(if you haven't read the Prologue, I suggest checking it out before this chapter for better immersion)
note to reader: this chapter contains descriptions of scars, physical harm and torture, so reader discretion is advised. read with care!
One could rarely see stars over Safa. Or rather, they didn’t quite notice them – though that, perhaps, could be forgiven.
They hovered like afterthoughts, pale and hesitant against the vast indigo sweep of night, their light smothered by the lingering arrogance of day. For the Sun-goddess’s dominion did not end with sunset – her brilliance seeped into the very fabric of the sky, a warning carved in gold and fire. The stars had learned their place centuries ago: to flicker meekly, to never compete. Not without the Moon to shield them.
Not that it mattered. Selis had been gone for centuries.
Some claimed she had abandoned the world in a capricious fit, retreating into the depths of the Nether – her shadowed, obsidian-arched court, so different from the gilded halls of the Pantheon above. Others whispered the Sun had simply burned the Moon away, leaving only ashen silence where silver light once danced.
Aylah did not know the truth – only the aftermath. She only knew the world had always been this way. A dark expanse by night – the stars barely visible even to her Fae sight – and a shimmering, pitiless void by day. She had never seen true moonlight. And yet sometimes, in the hollow hours between midnight and dawn, she would lie awake and wonder what it felt like. Whether it was as intimidating, as cruel as the Sun’s gaze – or if it might have been kind. A balm rather than a brand.
The air in her room smelled of old stone and dust, thick with the residue of heat that clung stubbornly to the walls long after the sun had set. Her bed was narrow and hard beneath her shoulder blades. Like all the acolytes, she was used to it. The temple never offered much comfort.
She lay motionless atop the thin blanket, one arm slung across her eyes as if to press the dreams back into the dark where they belonged.
They always came like this – without reason or warning. One moment, she would be asleep; the next, standing bare at the edge of a black chasm so deep the air itself felt heavy, pulling at her bones as if to drag her in. It never spoke, never once shifted. Yet she could feel it, alive in its stillness, waiting for her. In these dreams, she was only flesh and terror, staring into the abyss that stared hungrily back.
She never recalled choosing to step forward. Only the terrible instant of suspension – toes curling over emptiness, body tilting into the pull, the darkness holding its breath.
Tonight, the edge had been closer. She could still feel the void’s exhalation frosting her skin, its patient malice inches away. Her throat ached raw. Had she screamed aloud? She pressed trembling fingers to her neck and listened.
No footsteps echoed in the hall. No alarm raised.
But that didn’t calm her.
The scars hummed in quiet warning – silvery lines and patches mapping her stomach and spine, latticework tracing her forearms and thighs, creeping vine-like across the pale canvas of her back. Old wounds that refused to fade completely, despite her Fae heritage. The magic laced in every burn and brand made sure she remembered. Each mark told the same story: a step out of line, a shadow where none were allowed, the high priestess’s disappointed sigh before the searing kiss of chains. Each brand a lesson carved in flesh. Control. Submit. Obey.
She sat up slowly, the thin linen shift clinging to her damp skin as her fingers curled in its fabric. Her legs swung over the edge of the bed, soles brushing the rough stone floor. The residual heat nipped at the half-healed burns circling her ankles.
The temple was quiet at this hour, the only sound the distant whisper of sand against stone outside, the occasional creak of a door down the hall. The other acolytes would be asleep by now, their bodies slack with the day’s labour. Somewhere beyond, the priests maintained their vigil.
Aylah let out a slow exhale.
Mind keen. Spirit strong.
The words surfaced unbidden. Aylah couldn’t remember where she’d learned them – in a book, a sermon, an overheard conversation? She didn’t know – and it didn’t much matter. They had simply always been there. Anchoring her, in a way.
She looked around, slowly blinking the dream’s haze from her eyes as reality seeped in.
Her room was small, suffocating in its simplicity – four stone walls, a narrow window with warped glass that turned light into pale, broken shapes, and a door that creaked no matter how carefully she eased it open. The only decoration was a large parchment pinned opposite her bed – a map of Aerynth, its kingdoms and borders etched in dark ink. She remained motionless, tracing familiar contours with her gaze. It faded in places over the years, worn by time and light, but the shapes still held.
Aurielle, the land of green valleys and commerce. The desert kingdom of Safa, its denizens known as Sola’s most dedicated worshippers. Aswani, with it’s shining rivers and lush jungles. Qinyu, mist-swathed and mountainous, home to poets and those brave enough to honor Hellan gods. All four, or so the priests claimed, were watched over by the countless eyes of the Pantheon. But Aylah knew better – these days, only one gaze mattered, golden and unblinking.
She looked over the map and wondered, for the thousandth time, if this would be the closest she’d ever get to those places. If her world was to be forever limited to this desert.
