Overnight, sand piled up against the door to the tower, covering it until it could no longer swing open without creating an avalanche at our feet. I order the warriors to clear a path for the door to shut again. Part of me knows that the tower must stay intact, at least with a solid door.

That thought is confirmed when we can finally shut it again. Standing outside the tower, the sunlight blazing, the door swings shut from the gloom of the tower.

There are claw marks on the wood. Some are weathered, old and grey, but there are new ones, fresh gouges on the surface, around the handle. Something was trying to get in last night.

My first thought is Gray.

"Search around the perimeter, try to find Gray," I bark. We all scatter, looking for footprints, more claw marks, any sign that our House member is alive and nearby.

The sand has obscured everything. There is nothing out here but the sand and the five of us.

Frustrated, I call a halt to the search an hour later. Part of me wonders if Gray is lost to his demon. If so, then I will have to report it to the Recondites. Their duty is to hunt down and cull any out-of-control demon.

My first months as Lord of the First House and I may have lost a Tasuri to his demon.

Father, give me strength. I haven't even reached my grandfather's tomb, yet.

We set out, grim and determined. As we leave the relative safety of the abandoned tower behind I wonder at my own selfishness. Why did I bring these males with me? Love's oracle told me that my life was the sacrifice, not these males. They don't need to be here. Gray didn't need to die. I was going to send them back after we reached my grandfather's tomb, but now... I can't wait. Just being here in the desert is a risk.

At the mouth of the valley to the tombs of the Forgotten, I pause. Slowly, I turn around. I can see the apprehension in their eyes. Their demons glare at me in turn. This was a mistake.

"Go home," I order, my voice like a croak.

"Lord Thane?" Holsten questions me.

"Go home. I will continue on from here," I say with more confidence. This is the right way to do this.

The males look at each other uneasily. "Lord Thane..." Rolle stares at me, "we can't leave you here. This is a dangerous place."

"I know how dangerous it is." I take a deep breath. "I won't be returning," I tell them. Ignoring the shock on their faces, I pull out the scroll I came with, "give this to my father. It explains everything."

Holsten takes it with slack features. "Lord, I can't-"

"This is where we part ways, Holsten," I interrupt him.

"No, no Lord Thane," Holsten protests. "We can't. I can't. I am sworn by the Father god to protect you."

"Nothing can protect me," I say quietly.

Holsten straightens his spine, "you will not face your fate alone."

My heart nearly stops when he says 'fate.' My Fated. Parijan.

"You can't stop us, Lord Thane," Rolle says.

I spin around. "Go home. This is no place for the living."

They don't listen. My heart sinks. So, I have murdered more than just my Fated. I am a destroyer.

---

I wake up feeling as though Momo and Mishu have eaten their weight and are dancing on my chest, but when I open my eyes it's not my gargoyles I see. It's the Mother goddess' High Priestess.

"My goodness, child. You are something otherworldly, aren't you?" she says quietly.

I try to sit up and quickly realize what a terrible idea that is.

"Don't move just yet," High Priestess Deanna says sharply. "You have sustained... an injury.

I glance down at my shoulder and chest. Large bandages wrap around my torso, spots of red showing through.

"A ghost did this to you?" the High Priestess whispers.

"No," I reply absently, "not a ghost. How is Tafia?"

"She is... surprisingly better. She was even able to eat a little something earlier."

I feel relieved. Maybe I succeeded in cutting apart her Fated bond. Then, she can recover.

"You should have came and fetched me straight away! Straight away! What do Recondites know of the Lord of Death? Hmm?"

Postite- I mean Patriarch- Salbin enters the room, a dark-skinned Recondite behind him. Despite the scolding, there is no visible emotion on the warrior's face. He is, however, armed to the teeth. I don't think I've ever seen so many blades attached to one shifter before.

He is almost too tall for the space, but it's the wings curling up from his back that make him... not fit quite so well.

"Daughter of Nateos, Flame of Death, you are well enough to return home?" he asks me. His baritone voice has the slightest echo of a demon in it. Something he would be able to hide, were it not for those wings. A male like this is the sort that would be rejected by his House, yet here he is, a powerful shadow warrior for the gods.

"Thank you..." I let my voice trail off.

"Lier"

"Lier. I am ready to return home." I want to bathe in my pool and have a discussion with my father, I add silently.

"Do I have permission to carry you, Priestess?" he asks me.

My mouth opens to tell him 'of course,' when I hear my father.

No

I roll my eyes.

Fetch a litter.

