The attendants were hauling her away before her scream had finished echoing. They shuffled her toward the doors, her limbs flailing, silk tangling around her ankles.
I couldn’t look away. My heart thundered, not with pity, but terror.
That could be me.
She fought the whole way to the doors, her voice breaking until it was no more than a desperate rasp. They slammed shut behind her, sealing the sound away.
And the High Priestess had already raised her hand again.
The line was thinning. Fewer girls remained between us now, only a handful of veiled figures separating me from her judgment.
My heart thudded, a relentless beat against my ribs. Each breath burned on the way in, too shallow to soothe.
Closer. Closer.
The soft drag of her robes across stone seemed deafening now, louder than my pulse, louder than the whispers clawing at the edge of my thoughts. I gripped my dress, trying to look calm.
She stopped in front of me and my breath fled, stolen clean from my chest, as if the very air had turned its back on me. A hush settled over my skin as her hand rose.
It was the same thing she’d done with all the others. But this was different.
This wasme.
I stared straight ahead, every muscle tense as my lungs ached with the strain of so much stillness. My heart was thrashing like it wanted to break free of my chest, to reach for her fingers andforceher to choose me.
Please.
Her hand hovered just above my veil. One breath away.
And then … she convulsed.
Her spine snapped taut, arching back as if struck. A tremor ripped through her thin frame. Her mouth opened, but no words came, only a strange, primal sound rising as if dredged from some forgotten cavern of her soul.
Around me, the air shifted, a gasp rising amid the rustle of silk and the whispers of girls drawing back.
The High Priestess staggered away, one step, then another. Her arms flailed slightly, clawing at the space between us like she was trying to fend me off.
I didn’t move. I couldn’t.
Her eyes flew open, wide and terrified. They locked on mine.
She looked at me, not at the veil, not at the girl beneath it, but through me, as if my skin were nothing but glass. Her gaze peeled me open, seeing every secret I’d buried beneath my ribs, every scraped-knee prayer whispered to forbidden gods, every desperate promise I’d made to survive. She saw my village, the red dust still clinging to my hem, and the years of training and trembling hope I’d carried like chains of lead across my back.
The High Priestess opened her mouth again, her lips moving as a voice not her own slipped free, colder and older than the air itself, rough and heavy with prophecy. “She will be the ruin of us all.”
The words slammed into me, impossible to dodge.
The High Priestess swayed, her chest rising in fractured gasps as her fingers twitched at her sides. She blinked once, twice, again, each blink slower than the last, as if she was waking up in a place she didn’t recognize, as though she had forgotten where she was … until her eyes darted back to mine.
For a heartbeat, she stilled.
Then her expression shifted, terror flooding her features. The room seemed to hold its breath as she stepped back from me in a clear rejection. With jerky and forced movements she shook her head, rejecting me, and then quickly moved to the next candidate, but her eyes flicked back to me in quick, fearful glances, as if she expected me to strike.
I stood frozen, emptied of breath, her words sinking into me like molten metal finding every weakness in the mold.
My chest rose and fell, but it wasn’t breath. It was panic.
The hope I’d held, tightfisted, sacred,all I had, cracked beneath the weight of that moment.
