She woke up in a temple. It wasn't Koidan’s, but she could see details that reminded her of all the temples she’d seen during her trips: Lausune’s columns of gray marble, Namuri’s green carpet, the pulpit of wood painted in gold from Erimur. The whole temple was sprawled in front of her, she was seeing the entire room at once: ceiling, floor, all of the windows, two people sitting on the benches along the wall. And her own body, a giant statue that vaguely resembled her.

Once the initial shock had passed, she tried to move it. She saw the head of the statue turn, but her view didn’t change. The body felt only marginally connected to her, as if she was moving it with two fingers and not inhabiting it. She knew she was inside it, a sphere of rotating light.

She focused on the energies floating inside the sphere and felt a violent buzzing, a lot more intense than the one in a human body. It moved in patterns too complicated for her to understand.

She observed the temple again. Maybe the key of the trial was in one of the two people sitting there. She focused on each one, an old man and a young woman, waiting for them to speak. They looked familiar, but she was sure she'd never seen them before. They only stared at the statue with a peaceful expression.

Aili wondered whether they were expecting her to talk to them. She was trying to figure out how to produce sounds, when she heard someone screaming outside.

She willed to see, to move her vision, and felt a slight push inside her mind. The view expanded, taking in the area around the temple, even if she could still see the inside. There were people near the trees behind the temple, running away from a charging boar. She focused on the energies running inside the animal's body: she could feel them clearly, as if she was touching its skin directly.

She tried to push her own viss into the animal, with the proper imprint to calm it down. The beast gradually stopped and stood there, looking at the people freaking out all around it. She needed to send it away, but didn't know how. She knew from Daira's lessons that every god had their own domain, the area on which they could act: it was a circle with the god’s sphere for epicenter that at its maximum expansion could contain little more than a village. Small quantities of a deity’s viss were floating around their domain as if it was a part of their body, and each god could use them to manipulate anything that was inside their territory.

Problem was, she still needed to know the right patterns to influence the world around her. She couldn't just will her viss to shoo the boar away, she had to move it in the right pattern to obtain a specific effect that could scare the beast, and Daira hadn't taught her anything in that regard.

The constant buzz of her viss was interrupting her thoughts. She wondered whether figuring out the patterns was part of the trials. And yet, she had instinctively known how to move the statue, how to see the world around her and how to expand her view, so maybe there were other patterns she subconsciously knew. She tried to remember what she'd seen the gods do during her trips around the villages. They moved stuff around using wind quite often, so maybe she could start with that.

She focused on the boar and thought about a gust of wind powerful enough to make it run away. She paid attention to her viss, both the one inside her sphere and the one floating in her domain, so this time she didn't miss the way the specks suspended in the air started reconfiguring themselves to follow a different movement. The wind appeared from nowhere, stronger than she had meant to, and the boar ran away amidst the cheers of the small crowd that had gathered around it.

She widened her view, taking in more and more houses until she could perceive the whole village. She tried to expand further, but found it was impossible, so she focused on the people and buildings, trying to guess which one of the villages they actually came from.

Before she could find any connections, she heard another scream. She focused on the area it came from and found a woman on the floor of her kitchen, holding a broken leg.

Aili was frantically looking for a way to heal her, when the sky became dark, clouds converging from every direction. She kept part of her attention on the woman, moving her viss to encourage her body to heal itself, while the rest of her mind focused on possible attacks from above. She caught a harpoon in mid-air, but she couldn't see which cloud shot it because a fire started in the area of the docks.

In the midst of making sure the woman was healing, keeping watch on the clouds and extinguishing the fire, she barely noticed it was already night. After another attack from above and catching two people who had got stranded on a boat, it was afternoon again. She still didn’t get enough time to examine her surroundings, because the carpenter injured his hand with a saw and an old man slipped, hurting his back.

She dealt with them as quickly as she could and immediately began to observe every single house, splitting her attention time and time again in an effort of preventing the next problem. She caught a child falling from a chair before they could hit their head, felt another boar approaching and scared it away. Dealing with the cloud people before they could attack again took a few precious minutes of thinking, and it was night again when she acted, sending a huge gust of wind to disperse the clouds, strong enough to last for a while even after leaving her territory. She realized at that moment she could pay attention to multiple places at the same time, but she couldn’t explore why, because a wave higher than usual threatened to take away a lamb and the girl running behind it.

