Returning to the ship was like an easy walk downhill. The oppressive heat had lifted and a cool ocean breeze swept off the waters, though I still felt sticky from sweat. The fires across the island were gone, except for the one at the heart of the temple. There was an altar, back behind where the colossus had faced us, shaped like a stone bowl. A fire burned steadily inside it now. “It’s larger than when I saw it in the past,” Raella had noted before we left. That was the last time any of us had spoken – we were all tired and awe struck, processing what Lexie had told us.
When we reached the place where we had left the boat, Tanert waved at us enthusiastically. “Whatever you lot did, it worked,” he said as I climbed down from the cliff. I was so tired that my foot slipped from the railing. Peyton, having climbed down before me, reached out to steady me, but my weight took us both down instead. “Sorry,” I muttered, standing as quickly as I could and avoiding eye contact.
She chuckled. “It’s fine,” she said, grinning at me in a remarkably disarming way. I reached down to offer her a hand up, and she accepted. We stepped aside to make room for the others to descend.
“What happened?” Dustyn asked curiously as she helped Lexie and Cassandra down from the cliff face.
“The fire god has returned,” Raella said simply. Dustyn exchanged a surprised look with her father. They seemed to want to ask more, but could sense that we weren’t open to answering questions at the moment. It was a quiet ride back to shore.
At the inn, once Cassandra and I had finished a round of healing spells on everyone, Raella immediately suggested a trip to a local bathhouse. “We can soak and get freshened up, and then we can come back to a good meal and discuss what occurred,” she explained. She spoke to the innkeeper about arranging dinner and then led our troop out again, away from the docks this time. I left Peter behind in my room. The bath house was a large building with plenty of foot traffic going in and out. I worried for a moment over whether it would be a shared bath, but there were apparently multiple private rooms, and Raella reserved three – two to be divided by gender, and one solely for herself.
I suspected she wanted to come just for herself but felt it would be rude to not offer the trip to the rest of us.
The room was large, with a bath that looked more like an inset pool, steaming from the heat. The calming sound of trickling water was present throughout the building. Zolambi and Greyjon, apparently more used to places like these, immediately stripped and slipped into the water. Lyre followed, also not particularly bothered. Asterollan and I both paused for a moment. “Is modesty a human thing?” Lyre asked, glancing back to see us. “Cassandra was always quite shy about it too.”
Realizing I was making it more awkward by not joining, I stripped and stepped into the pool, slipping down until just my head was still above water. It smelled of salt, and was instantly relaxing – I sighed in relief. Asterollan appeared to still be hesitating. “I wouldn’t say it’s modesty, necessarily,” he said as he began taking his clothes off. “But I tend to draw more curious looks than I’d like.” I could see that he was covered in scars across his entire body, including a massive twisting of flesh from an old burn across his back.
“Scars are a warrior’s medals,” Greyjon said, “A matter of pride more than shame.”
“Although that might depend on how one earned those medals,” Zolambi added, his tone dark. An uncomfortable silence fell across the room as Zolambi and Asterollan stared at each other, their expressions carefully fixed. I busied myself with using the provided soaps to wash myself, and Greyjon chuckled awkwardly as he did the same. Lyre sighed, taking a deep breath and then dipping under the water completely.
Some of the bath house employees entered, bringing thin robes and towels, and depositing them on the benches near our belongings. Lyre and Zolambi finished quickly, toweling off and leaving the room together. Greyjon leaned back against the edge of the pool, apparently intending to soak for a while. He looked over to Asterollan curiously, but instead of asking any questions, he chuckled again. “That fight was a mess. We were very uncoordinated.”
Asterollan nodded thoughtfully. “You’ve done well with teaching the other outworlder. Peyton.”
I grimaced, dropping so that only my nose stayed above water. Greyjon nodded. “I can’t take full credit. She was already quite skilled before she got here. I worry that she fell back into those skills too immediately though – she didn’t even reach for her magic in the fight.” Considering that, I felt a level of awe rise in me, and a twinge of something like jealousy. Peyton had rushed in to fight a giant and hadn’t once thought to use magic. She was ridiculously brave in a way that I wished I could be.
Asterollan glanced over at me. “You did well too.”
I shrugged. “Plants don’t stand a chance against fire,” I mumbled, briefly popping my head up above the water surface.
