Page 10 of The Blood Rites

“Luceris. Marissa. Callen.”

She says our names slowly, wrapping each one in ceremony until they no longer feel like ours.

“You have been called.”

The words settle over my skin.

I know this part. Everyone knows this part. I have watched it from the crowd every year, standing shoulder to shoulder with people pretending not to be relieved that it’s someone else’s name that was spoken, someone else’s child.

It looks different from here. Everything does.

Sera lifts her arms.

A chill races along my arms, goosebumps rising as a phantom wind whips through her robes, the hum of her Mana gathering like a storm until my teeth ache.

“I call to the glory and power of the Crown,” she says, voice deepening, widening, becoming more than voice. “I call to the Mother Shard. Permit me to become the beacon. We invite your Overseers to our home, to take what is yours.”

The Crown stiffens, then jerks. Not much, but enough to remind me he is alive.

Light bursts from him and strikes Sera. She throws her head back, her body catching it, shaping it, turning it upwards until a pillar of gold tears into the sky.

The crowd erupts, but I can’t move. The platform shudders beneath us, gears grinding somewhere below, huge and hidden as the stone begins to rise.

Marissa cries out. Callen shifts half a step, then forces himself still. I lock my knees before they can betray me, as the plaza drops away.

Faces become shapes. Cheers become wind. The outer walls sink below us, and the Alabaster Vein rises beside the platform, impossibly close, pulsing with light as if something inside it is alive and watching.

We climb until the whole Dominion opens beneath us, then the platform stops with a jolt hard enough to rattle my bones.

For a breath, there is only the gold pillar above us, then the others answer.

To the east, green light blooms against the horizon. Earth.

A moment later, red-orange fire cuts upwards from the deserts of the Fire Dominion.

To the south, half-hidden by the impossible shape of the Mother Shard, a black column rises like a wound that refuses to close. Shadow.

My skin prickles. To the west, blue shimmers over the islands of the Water Dominion, rippling as if the sky itself has become a tide. Farther still, silver-grey light spears up from the Floating Rings of the Air Dominion.

Six Dominions.

Six beacons.

Sets of Offerings standing somewhere beneath them, looking back.

The thought moves through me before I can stop it.

Seventeen will fall.

One will remain.

I look towards the Mother Shard, waiting at the heart of it all, alone on her island, towering and too far away to be real until she begins to glow.

Pink light pulses from her centre. Soft, almost tender.

That makes it worse.

The crowd below releases another roar, but up here the sound feels distant, trapped beneath us. The beacons burn across the world, each one a wound in the sky, each one a promise of blood.