Dahlia wrinkled her nose and I couldn't help but chuckle again.
"We'll never be one of them, Dahl," I vowed. "I'd never—"
"Warren," someone else spoke.
I turned, stopping just before the gate outside of our Second Ring house, to see Milo standing behind me. Had the boy followed us all the way from the Deck? I blinked at him, brows furrowing in confusion.
"Milo?" I asked, dropping my hand from where it had been reaching for the latch. I turned to fully face him and saw the expression on his face for the first time. My heart tripped over itself. "What is it? What's wrong?"
"There's something you need to know," he said.
I swore I could see tears gathering in the corners of his eyes as Bria emerged from the stairs behind him and her eyes met mine. The sorrow in her expression nearly knocked me off my feet as Milo spoke again.
"It's about the Tenth Trial.”
Chapter One
Milo
Ishould have known I would find her in the temple.
Nascha was an intelligent woman. She'd spent her life studying every book in House Avus’ library and scheming to get her hands on those outside of it. She knew things about our world, about Sanctuary, that others never even considered. But she had one thing, one vice, that defied all logic.
Religion.
It wasn’t the Geist my grandmother worshiped. She knew better than that, though she came to the temple to ensure it appeared as though she did. But I knew who she really prayed to. She worshiped deities only she seemed to believe existed. The old gods, she called them. I hadn’t a clue what that meant or where she'd even heard of them. They weren’t in any of the books she’d ever loaned me and any mention of their followers had been scrubbed from history, if they’d existed at all. Still, she persisted.
At least she was quiet about her faith, having only tried to recruit myself and Olympia as far as I was aware. The others wouldn’t appreciate her allegiance to a false god. They didn’tunderstand. They were still so blinded by the Geist, and Cosmo was going to use that against them as a weapon more effective than any sword.
So I couldn’t understand, when we were on the verge of fighting a religious war, how my grandmother could be so devout.
“Do you intend for all of us to shift our allegiance?” I asked as I approached her where she knelt at the carved golden altar. We were alone and could speak freely. The priests always allowed the leaders of this city to worship unattended. “Is that why we fight against the tyranny of the Vipers? To free ourselves of the chokehold that is the Geist only to shackle ourselves to other absent deities?”
“I have no intention of indoctrination, hafid,” she replied, rising from her ancient knees and turning to pat my cheek, sympathy in her tone as she called me by her preferred term of endearment. I wasn’t sure where it came from. A remnant of an ancient language, most likely. My grandmother did enjoy her linguistics.
She passed me then, hobbling toward the temple doors. I followed her through rows and rows of burning candles which illuminated the otherwise darkened sanctuary.
“And faith is not a shackle,” she called back as she walked on. “At least, it doesn’t have to be.”
I didn't agree but kept my mouth shut as we stepped into the glorious sunshine. Nascha paused, lifting her face to the beams radiating down on us from above. She did that more often lately, stopped to take in that which was around her. It was endearing, if not a little unsettling. Though I appreciated how much she was stopping to smell the roses lately, I couldn’t help but wonder what had inspired the change. Nascha had always seemed to anticipate the future in ways that bordered on the supernatural if one believed in that sort of thing. Her taking the time toenjoy the world around her more often could only be seen as foreboding at best. It meant that whatever she saw in the future, it was such that either the sun or she was no longer there to share in this exchange. I wasn’t sure which frightened me more.
“Have you found anything?” My grandmother asked. Her eyes were still closed, weathered face still raised to the sun.
“You know I haven’t,” I grumbled in reply.
It was my ultimate failure, a botched test of the task I’d dedicated myself to my entire life. When my grandmother had given me the book filled with the ravings of an ancient madman, I’d laughed at her. I’d tossed it aside and claimed I didn’t have time for a study of our ancestry. But she’d picked it up again and pressed it into my hand, and so I read it.
It was fanatical and crazed, made up entirely of the incoherent stream of consciousness of a lunatic, and yet, answers to some of my most confounding questions had been found within the text. Reading between the lines, skipping through the madness, one could find explanations for the very world itself, for the system that was Sanctuary. I’d made some miraculous discoveries since I’d begun studying the book. That the Cullings weren’t an original design of the gods. That our ancestors had given up the world outside of Sanctuary in exchange for freedom of a different sort. That therewasa world outside of Sanctuary. But Nascha didn’t care about any of that. She’d come to me with a very specific question, and I’d yet to find the answer.
“It shouldn’t be so difficult,” I sighed as we strode from the temple back toward House Avus. “Theoretically, it should be there. So much else is. And I’ve even identified a few passages I think discuss the…incident. But the man was insane. He skips through time like a child hops about a garden. It’s muddled and inane and impossible to follow.”
“That’s because you’re thinking like you,” my grandmother replied, opening one eye and somehow narrowing it in my direction. “You need to think like him.”
“I need to lose my mind then? Should I start talking to the walls and rocking myself in a corner?”
“Eximius saw something he wasn’t supposed to. He knew something the Geist themselves didn’t want him to know. What was it?”
“It isn’t written in the book.”
