“Your Grace. Are you here for a story?”
“Storyteller – yes. Perhaps a happy one. No – wait. A tragic one. If you may.”
He hesitated, blind eyes staring past Calissa. “Something troubles you, your Grace. I can hear it in your voice. If you would like, I can listen instead, and you can tell your story. Perhaps it will ease your burdens.”
Calissa shook her head wordlessly – then sighed, realizing her error. “No, thank you. This story… I can’t tell this story yet. It isn’t over.” Her hands found each other, wringing, writhing. “It can’t be.”
The Storyteller made a knowing noise. “There are many stories of darkness. Evil, and tragedy, and hatred… but many end in the triumph of good. Oftentimes, from darkness comes light.”
The word seared. Light. The sun in her blood, the taunts, the whip licking across her back. Tristian’s hands, full of the light of Sarenrae, palms pressed to his eyes.
Light.
What had light ever done but burn?
“I’m sorry, Storyteller. I – I need to go.”
Calissa remembered it in fragments, like a dream.
Vordakai, writhing on the floor, clawed hands clapped to his newly empty eye socket. The Bloom portal glowing behind Tristian, throwing his haunted features into sharp relief. The remarkable steadiness of his hands as he held the Oculus of Abaddon in his fingertips.
“I must take it. Forgive me.” His voice almost too soft to hear.
“Tristian, what are you doing?”
The way his pale eyes focused all at once, and the sharp ferocity in them that she had never seen before. “Calissa, listen to me. I must do this. Let me, and then leave this place. Leave these lands. Run. Forget all of this. Save yourself.”
The vicious and restless thing that had lived inside her for weeks had snarled and showed its teeth then. “Leave? No. Not until you explain. You’ve been acting strange since we got here. Something is happening here, and you know what it is. Tell me.”
But he had only shaken his head, and the sorrow in his eyes only deepened. He turned towards the portal and set his drooping shoulders, and took a step towards it.
“Tristian! What in the Nine Hells is going on? Where are you going?” She threw her sword to the ground with a clangor that reverberated through the tomb, and took a few running steps, feet moving faster than her mind. “Stop with the cryptic answers! Tell me what’s happening. Let me help!”
His steps faltered. His head turned a fraction; not enough to meet her eyes. “I need to do this. Please, Calissa. Let me do this.”
“No. Don’t.” Her own voice had gone quiet. “Don’t leave. Don’t leave… me.”
There they were. The words she had managed to hold inside all these long weeks. The words the vicious, terrible thing inside her coiled around, like a dragon and its treasure.
They tumbled from her and lay between them, shining, precious.
He had turned his head fully then, looking at her over his shoulder. The Oculus nestled in his palms now. “Do you mean that?”
She nodded.
“Even now… you don’t back away from me. I never even tried…” His lips trembled as he spoke. A faint smile tugged at them. “The sacrifices I made, I thought they were enough, but now… I see.” His mouth twisted, the smile becoming a rueful smirk. “I see.”
For a long moment, his eyes roamed over her face. They held the same unfathomable tenderness that she had seen but once before – when she’d dared to take his hands in hers, to lay her hand on his cheek. When he’d pressed a kiss into her palm, there, in the dark.
Then he raised his voice. “Merciful Sarenrae! Your servant begs one last favor! I am unworthy of this light! I see that now.” The Oculus slipped from his fingers and fell to the stone floor. “Please, Dawnflower. Take it. Take it from me!”
The blinding light, sweeping through that place forever shrouded in gloom. His hands upturned, catching it somehow, bright, searing. His palms, pressed to his eyes.
His scream.
They all rushed forward then, but something stopped them, paces away from him. When he took his hands away from his face, bright tears streamed from his all-white eyes.
And the Oculus lay shattered at his feet.
He’d said something then, too quiet to hear. And turned, and fled into the portal.
“Calissa. Calissa!” Valerie’s voice pulled her from the depths of memory.
She blinked, letting the familiar contours of her bedchamber come into focus. Thin winter light filtered through the window. Her fingers brushed the coverlet of her bed.
Slowly, she returned to the present. She recalled Octavia's quiet words with Regongar and Ekundayo downstairs in the throne room, the men nodding and taking their leave with scant glances in her direction. She recalled how the women shepherded her up the stairs and through the hall, pushing open the door, arraying themselves in the room – Octavia seating Calissa on the bed and taking her place next to her, Valerie sinking into a chair, Linzi laying her ever-present book open on the desk, her quill immediately beginning its dance.
Octavia’s brows drew together in concern. Valerie’s raised in expectation.
“You have not said a word since we left the Tors,” Valerie said. “We need to talk about what happened.”
Calissa nodded mutely.
Sighing, Valerie continued. “It was a Bloom portal that Tristian went through. He's involved in this somehow.”
