fondly!”

  Even empowered by Light, he lied. All things to their place: mortal souls to heaven and angels to the Chorus.

  This seeming was the cloth of her own sin, lingering long after the victims found peace.

  How dare he! howled the Tempest. We will not be chained! We will not be judged! Who is this blind, little fool to question our judgement? He did not see what Verdandi would make of her children – how she planned to wed man and beast! Or how Hylas grew to demand all the gold of the earth for his own! We were the only hope of mankind! We were justified!

  Through long years of practice, Lynne had almost convinced herself that those claims were true. Almost.

  The angel of oceans wove between the golems, probing for a weakness. Her spear only chipped the dirt, and the golems approached from every angle. They were plodding, stupid things, but they inexorably crowded her towards the ruined temple.

  Judgement before the high court of man.

  We are stronger than this! We have devoured mages before!

  She spared a glance at Donovan’s duster. Another of the gems sputtered and faded.

  For every golem she managed to break, two more rose.

  Where is his guardian?!

  “Ah, this is easy as a lark!” he bragged. “Your ghosts rise of their own accord, seething for your throat!”

  Why does she allow him to wield this power?!

  The golems shuffled, and she spied an opening.

  She ducked, darted, and flung her spear between the golems.

  She heard Donovan curse in pain, though the golems immediately closed again.

  “Mind yourself, mage,” she growled. “We aren’t done yet.”

  Not until those stones ran dry.

  Yet the golems left her no room to dance. Another caught her in the back and drove her to her knees. She collapsed, clutching her reformed spear for support, between two of the ruined pillars.

  The Tempest roared, rage yearning to burst from its cage.

  We have the power. We have the right! We will destroy this mage. Bury him! Bury all memory of everything he ever touched!

  White hot madness, the Tempest reached for the sea in its bed.

  Bring the seas to the heavens and wipe this world clean! No more mages, no more servants, no more pain!

  Lynne lost her grip on her spear.

  Let us shed this cursed mantle! No more hobbling motherhood! We will be free of the disrespect – the disobedience!

  The golems punted her forward, and their collective eyes began to glow, rust-red with old fury. The air began to ripple like the desert noon, and the world beyond the mesa grew distant.

  As if such a trivial binding would stop the Tempest. She had drowned villages and wiped away tribes! So a few mortals would die when the seas burst free! So what?! There were always more worlds and more children. The drowned barely even suffered. They just fled home.

  I will not, Lynne whispered to her Tempest, braced at the center of the kiln. I will not!

  Rage did not care. That was its freedom. Rage did not have to care, and the Maiden would clean up after.

  I have inflicted so much harm already. Betrayed my siblings. Made war and brought famine. Why won’t you listen to me for once? This is what we deserve!

  There was only one more thing to do first.

  “You think…this little binding…is enough?” she mocked, staggering to her feet. The fire nipped at her hands, peeling back the flesh, letting the white tendon of her clenched fists show. “You’re going to have to put your back into it!”

  The last of Donovan’s smaller prizes finally faded, leaving only the covenant stone. The thief’s last key to heaven.

  Soon her quest would be complete, and Esmie would watch Wave’s Lament while she served her sentence in blistering stone.

  The legion of golems opened their hands, revealing names emblazoned in their clay palms. The names of her victims, the names of her sin, written in neat print by the thousand across each hand.

  Echoes that burned like the sun, and Lynne’s dew armor boiled away.

  She was naked before the heat, and the meat peeled from her bones.

  “I finally understand!” Donovan cackled. “A demiurge could never stand against truth! So simple even a child could see! You stand against God, and there can be no forgiveness for pretenders. Your sin is etched into the very fabric of the world!”

  The golems closed ranks, pinning Lynne into a prison just wide enough to stand at the center of thousands upon thousands of searing names.

  “This is why you fear the divine language. Because you fear the true fire that brings retribution for what your hands have wrought!”

  A fluke, then, that the golem shifted just enough to spy a coquettish dancer snatching a discarded diary from the muck

  Oh, God in heaven, leave her be! I will accept my penance!

  Donovan turned.

  “Face me!” Lynne screamed. She struck the golems, and her fingertips burned to ash.

  Had Esmie yearned to play a part in a hero’s story? Or had the Song conspired to draw her into this farce?

  Donovan smiled thinly. “What is this? You smell like her, girl…”

  Esmie spun away, her brand flashing silver, and ran for the steps.

  “A half-breed abomination…” he mused.