Incidents and disasters kept piling up without giving her time to think. If the life of a deity was as chaotic as the trials suggested, she didn't want anything to do with it. Now she could see the sense in having a strategy like the ones the other candidates were talking about. The only thing that pushed her to go forward was wanting to know what came next, if there was anything at all.

She'd just repelled the fifth attack from the clouds, when the sun slowed down. She tensed, dividing her attention even more. She felt her viss buzz and vibrate, a sensation even more distressing than a leaping heart. She checked the sea, the piece of forest inside her domain, the streets and every single house. When she finished, it was still just dawn. Time seemed to have gone back to normal. People were mostly sleeping, no one was ill or in danger, nothing was coming from outside the borders.

She thought about the earthquake and looked for the trail of energy that connected her to the mountain. It didn't look like it was about to crumble. She wondered if it was possible to withdraw her viss from the link that connected her to the mountain, then remembered that the monks were probably observing everything. If there was one thing she didn’t want to do during the trials to become a god was to make the mountain crumble on purpose.

The calm afternoon became a suspiciously pleasant evening. People were going about their business in a fairly realistic way, even if when she focused on their words she could only hear a jumble of sounds that only barely resembled language. Even their prayers in the temple were unintelligible, and everyone only reacted with a smile when she tried to talk to them, no matter what she said. She hoped that everyone's inability to speak wasn’t the next catastrophe she had to fix, because she had no idea of what to do about it.

She waited for the night with growing unease. She could perceive the village clearly even in the darkness, but the growing shadows made everything more menacing, as if something terrible was about to happen. She waited, attention jumping from the clouds to the houses as the night rolled over everything.

At midnight, she started to think that maybe the trial had become something different than protecting people from dangers, since there hadn't been a single one in several hours. Probably the next task wasn’t that obvious and she needed some time to find it. Maybe it was something more sophisticated, like a danger only an expert god would consider as such.

It was also possible that she had already failed, or that the trials were over and the monks were waiting for the effects of cloud water to disappear before waking up the candidates. Maybe her scholar had made a mistake, maybe creating the next trial inside her mind required more time compared to the previous one. In any case, she had to find a way to spend the night without letting her guard down.

Keeping peripheral parts of her attention focused on the village, she chose a street on the leftmost side of her territory. She put all of her efforts into perceiving her surroundings, without letting her perception enter houses or go beyond obstacles like walls or trees. She consciously shut off the parts of her vision that allowed her to see from every side at the same time, until what remained in her field of view was very similar to what she could see as a human being. Her gaze traveled far, just like a human’s, allowing her to look at trees and rocks that were beyond her domain, even if she couldn’t expand it further to examine them better.

She moved her vision around, advancing slowly, trying to imitate the pace of a stroll even while missing the feeling of wind in her hair and solid earth under the sandals. She examined her surroundings, taking in every single detail. Where people’s behavior was credible only when she didn't focus on it too much, looking closely at the bark of a tree revealed more and more details: a multitude of ants running along a surface striped with cracks and lichens; fragments of fallen leaves stuck in tiny woodpecker's holes; patches of gray and light brown where the new bark was growing after the old one had fallen.

A distant sound reminded her that she was supposed to keep guard on the village. She reemerged from her intense focus on the tree, the buzzing feeling of agitated viss once again replacing her beating heart. She expanded her view until it included the whole village again, sky, sea and forest included. She checked time and time again, but she didn't see any problem or danger.

She shrank her view again, until she could only see what was in front of her, then divided her attention once, setting the other part high up in the sky. That way she could perceive the whole village from above while she examined something else.

She wondered whether the monks could perceive where her focus was, or they only saw the results of her actions. She decided not to risk it and proceed in her stroll with renewed care.

She took every side street and looked at every house. When dawn came, she had seen most of the village. She completed her walk while people left their houses, then slowly returned to the temple. She wandered around the forest before descending back down again, curious to see the daily activities and the shops.

