Husks of thorny vines hung from the broken windows along the back wall and ceiling. Those windows were meant to allow in dawn’s light and cast a warm glow on the pink stones and the golden accents of the temple. Instead, the chamber was dappled with shadows, and the cloudiness of the day only allowed in a grey haze that matched the dreariness outside. Somewhere, unseen water steadily dripped, and wind whistled through the side passages.
At the back of the main room stood the broken altar to Valcord. Celeste went toward it, maneuvering quietly around the soft seating in the chamber’s middle. She left her overstuffed pack on the sofa, a piece Delphine had commissioned from a lamia artisan in the mountains to replace the many benches that had once lined the chamber for worship. Her footsteps felt too loud even though the place was no longer holy. As much as she failed to understand and perhaps even loathed the idea, she was quietly touched then by the thought of coming there to pray to the god of dawn and clover, of new beginnings and hope.
Then Celeste stopped short at a divot in the floor. That was new. And ominous.
Before the altar that Delphine had turned into an extravagant seat was a crescent-shaped pit carved into the stone floor. Celeste was unsure she could trust the thin bit of stone that served as a bridge over its middle, but even less did she trust the hole itself. Her hand went to her locket, squeezing tight, and the newly acquired noxscura rattled. Steeling herself, Celeste crept to the edge and peered down.
So many bones, and all so small.
Celeste bit back the yelp that wanted to escape. Noise like that would be unacceptable in the silence of the place, even if it was accidental. Cruelty was commonplace in Delphine’s presence, but stupidity and failure earned the brunt of her abuse. Celeste wasn’t surprised to see the corpses were child-sized in that regard, but they had to have been reanimated from the graveyard out back and not new—she couldn’t bear to think of her sister being so cruel, so hypocritical, as to hurt children.
Then Celeste peered deeper, and a tug in her chest nearly toppled her right down to the pit’s bottom.
One of the bodies wasn’t quite so small. She recognized the dress that had been Delphine’s, a shroud of shimmery black feathers blanketing bones that belonged to her sister. Pain pricked at her eyes, her legs wobbled, and she fell to her knees at the pit’s edge.
For all that her older sister had been, misery and nastiness and cruelty, Delphine was the only person Celeste had in the entire realm, and there was no question now, even if her features were eaten away from her skull, that she was gone.
Celeste Delacroix’s heart languished deep in her chest, softening to barely a thump. Beneath her hand, the locket thrummed, a stark reminder of her own weakness. Delphine never needed an enchanted vessel to hold errant noxscura like Celeste, so incompetent that she was forced to carry around arcana like a child might a blanket, and yet her skills had not saved her. Delphine’s death seemed an impossibility, but no—that was her sister at the bottom of the pit, all bones and spent magic and dashed hope.
Sitting back, she lifted her eyes to the altar and the orb carved upon it, wings flanking either side. The sun didn’t have wings, didn’t need them to ascend every morning into the sky to warm the earth and light the way, but she imagined it would certainly help on days when rising felt like too much.
There would be no cobbling together what was left of Delphine despite what the woman requested in her posthumous message. Necromancy wasn’t the kind of tool that would really bring her back anyway, not whole, and especially not when the corpse was so spoiled. A spoiled corpse, however, could have been avoided if Celeste had arrived sooner, a thought that had been niggling at her for moons.
Because shehadstalled, after all, and it wasn’t only due to her fear the whole thing could be a ruse.
As Celeste spent the winter pacing the tiny chamber of the Clarriseau inn, being yelled at by her downstairs neighbor and wondering what exactly to do, there was a second, quieter thought that whispered itself into her mind about Delphine’s death. It was a thought she knew was wrong to have and thus wasn’t really being had, it was just sort of having itself in the peripherals of the place where she actually thought all her real thoughts, and it was this:
Maybe,just maybe, Delphine’s departure from the plane was not the worst occurrence in the history of the realm.
But Celeste could not—should not—bring that unthought thought to the forefront or even the aftback of her mind because it was too cruel, and it was ungrateful, and it was certainly a betrayal at its very core. And now that she knew the woman was truly dead, it was especially guilt-inducing even though Celeste hadn’treallythought it, a thing she would swear by with tears in her eyes if the truth were demanded of her. The thought had only just sort of thought itself.
