A surprised laugh breaks out of him. Then another, louder laugh, and I join in. Soon we’re both cackling so hard tears are running down our cheeks. We don’t stop until I’m weak and sagging against him.
“Next time you want to show me something, try and pick a less hazardous place, huh?” I finally wheeze, my cheeks sore.
“First order of business is installing some type of railing before you set one toe on these stairs again.”
“Thank you,” I whisper. “You know… for saving my life and all.”
His gaze pins me in the dim cavern. “Please don’t ever scare me like that again,” he whispers back, looping his arm around me, drawing me close, and pressing a soft kiss to my forehead.
Every fiber of my body tingles as his arm falls away, the echo of his soft lips pulsing above my eyebrow.
Eisha towers overhead, presiding benevolently over her secret realm inside the mountain. Her graceful hands with their tapered fingers loom above us. The moonlight filtering through the ceiling opening bathes her in ethereal radiance.
His voice is reverent when next he speaks: “From this angle, she truly looks how I imagine her.”
“She’s breathtaking. How did she get here?”
He tells me about the generations of high priestesses before him, before Maida and her predecessors, stealing away in secret. How they chipped away at the sandstone bit by bit until the cavern and the stairs and the goddess came into being.
He points upward, to where the wind is howling past the opening in the rock. “This place was just a small natural chamber at first. The weather had wormed its way inside and worn away at the rock. But the rest of it was formed by hand. Dug out gradually over hundreds of years.”
The sheer scale of such an undertaking leaves me astounded. “Does the prioress know about this place?”
“Absolutely not,” he scoffs. “We call it the Sanctum of the True Goddess. Its existence has been passed between high priestesses alone all these years.”
“This is a sacred place,” I breathe. My heart clenches at the enormity of what he’s sharing—the trust he’s placing at my feet.
He gazes at the stone goddess in her majesty, and I gaze at him, my pulse beating in my cheeks.
“Mother of Destruction and Regeneration,” I finally murmur, shifting my gaze to Eisha and reciting the part of her motto I remember. “Patron goddess of builders and craftsmen. In particular blacksmiths.”
“There’s more to it.” He glances sidelong at me.
“Iknowthere’s more, but I can’t—” I shake my head, dull pain springing to life behind my eyes. “It’s gone now.”
“Killer of Máiréad,” he provides. “Maker of Changelings. Giver of Magic.”
The gears in my mind align and click. “That’s it! But why take it away to begin with?”
“Because that’s precisely what the ritual is designed to do.”
A chill runs down my spine. “Do what?”
“Target all knowledge of changelings, erasing everything you used to know. About demuns especially. Any other knowledge linked in your mind with the existence of changelings, including awareness of your own attraction to women, was also eliminated.”
Because changelings are always wasted women.But the reverse isn’t necessarily true.
“Thanks to the ritual, you no longer remember Máiréad, the Dead God. Do you feel like getting a little further ahead of your classmates today?”
“Sure,” I smile, feeling very doted upon all of a sudden.
“Máiréad was the First Divinity. The Old One,” El starts, folding his arms over his knees. “She existed in the Time Before Time Itself. She was the creator of the universe and every element in it. Maker of light and bringer of darkness. She fashioned this and the other planets and gave them their moons. Divided the sky from the oceans. Made the Netherworld and the Great Hereafter on parallel planes. Finally, tired of being alone in the vastness of time and space, she brought the New Gods into being.”
I’m riveted by the smooth cadence of his voice, the concentration creasing between his eyebrows.
“Among them, only Eisha feared Máiréad’s infinite power and the fact that she could unmake everything. Including the New Gods themselves, if she so wished. So. Eisha destroyed her.”
“Mother of Destruction.” I say it again as everything takes on a strange new clarity.