She completed three more tours of the village before she started to get bored. It was only noon. She wondered whether time had slowed down to the point that the same amount had passed in reality. But the monks hadn't seemed equipped for such a long wait, and she knew for sure that nobody apart from the minimum necessary amount of sentinels was working that day to watch the proclamation of the new Koidan.

She stopped at the docks, staring out at the sea while sailors, fishers and dockworkers walked through her invisible presence. She wondered about the distant lands Daira had talked about. If she became a goddess, she'd never be able to move past her territory for fear of starting an earthquake. Not that she could go further as a human, but at least she could visit the other villages.

She expanded her view again, joining all the pieces of her divided consciousness into one that encompassed the whole territory. She remembered Daira talking about the candles, even if Aili had immediately dismissed the idea of leaving the trials before their end. Now it seemed like the only possibility she was willing to accept: it was clear being a goddess wasn't for her. Too stressful at times, too boring at others, and she still hadn't understood what they wanted from her.

But first, there was something she wanted to do: test the limits of cloud water's ability to imitate reality.

She started with the trees. She examined them one by one, comparing them to each other to find similarities. She quickly concluded that they were all unique, there wasn't a specific pattern being repeated in the way the branches jutted out or the trunks bent. She chose the three biggest ones and examined them closely: everything, from the birds and insects nesting among the leaves to the roots burrowing under streets and monuments, looked real in a way that could make her weep.

She looked even closer, drinking the details with her new perception. She saw creatures so small and different from an insect that she felt like they were an entirely new kind of being. The flow of viss, usually almost imperceptible in plants, was buzzing all around her, so strong and loud she couldn't even distinguish her own energies from it. And when she'd thought that there couldn't possibly be anything else, that looking even closer would mean losing herself in a sea of dark and nothingness, she saw that the whole tree was a colony of even smaller beings. They were all pressed together, connected on each side with their neighbors, sharing water and viss through patterns she couldn't understand.

She was conflicted on whether to stop there and observe them further, or go on and see what else she could find beyond. She was still taking in what the presence of those creatures meant, when patches of dark started to cover her vision. She expanded it until she was looking at the whole village, but they kept obscuring her sight. She felt a pull, someone tugging at her soul.

“No, wait!” she said, or tried to say, while the world whirled in confusion around her.

She opened her eyes to the upside-down face of the monk who had been standing behind her. He bowed his head and walked away, disappearing from her field of view.

“Wait,” she said, but her throat was so raw she had to stop and cough.

He didn't even look back, and she eventually heard a door open and close. She closed her eyes, willing herself to go back to the dream, or vision, or whatever that was. Then remembered the trials, the fact that the priors were somewhere nearby, and made an effort to sit up.

The first thing she saw was the woman sitting beside her bed: piercing black eyes looked at her as if to examine her every thought, while the rest of her expression was relaxed in quiet curiosity. A braid of black hair striped with gray was resting on her shoulder.

Aili recognized her as the one who had examined her and Saia before meeting the abbot. She nodded to her, receiving a nod back. The rest of the room was empty: no candidates on the beds, no priors on the chairs. There were just Aili, the woman, and the empty glasses on the table.

Aili pointed at them.

“Was it real?” she asked, then coughed again.

The woman's eyebrows drew together, but the rest of her face stayed calm and open.

“What do you mean?”

Aili briefly thought that she might be in the next phase of the trials, but she didn't care. She needed to know.

“The small creatures in the plants. They're sort of rectangular and make up the whole tree…”

She realized how crazy it all sounded and stopped talking.

“I think I know what you mean,” the woman said. “My colleagues who study biology and geology use cloud water sometimes, even if not quite as often as they'd like. We don't have a lot of bottles left.”

“So what I saw was all real?”

The woman nodded slowly.

“Yes, as incredible as it seems.”

“So the people behaving erratically was part of the trial?”

“No. Cloud water retains information easily, but it has to contain the viss of the things that will appear in your mind, or viss that contains the same data. As a rule, we avoid storing information about real people in it, and anything less makes them behave in ways we find unrealistic.”

Aili glanced at the door, wondering whether the wood still contained the creature she'd seen. The woman followed her gaze.

“Don't worry about the others,” she said. “Focus on our conversation. I'm Riena, a consciousness scholar, and I need to examine your viss. Can I?”