Really? I roll my eyes. "May you please get a litter, Warrior? It doesn't have to be fancy!" I hurry to add. I wince at myself. It doesn't have to be fancy? All litters are fancy.

The faintest smile twitches his lips, but he nods and bows. "I will obtain one and return, Priestess."

"Thank you," I mumble.

I am strangely lethargic. I feel somewhat numb, as if my mind and my body aren't working quite properly. As I step into the litter that the Recondite borrowed from the Mother House, I realize why I feel so out-of-sorts. My gargoyles are missing. The voices... they are missing, too.

When I slip into the sacred pool, it burns my skin for the first time, ever. My chest, where the cat clawed me, is itching and tingling.

Heal Daughter

"Where are my beasties?" I mumble.

In the Desert. They will return. Heal.

"Fine," I murmur. My eyes are heavy, my limbs even heavier. I slip under the water. I see... lines, chords, bonds intersecting and wrapping like vines. I watch them, somehow instinctively knowing that I am not meant to see these chords. I am Grief, no longer do I belong to Love. Soon, this newfound ability will fade, but for now I just watch.

I press my hand to my chest where my wound is gone. My eyes flicker, almost closing. I giggle. I'm seeing double, my exhaustion catching up with me. Two copper strands of fate. They are bursting forth from my own chest.

---

There are no names on these tombs. They are as blank as the rock face walls surrounding the valley. This must be what it means, an eternal punishment, to have your name lost forever to the sands.

My grandfather is here, locked behind solid stone that bears no name. Forgotten, but not by me or my House. Not yet, at least.

I take off my gloves and touch the flat of my palm to the stone of the first tomb. It has warmed in the sun, midday making the sand shimmer in front of my eyes. This cairn is old. Half-buried in the sand, the edges of the stone have been worn down over time so that the precisely cut slab that makes a door is obvious. If you cleared the sand away, then you could open this tomb. I have a feeling that my grandfather's tomb will not be so easily opened.

"What do we do now, Lord Thane?" Carnak whispers.

"We seek my grandfather's tomb. Look for a new one. One that has been recently constructed."

We wander through the valley. Some of the tombs are cut into the sides of the mountain. These are far older and unlike the newer ones, carvings of gargoyles and ancient monoliths litter the faces of those burial chambers..

"There," Nasir points to a tomb sitting nearby. We all walk over to the see the smooth face of rock. The door slab sits above the height of my head. It is barely distinguishable from the walls. This tomb is clearly new.

But sitting just a few lengths away is another new tomb. Then another. Three new cairns. All three from my House. The damned souls who Death rejected.

My demon gnashes his teeth. Something deep in him rebels at the very sight of these simple, stone boxes. There is something here that in the bright light of day looks innocuous, but he sees what my eyes can't.

"This place is creepy," Holsten mumbles.

"Yes, it is," I agree. Stepping forward I run my hand down the first tomb's door sill. A shiver dances down my spine. The stone is cold, not at all warm like the first, older tomb. The rock is the same, the light brownish red of the cliffs, so why the different temperature?

"Lord Thane?"

"It's cold," I say quietly.

Ililie touches another tomb. "This one, too."

"And this one."

"Pitch camp," I murmur. "I need to try to figure out which one contains Arim of the First."

---

It is an hour later when I finally make a decision. It's based on nothing more than the knowledge that my grandfather was entombed first, so the furthest one from the mouth of the valley is where we begin.

The door can only be reached by a ladder, so one at a time we painstakingly chip away the mortar, taking turns in the hot sun. The top layer is dry, the mortar coming away easily, but farther down it is slow and monotonous work. It is another hour before the first bit of the seal is revealed. If this isn't my grandfather's tomb, then this will take much longer than I ever expected.

The entirety of the door isn't revealed until the sun is setting.

I have the fires lit all around the valley. My warriors hold sticks of flame that were lit from the incense that failed to burn the black candles for my House. It is my peace offering to the deity who has trapped my grandfather in this place.

"Open the door," I say quietly.

Holsten and Ililie take the large wooden stake and jam it in between the bottom of the door and the sill. It takes four of us to lean on the lever, cracking the door open. The grating noise of stone on stone echoes in the valley, sounding amplified in the darkening daylight. The slab gives way suddenly, one long groan and it comes out, falling down onto the lever and snapping it in half easily.

Holsten swears under his breath. We all stare at the stone slab, except for Nasir.

"Close it. This was a mistake," he hisses. Scales appear, claws erupting from his fingertips. Fangs curl from his gums, sliding out over his lips. Snarling, he crouches down, red eyes intent on the opening. "Close it," he shouts again.