“Still,” Greyjon said thoughtfully, “You unbalanced a god.”
A god. I hadn’t even wrapped my head around that fact yet. “Yes,” I said quietly, dipping down again. After several minutes of soaking, the heat of the water was starting to make me dizzy, so I stepped out and toweled off. I wrapped one of the robes around myself and gathered my things, stepping out into the hallway of the bath house. I didn’t immediately see Lyre or Zolambi, so I started walking down the hall, past other rooms and employees that smiled at me warmly as I went.
I found an interior garden that appeared to be open to the sky. It was lit by the moon and by small round crystal lamps crisscrossed along strings that draped from column to column. I stepped out, feeling almost chilly now that I was away from the steaming baths. “Kind of like an old Roman bath. Did you enjoy it?” I heard a voice say.
Looking up, I saw that Cassandra was sitting on a bench, wearing one of the robes. Her hair was wrapped up in her towel. I hadn’t seen her initially, since the space was so dimly lit. I held my clothes in front of me, hoping the robes weren’t too sheer. “It was nice,” I said. “Did Lyre and Zolambi come out this way?”
“Oh, were they already done? I haven’t seen them.” She paused a moment, studying me with her head tilted. “I wonder what the name of the fire god is.”
“We’ll find out later, I’m sure.” I stepped over to a separate bench, facing the one she was sitting at, and settled there.
“Do you know your god’s name yet?”
I frowned. “No. Do you?”
“T’Keran,” she said without hesitation, so straightforward that it caught me off guard. “The goddess of storms.”
“You’re god talked to you too?” I asked, surprised.
She nodded. “She’s been talking to me all along.” Cassandra hesitated a moment, like she wasn’t sure if she should say more. “I think I saw another god. Briefly. It looked like a child, and was walking along the ocean shore one night. Plants grew wherever it set foot.”
I stared at her, remembering the giggling I had been hearing so often. Suddenly I felt significantly less crazy. “You know, I’ve been seeing this figure of light out of the corner of my eyes…”
“That’s Asterollan’s god,” she said. “He mentioned that he’s been seeing him like that too.”
I leaned back, sighing deeply in relief as I closed my eyes. I wasn’t crazy. I wondered if I would really sleep better for that knowledge or not. It was still creepy to consider that there were these powerful beings that were following and watching us, invested in us, giving us our abilities. “I wonder what they want,” I mumbled.
“Maybe Lexie will have the answer to that.”
“Maybe.” We sat in companionable silence until Raella came looking for us.
We were allowed to keep the bath house robes, and walked back to the inn wearing them. I was a little embarrassed by the idea at first until I saw that other patrons of the bath house left in a similar state. We ambled along slowly, enjoying the crisp autumn air. I could hear snatches of conversation here and there among people that we were passing – awe that the smoke had cleared so quickly, that the fires had stopped.
Back at the inn, we pushed tables together and settled down to eat the meal that had been prepared for us. It was a rather subdued dinner, and I noticed that Lexie kept staring into space, twisting her head to stare at the invisible orbs that she had described to us. As we each finished our meals, we sat quietly, expectantly.
Raella had the grace to wait until Lexie finally pushed away her plate before speaking. “So, the fire giant we fought was actually the physical form of the fire god,” Raella said finally, swirling her wine around in her glass. She had stared at the girl through the entire meal, her bright eyes intense as they reflected the light in the room.
Lexie nodded, her eyes finally drawing away from the invisible object she had been staring at. “Yeah. Er… Yes.”
Raella frowned, waiting for Lexie to continue speaking. When that didn’t happen, she asked with some exasperation. “And it… communed with you? Spoke to you? What did it tell you?”
“Oh… a bunch of stuff, but some of it wasn’t quite words. It’s really hard to explain. She was angry.”
“She?” Raella said thoughtfully, intrigued by the concept.
“I think she was a she because I’m a she? I think she’s anything, really.”
“I see. Did she say why she was angry?”
“She was super pissed. Something about… like, betrayal? But that wasn’t what she was telling me. I just felt it, in the background of everything she was telling me,” Lexie stared absently above my right ear, then sighed in frustration. “She said she wanted to stay here, but that she’d grant me all of her powers, and I could choose to use them how I want. And then she said she was going to gift me Sight, because it was important that I See.”
“And now you See these things, around yourself and the other Graces?”
