She noted the garb the apprentices wore—rust-colored robes with a yellow insignia patch sewn at the shoulder. The patch denoted at which training school the apprentice studied and his rank among the students.
Gilene abandoned her illusion of the old man for that of an adolescent boy dressed in the apprentice’s robes. She waited until the bear wagon stopped at the doors before leaving the shelter of the barrel stack.
The guards unbarred the doors and heaved them open to reveal the colossal expanse of the arena, with its screaming crowds and blood-soaked sand. The wagon rolled forward at the beast master’s shout to the driver. Its entourage walked beside and behind it. Gilene jogged to catch up, playing the part of tardy apprentice but keeping enough distance so the true apprentices wouldn’t notice her behind them. The guards thought nothing of it and waved her through with hardly a glance before pulling the doors closed with a creaking thud.
The crowd’s roar bludgeoned her ears, the scent of gore strong in her nose. A surge of spectators packed the narrow walkways that led to the arena’s seating as well as to the outer ring of hallways encircling the structure where food, prostitutes, and favors could be purchased. Here, it was easy to disappear into the chaos, and Gilene took advantage of it to part ways with the beast master and change her illusion yet again.
Illusion magic wasn’t an endless well, and the effort to invoke and hold another disguise grew ever harder. This, however, would be her last.
The spectators inhaled a collective breath soon punctuated by appreciative whistles when a solitary woman of startling beauty crossed the bloodstained sands toward the platform built of dried kindling and the bodies of the dead. Garbed in robes the colors oftwilight, with flowers woven in her dark hair, she shimmered in the sun, the epitome of spring.
Gilene didn’t falter under the weight of their avid scrutiny nor stumble as she climbed the grotesque hill of dead men and animals to reach the immolation pillar prepared for the Flowers of Spring set to burn for the crowd.
She pivoted slowly so that all the arena might see her, before halting to face the pavilion where the emperor lounged in shaded splendor to view the events. The chair beside him was empty. Where was the empress?
A voice rippled across the arena, rising above the crowd’s murmurs. “Burn! Burn for us, Flower of Spring!”
The audience took up the call, their chant rising ever louder until it was a one-word bellow. “Burn! Burn! Burn!”
Confused guards approached the platform, pausing at times to look around them for the wagon full of women they expected to arrive instead of this single girl. They stopped and edged back when Gilene lifted her hands. Fire ignited in her palms. The crowd roared its approval, demanding more.
Gilene turned her focus inward, to the ebb and flow of magic purling through her body and her spirit. She spooled it out slowly, reining in the surges of power so that the flames dancing merrily in her palms spilled through her fingers to splash across the platform and ignite the kindling. The planks beneath her feet vibrated with the cheers from her audience. The guards sprinted away.
This immolation would be her final one, the last desperate effort to end the Rites once and for all. She would burn up and burn out, use every last drop of magic inside her, fuel it with her life force until she was drained of both. Far better this than years of pain and slow disfigurement and a duty to pass on this hideous burden to another Beroe fire witch.
The flames grew, bursting upward with a roar that rocked Gilene back on her feet under a scorching wind. She stood within a whirlwind of fire that twisted and spun like a frenzied dancer. Power spilled out of her with every pull of her will, building layer upon layer until the entire floor of the arena transformed into a fiery lake. This was no illusion, but true fire, and it surged toward the arena’s lower tiers in a wave of blistering heat.
Cheering changed to screaming as people closest to the arena floor abandoned their seats and fled up the steps to the higher levels.
Strength flowed out of Gilene like blood from a wound. In previous years she would have abandoned her place atop the pyre and fled the arena as an illusion of flame herself until she reached the questionable safety of the catacombs. Not this time. This time she stayed.
The fire climbed the high walls and hopped over, licking at the fleeing crowd as its flames galloped up the steps, grotesquely sentient in its movements as it consumed more and more of the arena.
Gilene’s vision blackened as she poured her life force into her magic and nurtured the beast devouring the Pit. The flames had reached midway and seemed to slow. People jammed together in a tightly packed ring that huddled along the highest tiers. They began shoving each other to make room, and bodies tumbled down the steps and into the flames, their shrieks instantly lost in the inferno.
The seating, carved from stone, turned black and scorched, and anything cloth or flesh that succumbed to the fire was reduced to char. Still, it wasn’t enough. Gilene snarled her frustration, and the fire leapt briefly in response, swallowing an entire section of the arena up to its highest point.
Tears filled her eyes only to evaporate instantly. For the first time since her magic manifested, she truly prayed.
“Agna, hear this woman you have named handmaiden. Your children die before the gates of Kraelag, and the Empire would burn its own to defeat them. I ask for your strength, not your mercy, because I can’t do this alone. Make my death not a vain one, nor the deaths of those women who died here before me. There is vengeance, and there is justice. This is justice.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, didn’t hope for some celestial recognition of her pitiful cry for help. The gods weren’t deaf. They simply didn’t exist, not even the one Azarion so fervently worshipped.
Gilene called on the tattered threads of her strength to make the fire hotter. Her lungs burned and her chest hurt, as if her heart struggled to push the blood through her body.
The arena seats drowned in fire, its spectators gone or immolated. She hated those who attended the Rites, hated them for slaking their thirst for agony and death under the guise of religious fervor. She would die unburdened by guilt over their demise.
A stray thought flitted across her bleary mind, of plume grasses murmuring in the wind while a Savataratamantwined her hair through his fingers and kissed her lips with the passion of a lover and the reverence of a votary.
The fire was dying, as was she, when the sense of being watched overcame her. She peered into the flames surrounding her but saw only the hazy outline of the burning arena. Her eyelids were heavy, and an anvil rested on her chest, crushing her breastbone and making it so very hard to draw breath. Still that feeling of being observed didn’t lessen. Gilene closed her eyes and gasped at the image filling her mind.
A woman, but not just a woman. This was something else,something so vast and ancient, Gilene’s spirit shied away with a whimper. She comprehended an ever-changing face whose eyes were the gathering of stars and whose body was woven of sky and meadow. The being was all that was both supernal and earthly, all that was young and old, frail and vigorous. Eons of time had passed through her fingers, and her fluttering hair reminded Gilene of a horse’s mane.
“The Great Mare,” she whispered.
The goddess tilted her head in a curious gesture. Mountains shivered in response. “You called me, handmaiden. I have heard you.”
“Agna.” Gilene tried to lift her hand and touch the hem of the goddess’s gown, but she lacked the strength. “Help me,” she said on a weak sob. “Make it all stop.”