She held out her open hands, one next to the other. Aili hesitated. She’d put a small stone in a pocket of her tunic, planning to fill it with her viss. She could write most of what she'd seen as data using a simple code she had devised, but Riena was staring at her. She couldn't just slip her hand into her pocket and tell her to wait. Besides, there were too many important things to write that she couldn’t summarize in a few instants.

She put her hands on Riena’s. The scholar closed her eyes for an instant, then nodded.

“Your trial, we were saying. It measured both your resilience and your patience, by forcing you to deal with two of the most extreme situations in a deity's life: a series of disasters happening all at the same time, and a long period of extreme calm.”

“Did I pass?”

“It's not as clear-cut. Not like the written test, at least. Your chances are tied to this examination.”

Aili nodded, feeling her heart accelerating. She knew Riena could sense her growing unrest, and that put her even less at ease.

Riena closed her eyes again.

“I’ll check for any tendencies that would make you a terrible deity: lack of empathy, self-centeredness, a willingness to leave the mountain even if people are going to die in the earthquake that follows. You, meanwhile, will talk a bit about yourself.”

“Can I ask a question, first?”

Riena frowned, but she kept her eyes closed.

“Ask, but keep in mind I might not be allowed to answer.”

“You… You have heard about Vizena, right?”

Riena's eyes opened. The piercing pupils stared at Aili for an instant before she answered.

“Yes.”

“How is it possible that she became a goddess despite this trial? Is this examination new?”

“No, she went through it too. The study of consciousness is a recent discipline compared to a lot of the others. At the time when she was chosen, scholars only looked for already present characteristics in the individual that would make them a bad candidate. Now, we also look for signs of generalized instability that could bring a person to have those characteristics later in life. We're also on the lookout for people with a limited life experience, or who are obsessed with control, and people who haven't experienced enough suffering or grief. None of it by itself makes a candidate bad for the role, but when they're combined they might be dangerous.”

“And what is her problem?”

“I would need to examine her viss directly to know for sure. And I wouldn't tell the result to anyone who isn't a prior.” She closed her eyes. “Now, tell me about yourself. Whatever comes to mind, let it flow.”

Aili started to tell her about her parents, the brief part of her childhood when they were still together. She felt weird looking at a person who wasn't looking back, so she closed her eyes too. She talked for a bit, with almost no answers from Riena, except encouragements to go on when she stopped and some additional questions. She only mentioned Saia once by name, talking about 'a friend' from that moment on, when she really couldn't avoid mentioning her.

“You seem to care a lot about this Saia,” Riena said.

Aili opened her eyes and kept them that way even when she saw that the scholar’s were still closed.

“She's a close friend.”

“And yet you said you've met her not even four months ago. You only mentioned her name once, but she seems to be everywhere.” Riena opened her eyes. “There's something you're hiding about her. What is it?”

Aili felt a pang of panic, immediately interrupted by a memory: her telling Saia that she knew she was hiding something, and her incredibly frustrated face when she realized it was true. She snorted, trying to stifle a laugh. Riena looked taken aback by that reaction.

“Sorry, I... She doesn't agree with me trying to become a deity.”

“Why?”

“She's the one who denounced Vizena. She doesn't like deities.”

A small, hopefully undetectable half-truth, to let her think that Saia hated Koidan too and would have never helped Zeles. Riena’s eyes widened.

“I think I know who she is now,” she only said, then let go of Aili’s hands. “We’re done.”

“What happens now?” Aili asked.

Riena ignored her and left. The door closed behind her, leaving Aili alone and uncertain about what to do. She laid down again, wondering whether the effect of cloud water had completely dissolved or there was still something she could use later.

She heard the door open and sprang up again. It was Daira, this time. Her face was holding back the smile that shined through her eyes.

“You did it. You passed the last trial.”

Aili looked at her in shock as she sat down on the bed next to hers.

“I would love to talk some more, but the assembly is waiting, so I have to ask: do you want to become the next Koidan?”

Aili thought about the small creatures she could only see with the perception of a god. If she refused, she’d have forgotten about them entirely. She couldn’t let another monk ruin her village. She couldn’t allow them to find Zeles.

“Yes. I accept.”