When the Maiden rose, she hesitated before the girl. A hand came to rest on her shoulder in a gentle caress. “Remember my words. Do not forget who you are.”
She didn’t understand.
The girl turned between them in confusion, looking at Nyx and Celeste. “What’s happening?”
But they did not answer her. Celeste startled her by pulling her close and squeezing her tightly, the way that she had only once, when the girl had roused from the clutches of a fever they thought would see her return to Hala as a child of just seven winters.
But the girl had sixteen winters now. An adult—or she would be. She slid up her hand, her fingers brushing the tear from her sister’s cheek. Another fell that her sister did not try to hide, and the girl’s throat tightened to the point of pain. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Because something was very, very wrong.
That bell—she knew that bell, of course. It was the bell in the harbor, used in ceremony and in celebration. To welcome the visitors who came to Asteria for learning, or for healing. It was a point of pride in the town to train as a bellringer for Asteria, to learn to wield the enormous, metal bells in the belltower to send urgent messages up to Hala’s temple.
But she didn’t know this message.
For the bells rang withdesperation, the peals harsh and continuous and without rhythm.
Only to stop, abrupt and sudden.
The girl looked at Nyx for answers. She suddenly felt—unsteady, perhaps. As though the world was shifting beneath her feet. “Nyx?”
Nyx blinked rapidly, before she threw her arms around the girl as Celeste had. “We have to go. Come now.”
The girl took a step back, yanking herself free. “What are you talking about? That’s not part of the Ascension—,”
“There will be no Ascension today,” Nyx breathed. There was sorrow there—so much sorrow that the girl felt the bottom drop from her stomach. “The Caelumnai are here.”
She didn’t understand the words that had Nyx—her Nyx, so steady, so elegant—ashen and trembling. “So? They come here all the time—,”
They came for healing, for education, for exploration. And there had been more and more these past few months. The town was full to bursting with Travelers. And with them came the whispers. Whispers that their own land was dying, that their maegishad pulled every bit of life from the ground and there was nothing left. That their people were beginning to starve.
She had thought it nothing more than a terrible story. Maegis did not act like that—it never had. The faeyte’s maegisdid not steal from the ground, but supported it. Asteria’s land was lush and plentiful, helped along by Deva and Milah, who had received an affinity to influence animals as part of her Calling. The Travelers had always liked to tell stories, had offered them in exchange for shelter and food, and so did the inritus in the town as they gathered around the hearth in the square each night, though they lacked the unusual gifts possessed by those with Traveler maegis.
The girl had always loved those stories. She had crept out of the temple more than once to listen at the shadowed edges of the crowd, a bowl of hot soup nudged into her hands by the elders who saw her and only smiled. They would press their thumb and their index finger together before touching their forehead, and the girl had always returned the gesture with pride, her shoulders straightening and feeling a little taller at the respect they offered before sneaking back to the temple to receive a tongue-lashing from Nyx for her tardiness.
“Not this time.” Celeste gripped her shoulders tightly, shaking the girl. “You must listen to me now. They do not come for aid. They come foreverything.”
The girl blinked. And very faintly, through the open air above her head, high above the arches, she heard something.
She had never heard such noise. Harsh, and high, and continuous, a harrowing, awful song that grew louder, twining with the sound of her own heartbeat suddenly echoing in her ears.
Screaming. Endless waves, ebbs and flows of cries from hundreds of throats. She didn’t know the town could make such a noise, didn’t know how to understand the sound that reached her.
She had heard pain in the infirmary. Knew what that sounded like. But she had never heard pain like this.
Nyx pressed their foreheads together, her voice urgent. “It had to be this way. Do not hate us, Selene. And…gods, do not forget us.”
Selene.
The girl frowned. “That is not—,”
Shehadno name. Not until Hala gifted it, not until the girl had climbed the steps to the Sanctum and lifted her face to the crescent moon.
“Iname you.” Nyx swallowed. “We name you, little sister. Selene Amaris.”
Selene Amaris.
She had waited sixteen long, nameless years for this moment. Only for Nyx to throw it at her amidst a cacophony of pain, her own voice filled with fear she did not attempt to hide.