We can't close it.

"Get him out of here," I tell Holsten. Dread is spreading over my body. My demon is watching Nasir, the longing to shift obvious in his steady regard. He is uneasy, knowing that whatever we have just opened is dangerous in more than just a physical way.

"Lord Thane," Carnak says quietly, before his voice trails off. His own eyes are beginning to glow yellow. "What is in there?" He is not a demon-shifter. I believe he is some sort of cat or wolf.

"My grandfather," I reply grimly. Hisses erupt in the air. All of our beasts are clamoring and agitated. My own is just at the surface of my consciousness. Claws and fangs are protruding. Normally I would be embarrassed by this lack of control, but nothing is normal right now.

The sound of chains chiming in the air cuts through our noise. We all fall deadly silent, straining to listen. I feel my skin shiver as scales begin to creep over my body.

"What the fuck was that?!" Ililie says. The quiet warrior is shaking.

"The wind," I reply with confidence. It must be the wind. "Go home, all of you. I am going to go in." I prop the ladder at the opening of the tomb. I kick off my boots. Claws are curling from my toes, one after another.

This time, no one protests, but they don't leave, either. Part of me is comforted by the presence of other living souls. A deeper part of me wants to shake them, scream at them to leave while they can.

Grabbing a torch I climb to the opening. There isn't enough daylight anymore to see inside the tomb. It is a black maw, ready to swallow me whole.

Gulping, I square my shoulders. No time to act like a weakling. Taking a breath, I climb into the tomb. It is silent. The air is oppressive, cooler in here than the desert outside. Maybe that is why the stone is cold. The air was trapped in here with a dead corpse.

I approach the body that was once my grandfather slowly. I have to swallow down my nausea, force my knees to stop knocking. I breath out a slow breath. I can see my breath in the chill air. My demon flashes his fangs. Red hazes my vision as my eyes shift to his for a moment.

It smells dead in here. My tongue flickers out, forked at the end, tasting the air, testing. Despite the cold, the rank scent of death is nearly overpowering.

I prepare myself to see my grandfather's dead corpse. It's been a month since he was entombed. Decay, rot, insects, all should have attacked his body by now.

My grandfather's mangled corpse is chained to what must be an altar of some sort. The stone is dripping, black, viscous liquid pools in several spots along the floor. Pale, pasty skin is peeling away from dark bruises. The chains are cutting into his skin from where the body has started to bloat, the skin irritated and red around the chains. His fingers are curling upward, claws poking out from flesh that is eroding in death. His eyes are half-open, staring up at the ceiling, blue-white irises staring at nothing. A chain is wrapped around his open mouth, his fangs curling around the metal, his blackened tongue swollen and protruding from between white lips. The worst desecration of his body is the large stake piercing his abdominal cavity, the area where the black blood is pooling from.

I choke back a sob and it emerges from my mouth as a hiss. Why would the oracle send me here? Will I get another vision from Death? Or, is this to torture me, to punish me with the knowledge that my grandfather will always be this disgusting corpse instead of resting eternally with his ancestors?

I force my eyes away from him to look around the interior of the tomb. Pink streaks coat the walls and ceiling, even the floor, as if someone took a feather-light paintbrush and delicately stroked the stone every so often. I take a step towards the wall to the left of the sarcophagus. The pink... it reminds me of the pool in the Death temple.

The chains rattle again. I freeze, slowly turning around. My grandfather hasn't moved. Of course he hasn't. He's dead. My tail is out now, I am almost entirely shifted into my demon. If I change, I will lose myself to him... forever. I force myself back under control. It's easier than I expected. My demon is not concentrating on shifting, this is all an instinctive reaction for both of us.

The pink streaks draw my attention again. I lift my fingers, touching one of the largest streaks. It feels warm, the only warmth in this godsforsaken place. Smooth, not an oil, but not water, either.

Another rattle that I ignore. The wind, or maybe it's just the effects of an airless tomb filling with new air.

The scream of fear makes my entire body burst into motion. I plunge towards the opening, wings and tail exploding outward. I hit the sand and look around.

All of my warriors are gone. The torches flicker, everything looks normal. But no one is here. The desert is silent. I am alone.

I hear another rattle of chains behind me.

"Thane..." comes the raspy croak from the black maw of the cairn.

In that moment, just before my demon explodes from my body and takes away my own consciousness forever, I remember that my grandfather's eyes had been sealed shut with wax at the temple of Death.