Perhaps Calissa had left her voice behind in that tomb. When she summoned it again, it was dusty and dry, scratching in her throat. “I just… can’t understand. He warned us when each Bloom was coming. He helped identify the parasites. He… he asked me to open a clinic, so he could help people…”
“He never told us how he knew the timing of the next Bloom. And his knowledge of the parasite proved a touch too prescient, though he claimed it was but a guess. He argued with Jhod about it most ardently,” Valerie said.
Octavia turned her head sharply, the motion sending forth a hint of perfume. “Just because his guess turned out to be true doesn’t mean he’s complicit! And, if his intentions were truly evil, why did he destroy the Oculus?”
Linzi’s quill paused. She looked up from her writing, and her eyes were crinkled around the edges. “Speaking of which… He wasn’t going to destroy it. But then you said – all that – to him.” She waved her hand ambiguously. “What’s between you two, anyway?”
“He… he ended things with me.” Calissa had a fleeting thought that perhaps she should return to that tomb and bury herself in it.
“He what?” Octavia ruffled like a startled bird. Her deep green eyes filled with concern. “Wait. What things?”
His knuckles white around the ring he proffered her. Her hand on his cheek, his face bathed in her light. His arms around her, safety, refuge as everything she knew fell apart around her…
His words, an edict. “Enough. It is decided.”
“I… don’t know. I don’t think it was anything to begin with. It must not have been.”
“Oh, Calissa.” Octavia lay her hand on Calissa’s, pale and slender and reassuring. “I’m so sorry. We’ll find him.”
“And what?” Valerie's eyebrows, already raised, only climbed higher. “Will we allow him to return here, after what he’s done?” If she saw the outraged look Octavia threw her, she paid it no mind, and pressed on. “You must forget about him. We need to make for Restov. Amiri is waiting for us. The Swordlords will be slaughtered if we aren't there by the time the barbarians arrive!”
A rap sounded at the door, saving Calissa from the need to reply. “Enter,” she called.
The door eased open, and a ruddy face crowned by a shock of fiery hair peeked through. “Sorry to intrude, your Grace,” the guard said. “Word just came. A Bloom has been spotted over Candlemere Lake.”
Calissa exhaled.
She had made the return journey from Vordakai’s tomb by sheer force of will. Her dogged tenacity had kept her steps from faltering as they carried her away from that desolate place, even as she had the distinct, terrifying feeling that something had changed forever. That she had left some part of herself interred in that sepulcher for eternity.
But at this news, some yet-living fragment of her stirred. “Thank you, Rupert.” She met her friends’ eyes, one by one. “We leave immediately.”
“But the Swordlords –” Valerie’s words faltered.
“You’re sure?” Linzi asked.
For the first time in days, she was. “Restov has an army. Tristian has no one but us.”
Octavia smiled knowingly. “Stranger things have been done in the name of love,” she said.
Calissa rose, avoiding her gaze, avoiding thinking about those words.
The Defaced Sister lay dead. Nyrissa was gone.
Calissa checked on her companions. They leaned on their weapons and panted, and blood flowed freely from several wounds – but they were alive.
And so was Tristian.
He put his hands together around his holy symbol of Sarenrae, and a barely perceptible radiance engulfed each of them. Calissa’s wounds stung as they mended, the flesh knitting together, and the familiar peace that accompanied the channeling enveloped her. But the Defaced Sister's words bored holes in her, making a sieve of her resolve, and the peace washed away as quickly as it had come.
“Calissa… I want to tell you everything. Before you decide my fate.”
Tristian told his tale with his hands tucked into the sleeves of his robes, his shoulders sagging more and more under the weight of his regrets. He looked down – no, Calisa reminded herself, he could not see. He merely dipped his head, concealing his blindfolded face within his hood.
A deva. An immortal servant of Sarenrae.
Calissa tried to imagine him, shining and glorious, with wings bursting from his back. But all she saw was the broken, mortal man before her.
A traitor.
“So everything you said, everything you did – all lies?” Her voice was glass, brittle and sharp.
Tristian flinched. “Not all. As little as I could manage. But… too much, all the same.”
“You didn't even fight back.” Regongar spat on the floor.
When Tristian had held the Oculus in his hands, the Bloom portal shining behind him, Calissa had not dared to believe what she saw. When her friends had called him a traitor, she had denied it. But how could she deny it now, when he stood before her and spoke her fears into reality?
“Nyrissa chose her assassin poorly. Had she known you at all, she would have seen that you were the worst person to task with killing – anyone.”
Calissa had intended it as a barb, but Tristian smiled faintly. “You’re right. Somehow, I could never bring myself to end an innocent life in order to get back the divinity that Sarenrae granted me.”
His smile infuriated her. “So, after you failed to kill me, Nyrissa ordered you to bring her the Oculus. You could have regained your divinity then. But you destroyed it instead. Why?”