  But if Esmie was part of the trial, she was not a test for Lynne.

  The Redeemer; the judge; the man who would claim the mantle of righteousness.

  One did not evoke the mantle of heaven and escape unseen.

  “She is innocent! Let her go! That is all heaven asks of you!”

  He could become Lynne’s judgement.

  In service, perhaps even find absolution.

  If he was more than his crusade.

  He tilted his head and licked his lips. “What secrets lurk in the spirit of a half-breed? Is she a human, polluted by false gods, or a seed, waiting to burst into another profanity…”

  Grinning, he raised the covenant stone like a gun with the child in his sights…

  “Show me how your soul breaks, girl! Let me glimpse that corrupted garden!”

  The covenant stone flared, but its fire roared into the Redeemer’s fingers instead.

  He flung it to the mud by instinct, clutching fingered blackened and charbroiled. For a moment, he could only stare at his maimed flesh. Then his face twisted into a black snarl. “Traitorous creation!”

  He wrapped his hand in his duster, clumsily snatched up the burning stone, and aimed once more at Esmie. The Light within the covenant warred, sizzling against the leather as it slowly yielded to his desire.

  “You serve me!”

  The covenant stone released a bolt of fire. The shot caught Esmie in the meat of her neck as she fled, and the force of impact flung her face-first into the mud.

  There Esmie lay, bleeding.

  Lynne felt the current of Time pounding against her. Felt the Song of time, place, and being.

  The merciless, marching laws of birth, life, and death that stopped for neither saint nor sinner.

  The Redeemer struggled with the covenant stone, its fire twisting in his hands. “Quit your squirming! You called me here to purge these wretched liars! Serve me!”

  His Will was stronger than its fire, though he did not notice how swiftly it began to dim now.

  And the angel of oceans stared at her bleeding Herald, the world ringing in her ears.

  This is how it always ends, hissed the icy Tempest. They never listen. They never obey. We offer them care and comfort, and yet they disobey! We told her what to do! Why couldn’t she listen? This is why we must be stern! This is why they require such discipline! For their own good!

  Stricken, grieving, Lynne heard what her Tempest was actually saying for once.

  Don’t they understand that I know what’s best for them?!

  If they would only bow before her wisdom, she would take care of everything. Things would finally be perfect.

  Don’t they understand how much I love them?!

  Their every scraped knee and hurtful word echoed in her heart. She held them so tight, and yet they slipped from her grip with such ease.

  So Lynne tried to Will the world only a mother could wish for her children. Tried to mold herself in that image. She would be the Maiden pure, a shining light against the darkness. Perfection within; perfection without.

  She built her Goddess higher and all the more calamitous with every fall.

  Because every time she failed hurt more.

  Summon me once more. We will wipe the slate clean!

  The next time, she would be the perfect ambassador of love.

  Donovan glanced at the Goddess, safe in her prison, and marched to finish the job against her half-breed Herald.

  Esmie does not deserve this fate.

  Nor did Wave’s Lament, victim of a maddened goddess.

  The Tempest fury existed to shield herself. To make it someone else’s fault. To free Lynne of the pain.

  But her children deserved to be more than her orbiting constellation.

  At last, Lynne understood what the ancient Chorus Sang.

Excise the Goddess from the center.

In service, absolution.

This place is not about me.

  A new covenant beyond the cycle.

  The Work left to her by Hylas and Verdandi.

  Donovan slogged across the silt, straddled Esmie, and fumbled with the covenant stone. It still burned against the duster, and his numb fingertips no longer registered the texture of its edges.

  “I will care for them as my own,” she vowed. “All of them.”

  The grey clouds began to swirl.

  Snarling, the Redeemer clutched the gemstone tighter. “Show me the Gate, foul child. Give me another glimpse of–”

  A gleaming, ebony spear tore through the legion of golems and caught him square in the back. His blessed duster saved his life, but the blow flung him into the towering bones.

  “Face your own judgement!” roared the Tempest.

  “You who would steal your secrets from the innocent!” agreed the Maiden.

  Donovan staggered upright, dazed. He glanced between the insolent covenant stone and the Stormmother, and he ordered the golems forward.

  Lynne drew dew from deep inside, spun it into a cloak of mist sharp as wire, and whirled. The clay figures flashed once, and they began to slide apart in chunks. The sky above mirrored her motion, clouds splitting into hundreds of chunks, and began to rumble like ancient drums.

  The Redeemer staggered a half-step backwards, clutching the gemstone more like a lifeline than an artifact.