However, Celeste was nothing if not deferential despite the impossibility of the task. She wiped at her eyes and pulled herself to her feet, Delphine’s cutting but honest words ringing through her mind,Darkness knows I don’t have time to clean up after you if you fuck something up down there, so stay out of the sepulcher. Never had she been allowed below the temple on her own, so if Celeste were being instructed to go down there now, something important was surely to be found within.
A door off the main chamber had another lock on it, this one arcane. Celeste swiped her fingers over it once in the pattern she’d been taught for emergencies, but nothing happened. She repeated the movement, familiar with the need to do things twice when she inevitably failed. Again, nothing happened. She sucked a breath in over her teeth and squinted, then slowly performed the motion one more time. When the latch again did not give way, she recklessly tried the arcane movements a last, frustrated time.
There was a pall of blackness that enveloped the lock, and a crack that nearly knocked Celeste off her feet, but then it cleared, and the latch lay in two pieces on the stone floor.
Whispering apologies to the inanimate object, Celeste took the winding stairway underground and halted on the last step to stare into the darkness. She wasn’t afraid of the dark. In fact, she preferred it, how it allowed her to go along unseen, to exist amongst things like herself. But the things in the sepulcher weren’t like her, not really. These were important things, revered things that deserved special care, and her insides churned, telling her she didn’t belong.
But Delphine had ordered her to go, and even in death, her older sister’s commands had to be followed.
Celeste took a torch from the wall, and with a slip of a finger over her locket, set it alight with a black flame. Black fire didn’t illuminate as well as the other colors, but it was all she could conjure with noxscura. Delphine could do the entire spectrum, and other wielders of arcana could command fire that burned for more than just light, but Celeste had only ever managed black. It was enough to make her way though, and she moved forward into the slightly-less-dark darkness.
The temple’s burial basement was used in winter to hold bodies when the ground was too firm for digging graves. It was a small space with coffin-shaped nooks lining the walls and a stone table in the center for preparation. When Delphine took over, she hoarded spoils in place of corpses—those usually just got tossed into the woods.
Most of the nooks were empty now, bottles of wine stashed in one, a forgotten urn stuffed in another, and a trove of coins gleaming from one on high. Celeste’s eyes went wide at the amount, but she moved on until she found a small book propped up in the last.
The parchment inside was covered in Delphine’s handwriting, long, slanted, and beautiful. There was the list of necromancers and where they could be found, one back in Clarriseau, a few at the edges of Eiren itself, and one in the Accursed Wastes—not that she was goingthere, not again.
The rest were in far off realms, and one was even listed in an entirely different dimension with a footnote from Delphine that read:Necromancer Hargreaves is likely the strongest, but he is the equivalent of a crown’s guard in his world, and as he will need to be taken here against his will, it will prove most difficult. But he is tall and pale and has dark hair, you know, just your type, so if his abduction can be managed, I’ll think about letting you keep him.
Celeste went red even standing underground where no one, not even the gods, could see what had been written. She didn’t want tokeepsomeone, the thought alone making her ill. And tall, pale, and dark-haired wasn’t her type anyway. Celeste never shared her romantic preferences with her sister, knowing she would be mocked for her tastes, she had just never been very good at hiding her accidental infatuation with Delphine’s long-suffering significant other.
On the following page were instructions to bring someone back from the dead, but they were unsurprisingly unfinished. Delphine had not been stupid. She knew that being brought back by a necromancer wasn’t true resurrection—Celeste didn’t know anyone who could dothat—but the woman had been ambitious, likely intending to figure it out before she was actually killed. She hadn’t though, and Celeste sighed out a guilty breath of relief.
As she watched the black fire dance against the dirt walls of the sepulcher, she whimpered in the back of her throat. Relief at her sister remaining dead was neither loyal nor nice, but she quickly convinced herself that her relief was actually in response to not having to do any of the complex arcana at all. She would surely mess everything up anyway, she’d never abducted anyone all on her own, let alone a necromancer, and despite Delphine’s suggestion, Damien Bloodthorne wouldnothave helped. Implying that he would was like having a thorn twisted in Celeste’s side—he had been the subject of their biggest disagreement.
“You shouldn’t lock him up like that,” Celeste had braved saying once when her older sister’s antics turned from regular cruelty to truly heinous. She had just delivered food to Damien, blood dripping down his face from a newly opened scar and defeat in the hollowness of his once-spirited eyes, and the words came out despite herself.