On her small desk sat the sanctioned texts – leather-bound volumes of Sola's hymns and Pantheon decrees, their spines split from years of mandatory study. Beneath the lumpy mattress, her true treasures lay concealed. A worn travelogue, its pages soft and bright with sketches of distant lands and creatures. An herbarium with fragile desert blooms pressed neatly inside. A weighty tome detailing the three realms – the Heavens, the Hells, and the Earth between – with a chapter dedicated to the Nether’s architecture – its section on obsidian palaces read so often she could recite entire passages from memory.
The irony wasn’t lost on her. She knew so much about the Moon’s ancient court and yet had never glimpsed the goddess in the sky. Perhaps she was no more than a myth, a story – the Sun’s twin that had never existed to begin with. Strangely, that thought stung less than its alternative – that Selis had deliberately turned her face from the world, simply abandoning mortals.
She ought to get rid of the books. Gods knew what the high priestess would do if such heresy was found in her possession. But they were the only gifts she had ever given herself, let alone had received from anyone else, even as a child.
She had no memory of her childhood before the age of twelve. No mother’s lullaby lingered in her ears. No father’s hands had ever lifted her. Only the temple’s cold flagstones against her cheek, her small body already a canvas of scars, and the high priestess’s gaze – that implacable, measuring stare.
The temple had taken her in. Clothed her. Fed her. She had learned to sweep floors without raising dust. To patch torn robes. To heal burns with balms she brewed herself. She had always been good with remedies. At easing pain, mending skin, or drawing poison from blood. Even the acolytes who cursed her shadow-tainted blood came to her door eventually – eyes averted, mouths taut with both contempt and need. So she would press poultices to fevered brows, grind roots for salves, clean and stitch nasty cuts.
She treated them in silence and tried not to mind when they wouldn’t thank her or cast her another glance. Healing was something she could give. Something that felt clean in a way nothing was. Even if her own bruises went untreated. Even if her scars healed wrong.
Aylah had never once shed a tear. Not when they hissed she was sullied. Not when they tore out strands of her silver hair or forced her to recite prayers for hours, kneeling in the heat of the desert and chanting until her throat bled. Tears were for those who deserved pity.
She forced the thought away, her breath shuddering out slow and uneven. That was when she noticed the movement at the edge of her vision.
At first, she thought it was the room’s natural dark – the kind that lived in corners and hid under beds. But these coiled across the floor like smoke, brushing against her ankles, creeping up her calves, curling through her hair like black ribbon. They traced the ridges of her old scars and burns with obscene familiarity. There was no mistaking it.
She froze on the bed, lungs catching mid-breath. Her pulse kicked in her throat. Once, she’d tried to fight them. She’d even thought she could force them away by prayers, but that only seemed to rile them more.
Spirit strong. But never strong enough. The shadows never listened. They moved as they pleased, heedless of her terror or her shame.
She squeezed her eyes shut until sparks danced behind her lids, as though to banish the crawling dark away. But Aylah couldn’t unfeel the shadows slithering higher, caressing her throat, cool and slick as oil.
A strangled sound caught in her chest. She didn’t want this. She never wanted this.
She held very still, listening again. The hall was silent. She needed to shove it back down, deep inside, to force the shadows shut. Pretend nothing had happened. Just as she dared to think she might get away with it – than no one would see, that the shadows would leave her alone as she had always been – the latch creaked.
Light flooded in, blinding and brutal. The shadows vanished from her skin with a soft hiss, dissolving into nothing. As if they had never been. But it was too late.
Three acolytes froze in the doorway, eyes wide. One of them – a girl with bronze skin and a mouth that had always curled in disgust at the sight of Aylah’s scarred hands – dropped her lamp. Glass shattered, oil splashed across the floor. Flame rushed towards her. For a moment, the world held its breath with Aylah.
The acolytes' shouts tore through the chamber, but Aylah remained silent – she had long ago learned the futility of screaming. The acolytes shrieked as they scrambled back, shoving each other in their haste to escape the blaze, stumbling over each other. Their voices tangled together, shrill with panic, eyes reflecting the flames dancing across the oil-slick floor. One of them traced a warding sign in the air. Another – the girl who’d dropped the lamp – was already backing away, no doubt to fetch the priestess.
Aylah stood slowly, feeling the heat prickle her bare feet. The shadows were gone, but the air was wrong – charged, humming. She felt them coiled behind her ribs, a snake she could not cage much longer.
The high priestess arrived within minutes. She was tall, solemn in her white robes, her black hair bound by a bronze circlet. She looked at the burning pool of oil, the scattered acolytes, then Aylah, standing motionless beside her bed.
‘Again,’ the priestess sighed. Yes, Aylah thought bitterly. Again.
The Fae-forged chains seared fresh wounds over old ones as they bound her wrists. She offered no resistance.