  Behind Lynne, he saw another figure.

  The guardian of his garden firmly shook her head in disappointment.

  “You see her, don’t you?” the angel of oceans asked.

  Sheets of ice-cold rain began to fall.

  “You were offered a new path.”

  He flung shadows of the wailing dead at her.

  She carved through them like the ghosts they were.

  “But you have ignored her whisper.”

  He called echoes of the Verdant’s power in binding vines.

  But she knew Verdandi’s crushing strength, and he summoned only a boy’s seeming of his absent god.

  “You have set yourself as the judge, but you are the one to be tried.”

  He summoned stolen fire, and it was quenched by the rains before it could ever reach her.

  For those who she swore to cherish, she weathered his assault.

  “You have built this fate!”

  Clutching a rapidly dimming stone, he collapsed against a bleached rib and regarded the angel he had thought vanquished.

  She stepped forward, spear aimed for his throat. “You wish to see God? Perhaps you should consider what He will have to say about your time here, mortal.”

  Donovan clasped the fading gemstone tight, muttered the words of his last trick, and launched into the churning sky. He vanished instantly into the black clouds, fleeing for the farthest reaches inland – somewhere far away from the hungry ocean.

  The Maiden lacked the conviction to dance on the air itself, and the Tempest lacked the focus.

  Together, though…

  Lynne had a cloak of mist, a history brilliant and sorrowful in her wake. Now it shone azure-bright, catching a Light she had thought she lost.

  She stretched what she could be into wings of dew, and she leaped.

  The first downbeat of her wings caught the air, and she tasted freedom.

  Yet she did not think to run.

  Instead she soared into the endless, pitch-black storm.

  Her storm, the chaos she endured for an age.

  Donovan raced ahead, a comet amidst the lightning flashes.

  “Where do you think to run?” she whispered, knowing he heard.

  He sped as fast as the Harvest wind but grew no further away.

  “I am the storm.”

  But the mortal’s mind had surrendered to instinct, and he thought only of flight.

  He could not outrun their shared fate. They were linked, mage and angel, a bond forged in judgement.

  She had emerged from her storm by accepting her sin.

  He would emerge from his when he did the same.

  “Remain here then, Donovan, until that judgement calls.”

  Lynne spun against the pelting rain, tucked her wings, and fell through the clouds. The air warmed by degree, the rain slackened to a faint drizzle, and she passed at last through a thin puff of stratus into the brilliant day.

  Her fury had scoured the temple mount to bare rock, and several of the bone trophies lay shattered. Between two toppled ribs, though, a flash of cerulean waited.

  The angel of oceans landed heavily beside Esmie.

  Barely breathing, the child still clutched the Archangel’s diary. Her flesh was as grey as the bones, cold to the touch.

  Lynne knelt, stroking the child’s head. “I knew you were strong. Ah, but you’re stubborn as Ali! Cling to that stubbornness, child. Breathe for me. I know it hurts. Just breathe.”

  She gently laid a wing of dew over the girl, and she called the girl from the brink of a Black Gate.

  It was not time to go home yet.

  Esmie twitched, her mind lost in the halfway land between life and death.

  “You live yet, my daughter,” the angel of oceans whispered softly, guiding her home. “You live yet.”

  By a Maiden’s touch, she would.

  Lynne’s wings faded into simple dew, and she knelt beside Esmie to hum a guiding tune until the child woke.

  Gingerly, the child opened an eye. “Goddess?”

  “No, merely Lynne.”

  The child laughed guiltily. “I snuck after you.”

  “So you did, and seized the diary during the fight.”

  Esmie sat up, touching at her healed neck in puzzlement. “What happened after?”

  “Donovan thought that the power of heaven was a hammer to swing.” The angel considered. “Not unlike many a young angel, I suppose.”

  She admitted much in that statement, though only the Bones would hear.

  “I will hold him in my storm until it is time to bring him before the Archangel for sentencing. He will face death, I think. Not for stealing the fire, but for using that fire to only warm himself.”

  Live as mortals might, counseled the Archangel. What Foundation decried that angels, too, could not hold court?

  “I hope he gets it,” the child muttered. “He was bad.”

  Lynne laughed and stroked her head. “So was I, once. So was I.”

  “But not anymore!”

  Ah, if only good and evil were a switch to be flipped, the angel of oceans thought. Aloud, she said, “Thank you, my little champion. Now, if you are tired of laying in the mud, let us be away from this place.”

  The road to absolution ran one step at a time.