Something in the arrangement of Tristian’s features shifted. If he still had his sight, his gaze would have become distant then. “When I touched it, I fully understood its evil. I knew then that I could not let it fall into Nyrissa’s hands. But I was still so afraid. Afraid I would stay mortal forever, and never hear Sarenrae’s voice again. And… I was so afraid of what you would say, when the truth was revealed.” That maddening smile returned. “But you refused to run. You wanted to help. You believed in me, and… it gave me strength. For my first act of courage. Not enough to atone for what I’ve done, but the first small step. No matter what you decide to do with me, I will always remember that.”
Calissa felt her anger slipping through her fingers under the glow of that smile. She clung to it stubbornly. “You said something before you stepped through the portal. What was it?”
His smile became brighter. “I said thank you .”
A memory surfaced in her mind, unbidden. She was sixteen again, in the church of Iomedae that was her childhood home, and Father Gregor towered over her, red-faced and righteous. “You think that boy loves you? You think this is anything but sullying your body? An affront to Iomedae?”
Hot shame filled her. Would she ever be anything more than that silly, lovesick girl?
She reached for the vicious thing that had made its home inside her chest when Tristian had ended things between them. How she wanted to keep snarling at him! How she yearned for him to draw back, fearing its slavering maw! But when she reached inside, she found her chest empty. In the wake of Tristian’s smile, his soft voice, his gratitude, the vicious thing had fled.
His words to her at the entrance to Vordakai’s tomb floated in her mind. “I would know what I am to you.”
“You are my ally, and my friend,” she had said. “And if it comes down to it, I would fight to keep you by my side.”
She had lied to him, too, then. She told the lie he wanted to hear; the lie he resigned them to when he made the choice to end things.
The truth rattled around in her empty ribcage.
You hold my heart in your hand.
Her eyes roamed over Tristian’s face. Over these years together, on the road and in the throne room, its contours had become so familiar and comforting to her. He had been by her side through all her trials. His presence was a pillar, and she leaned on it for support.
She searched his face for any hint of a gleeful smirk, for any smug tilt of his head, but she knew she would find none. His posture spoke of only regret, and shame for his actions. The pillar she leaned on had never been an illusion, even in the depths of his betrayal.
And no nymph had sent him to find her on that cold autumn night, alone in the throne room, pleading with her goddess. Straining against the bonds that Father Gregor had tied around her in her childhood. Tristian’s pale eyes had blazed when he saw them for what they were. “This Father Gregor filled your head with lies! Calissa, you were raised in a cult!”
He had seen the truth before she ever had. His words had been the knife that freed her from those bonds.
That revelation had sent her crashing to her knees in prayer. For untold days, they ached, and her neck was stiff, and in the sleepless nights she wandered the palace like a restless ghost. But in those nights, in that quiet darkness, Iomedae had revealed something to her. Something beautiful beyond belief, and also terrifying.
Her anger melted. Her shame evaporated. The only thing that remained inside her was her goddess’ truth.
She took a step forward.
Iomedae, if I am wrong… strike me down.
If I am wrong about this, then there can be no justice in the world.
“Calissa… this is treason. The law is clear,” Valerie said quietly.
“Yes.” The word was no more than a breath. Tristian stiffened at its sound.
She took another step. Another.
The memories followed her. Father Gregor again. “There are no second chances under the Lady. Forgiveness breeds weakness. Justice must be done. Take up your sword!” How many times had she heard those words?
But the truth of what she had discovered in her prayers burned brighter, shining like a guiding light, banishing the shades of memory.
What good is a sword without a sheath? A dull and dented blade?
She had only meant to close the distance between them, to stand before Tristian as she pronounced her judgment. But she had held her burning hands close for so long. When she reached him, something in her yielded, and she could not stop herself from throwing her arms around him. Their bodies pressed together, and she cradled the back of his head in her hand. His heart beat against the confines of his chest. Hers answered.
“Come home,” she whispered to him.
He froze, but after a moment, she felt his arms close around her. He clung to her even as he protested. “No – I’ve caused so much pain. I can’t possibly…”
She pulled back to look at his face, focusing on his eyes behind the blindfold, willing him to see. “You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you.” She felt light, and the unfamiliar words were suddenly easy. “Tristian. I forgive you. Come home.”
She braced – and nothing happened. No divine smite struck her down. They remained standing there, in each other’s arms.
The way his raised eyebrows tugged his blindfold upwards was incongruously comical. “You… forgive me? Truly?”
And so she laughed, mirth bubbling out from some hidden recess where she had stowed it all these days. A great weight lifted from her. She had her goddess’ favor, and her love was in her arms. And nothing else mattered.
My love, she mused, looking into his face. Letting the thought sink in.
He disentangled himself from her awkwardly, reluctantly. “This… is more than I ever hoped for,” he said. The softness of his voice pulled at her heart. “I’d like to walk back to the capital alone, if it's all right. There’s so much on my mind yet. A walk will clear my head.”
“You’re blind. How will you get back on your own?”
“I’ll be fine.” He smiled, and there was something secret in it, something only for her. “More than fine.”
