As she exhales, she breathes out a wave of power. It’s frightening, awe-inspiring, beautiful, impossible. It’s like the first cry of a newborn, her mother’s pain still lingering.
As the wave moves, it consumes the forest. No, it doesn’t consume. Ittransforms.
In Lumina’s expression, there’s now grief, relief, joy. All of it all at once. She keeps her eyes closed as the woods start tobecome.
The dirt beneath my feet turns to packed, geometric stone, hardening with every passing second. The tall trees bend, branches growing in strict lines, at unnatural right angles, and then petrifying into the shapes of buildings. Roots become stone steps. Twigs grow up and cross one another and turn into windowpanes.
I spin, mouth agape, as the forest turns into a city before my eyes. Even the smells change, replaced by fresh smoke like the hearths are already burning. With a jolt, I realize I recognize the pattern of these streets. I’ve been here. Hours ago.
It’s Linsfall.
It looks slightly different. The buildings aren’t as modern, all with straw-thatched roofs and none reaching more than a single story. But the layout of the roads is familiar in their annoying habit of narrowing and widening unpredictably. And the buildings hold an echo of their future iterations.
When I turn back to look at Lumina, she’s standing in the very center of a city square I recognize.
She stands precisely where the statue of the Faceless Goddess stood.
After a minute, the groaning of the trees vanishes. A minute after that, the deep crackling of stone forming goes silent, too. Only then does Lumina open her eyes.
She surveys everything before her with a beneficent smile.
And then she weeps. She smiles andweepslike she’s glad to finally witness this place she held inside her so long, but like she also misses holding it so impossibly close to her.
Just as I witnessed in the tower’s Tear, her tears roll down to her pointed chin and fall into her hands. They gather and become an opal, new light glistening over the goddess’s features.
A door opens. Another. Suddenly, people are emerging from all the buildings around us.
People, when there werenopeople anywhere before the goddess’s magic swept through. My heart is racing.
She just… created them?
They’re dressed in simple clothes. I might mistake them for commoners from today’s Linsfall, though the styles are a bit strange and bulky. They all stare at her with wide eyes.
Lumina holds her hands out to them, welcoming, her head slightly cocked to the side.
A shock explodes from the base of my skull and down my spine when I realize it’s an exact mirror of the position the statue stands in.
Stood, I suppose.
“Welcome, my children,” she says. A woman reaches Lumina’s side first, and the goddess places the opal in her hands tenderly.
The woman regards it with reverence and wonder.
“This is your world now,” Lumina says. “Cherish it. Protect it against those who would do it harm.”
“Who are you?” the woman asks in a strange accent.
“Lumina, goddess of creation. And I… wish I could know you,” she whispers. But the emotion that briefly grips her doesn’t remain in her voice. “Guard over this Tear, and let nobody take it from you.”
Her voice grows powerful, and the people tremble. I tremble, too, hearing her.
“I will always come when you summon. Be good to one another, and be well.”
She turns, and suddenly she’s gone. I don’t miss it in a blink. She just suddenlyisn’t.
The people look around, confused, suddenly alive and suddenly alone.
And the woman holding the Tear holds it to the light, just as I did in the forest. “Goddess,” she says reverently.