The purification chamber was windowless, its walls lined with sun-discs that cast overlapping halos across cracked tiles. The air stank of soot and dried blood. The slab in the center gleamed smooth as glass – but she knew its coolness wouldn’t last.
They strapped her down. The restraints dug into her already-burned wrists. Her pulse hammered, breath hatching. Aylah knew too well the pain that would follow. She wasn’t sure she could endure it again. She had to say something. For once, do something.
‘I-I know I should’ve controlled it,’ she rasped. ‘I can–’
The backhanded slap sent stars across her vision. Rightfully so – it was pathetic of her to plead.
‘This abomination runs too deep,’ the priestess intoned. Her voice was cold, precise. ‘We cleanse what can be cleansed.’
The branding iron hissed in anticipation as she lifted it. The tip burned white-hot, etched with Sola’s sacred sigil – a sun with a single, vertical slash through its middle. The Mark of Purity. Aylah turned her face away.
‘This is for your own good,’ the priestess said.
The world narrowed to that single point of agony on her right side. But the smell – the rancid stench of flesh catching fire – was somehow even worse than the pain. Sweat flooded her, stinging the old, half-healed scars along her ribs.
She did not scream. Her body had other ways of betraying her – teeth sinking into the soft of her tongue, biting the insides of her cheeks until copper filled her mouth. Her spine arched against the slab, every tendon standing rigid beneath her skin.
I deserve this, Aylah thought as the pain turned her bones molten. I brought this on myself, as the iron pressed deeper. I will not cry. This is mine to bear.
She had always taken it. Because she was broken. Because this taint was hers alone. They’d given her sanctuary when the world offered nothing, no one, and she’d repaid them by staining the temple with her very existence. The darkness clung like second skin, yet still she sometimes found herself pressing her forehead to the tiles each dawn, praying today might be the day she finally burned clean.
Eyes wide and unblinking, she fixed them on the ceiling mural directly above her: Sola in her divine wrath, rendered in smoky quartz and gold. The goddess’s brown skin gleamed like polished teak, white dreadlocks cascading over shoulders broad enough to bear the weight of the Heavens. Those piercing eyes – amber as the heart of a furnace – stared down at Aylah, stern and unyielding.
Four hundred years, she thought distantly, the pain threatening to carve her into pieces. Four hundred years of devotion, of kneeling at your altars, of stitching shut the wounds of those who worship you and despise me. The irony tasted fouler than blood on her lips. Her fingers spasmed against the restraints, the scent of her charred flesh curling in the air like some twisted incense.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Her lungs had turned to lead, her chest threatening to cave in. Something ancient stirred deep in her veins.
The thought did not belong to her. Not plea or rebellion.
She knew it then. That the thing that had waited four centuries would wait no longer.
The chains screamed their protest – then cracked as Aylah’s spine bent like a drawn bow. Darkness burst forth – from between her teeth, behind her eyes, through the gaps in her straining ribs – not mere shadows now but something alive, something hungrier, unfurling like wings of void. No.
The sun-discs exploded in a rain of shards. Overhead, Sola’s holy portrait peeled away from the ceiling in blackened strips, her features contorted. The altar cracked down the middle as if struck by lightning. The priestess reeled backward, horror dawning in her eyes. Acolytes shrieked and stumbled – far too slow, far too late – as darkness surged upward in a devouring wave.
Aylah felt it in her bones – the dark she had fought so hard to contain, roaring free. It flooded her limbs with terrible purpose, snapping the final chains like dried reeds. ****The force launched her from the slab, sent her careening past archways that crumbled at her passing, past Fae who flattened themselves against walls, their mouths open in screams she failed to hear, their eyes wide with fear and incomprehension.
When she finally exploded into the desert night, the temple’s eastern tower crumbled in her wake. Wind lashed at her burns. The stink of seared flesh – her flesh – clung to her throat and clogged her nose. Sand scoured her bleeding feet, though she barely felt the cuts from her flight over broken tiles.
She ran. Not by choice, but because the voice – her voice and not her voice – thrummed through her like a second heartbeat:
And so she did – until her legs buckled, until the dunes blurred and the world spun away from her. When she fell, the desert took her greedily – sand grinding into her split lips as she collapsed face-first into it. She retched, spat, dug her fingers into the earth as the wind’s sharp teeth sank into her exposed back, her threadbare nightgown fluttering like a surrender flag.
A single glance back – that was all she allowed herself. She watched the only home she had ever known collapse in flame and darkness. Guilt surged thick as bile up her throat. But her eyes remained dry. They always did.
Face pressed into the sand, she inhaled the scent of her own ruin.
The word meant nothing and everything. She wasn’t sure she meant it the same way the voice had – right before all she knew came crumbling down.
Behind her, the temple bells began to scream.
