Though it was the place that might have inspired a confusion of tongues and the beginning of language, words failed Séverin as he beheld what lay before them.
On the other side of the threshold was an island wrapped in mist. It did not belong to any country. Perhaps it did not even belong to this world.
Silver fog wreathed the boundaries of the temple, so it looked asif it were cast in moonlight. A melted image of the night sky adorned a wide glass floor that formed close to the edge of his boots. The artistry was so vivid that Séverin’s stomach swooped, imagining he might fall through the darkness between the stars.
Thirty meters away appeared the first steps of the ziggurat. Séverin tilted his chin up… andup… and still he could not see where the ziggurat ended. He imagined a temple like that would scratch the sky, but instead, it seemed to disappear into a lush hanging garden. Like Eden itself tipped upside down. The silvery fog picked out flowers the color of pearls, and thick, reaching vines like the grasping hands of a new lover. The lush forestry curled down, resting on the shoulders of two massive automatons flanking either side of the ziggurat. In the dimness, they looked sculpted out of shadows. Their faces were serene and inscrutable. Atop their heads, they wore crowns of intricately carved stone.
When Séverin breathed deep, he caught the lingering whisper of incense on the air. And when he closed his eyes, he could hear an impossible wind rustling through the branches.
He did not touch anything.
Instead, the temple reached out to touch him.
29
ZOFIA
Zofia did not consider herself particularly religious.
She had grown up going to synagogue and hearing of God’s works, but she had struggled to understand divine rationale behind the actions. Why did he punish? Why did he hurt? Why did he deliver? What were the constants behind his choices?
When she asked, no one could give her an answer. After all, God was not a being whose expressions she could study and put into context.
Only her father had understood her frustration.
“I like to think of the divine in terms of an unknown factor,” he said. “Think of the universe as an infinite equation, Zosia. Perhaps the things which are added and taken away… new siblings or lost homes and countries… perhaps they are simply part of the balance of that equation… the sum of which we cannot see.”
“But then we’ll never understand it,” said Zofia, frowning.
“Ah, Zosia,” her father had said, smiling widely. “Who said we were meant to understand?”
When he smiled widely, that meant there was nothing to worry about, and Zofia had felt a knot loosening inside her.
“I believe we are meant for more wonderful things, yes?” said her father. “We are meant to live as best as we can with what we have been given. Time is the common denominator for us all, and it is not infinite.”
Zofia had liked that explanation, even if it frustrated her at times. Over the years, she clung to her father’s words. She thought of that grand, unknowable equation when her parents died, when she was expelled from school, when Hela fell sick.
It was not a cruelty, but a balancing.
That was all.
She did not have to see or understand the equation to trust that it was there.
But now, standing at the strange threshold between the cave and the temple, Zofiafeltthat equation.
She never liked the sensation of mind Forging. It was the intrusion of an alien image and feeling. What she saw and felt in that second was something entirely different.
It was as if the temple was telling her the story of itself. Behind her eyes, Zofia glimpsed what should have been impossible. She felt the knowledge that hundreds of hands had patted down straw and mud, had fed the fires of a thousand brick kilns. She heard dozens of languages whose names she did not know, and yet she understood what was being said:
Keep safe. Keep hidden. Don’t look.
Deep in her chest, Zofia felt seized by a vast weightlessness… as if she had peeked over the brink of a cliff above a lightless chasm.
The sensations disappeared instantly.
Zofia’s eyes flew open. Her hand was on her mouth. She did notremember bringing it there. Her fingers brushed over the indent above her top lip.
“Right there,” Hela had once told her in the dark. “That’s where the angel pressed their thumb down and locked up all the secrets of the world right before we were born.”