“Yeah. Like these little black shiny orbs just floating in the air around us.” She glanced above herself, and hunched down in her seat like she was uncomfortable with all the attention. “I don’t know what they are though, or why it’s important to see them. I don’t know how long they’ve been there. Maybe they’ve been following us this entire time.”
Raella tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Did she mention anything else? Or did you sense anything else while talking to it?”
“Myrapen,” Lexie said, intoning carefully, in awed reverence. “That’s her name. I got the sense that sometimes she’s known as the Eternal Flame.”
Raella seemed startled to have this information dropped on her. “Myrapen,” she repeated. “In all my years, I have never found a text that names the gods. Myrapen, the Eternal Flame.” For the first time since meeting her, I noticed that she actually looked excited – she was leaning forward in her seat as she spoke. I glanced over at Cassandra, thinking of our earlier conversation, but Cassandra did not seem keen to share her own god’s name with Raella.
I heard a giggle from somewhere in the room.
I glanced at the other Graces to see if they had heard anything also. Cassandra and Peyton had no reaction, and Lexie was too distracted by the invisible orbs sharing the room with us. But I could see Asterollan tilt his head briefly and glance around, a slight frown on his features. I wondered if he had heard it too.
Once it became clear that Lexie didn’t know much more about her god, Raella became invested in figuring out the invisible orbs. Lexie was initially reluctant to touch them, but once we finally coaxed her into trying to catch one, she quickly became frustrated by the fact that it always moved out of her reach. Next, we tried having Asterollan and Greyjon grab it while Lexie shouted directions, but we quickly figured out that each orb moved to evade being touched. “Certainly that means it has actual physicality, but I would like the confirmation,” Raella said, tapping her chin, her brow furrowed.
Some of the shouting drew the attention of the innkeeper, who stepped in to check on us, but after seeing a pair of grown men jump and attempt to catch something he couldn’t see while a young girl shouted directions at them, he stepped quickly back out the door. I think I was the only one that caught sight of him, and I suppressed a grin at how chaotic the scene was to an outsider.
After several moments, Raella said, “Ah, I think I have something for this. Where are one of the orbs?” Lexie gestured over toward me, where I stood off to the side. Raella lit up with the light of magic, and made her own swirling gesture with her hand – a wave of soft glittering light flowed past me. I held up my hands to see the softly glowing motes floating like glitter being held by static in the air around me. I knew it was only insubstantial light, but something about it made my nose itch. I stepped to one side and saw that the glitter followed.
“Oh! Right there!” Lexie shouted in excitement, pointing above my head.
Glancing up, I could see that the glitter had formed a circle in the air above me. I moved my hand up toward it and the glitter in the air shifted, moving toward the ceiling and out of my reach. “Usually this spell only works on things with a conscious will,” Raella said, staring up at the glittering spot in the air.
“So it’s thinking?” Lexie said, her voice jumping up in surprise.
“Or being directed by something that thinks.”
Lexie glanced back down at me thoughtfully and smirked. “Oh, Lucas. You can think too?”
I rolled my eyes. “Funny,” I said. “How long does this last?” I asked Raella.
“Probably about 30 minutes or so.”
I scratched the tip of my nose, a bit frustrated. “Okay.”
Now that we could see where the orb was, capturing it was a bit easier. Chase, this time, provided a spell that held the orb in place so that Greyjon could grab it. Raella thoughtfully ran a hand over it when he handed it to her. “Smooth. You said it appears black and shiny?”
“Yeah,” Lexie nodded, looking intently into the space that occupied Raella’s hands. “It doesn’t hurt to touch it?”
“No, it feels like glass.”
Lexie reached out and poked it. She shivered. “It’s cold. I wonder what it does.”
Raella sighed as it lifted out of her hands. “No way to tell. Keep an eye on them – Myrapen thought it was important, after all. If they do anything unusual, let us know. In the meantime – we resume our journey to Glyss.”
Back in the room I was staying in, Peter trilled in alarm as I entered. He rushed me suddenly, causing me to stumble back against the door. His legs waved around me frantically and I realized he was trying to bat away the glitter that still surrounded the air around me. My choked scream turned into a hysterical laugh, and I patted him on his head. “It’ll wear off,” I promised, pushing him away. He chittered nervously, a low ticking sound that he didn’t stop until the spell finally faded.
mehryment 