Aili woke up.

She'd never been as much aware of her godlike sense of time as at that moment, when it told her exactly how many days had passed since the last time she'd been awake. Even more so since she wasn't in the temple, not even inside her statue.

She instinctively expanded her domain, trying to make sense of her surroundings. The first thing she noticed was the hands that were holding her sphere. They were squeezing the glass and trembling at once, which made the fear in their viss even more evident. The monk they were attached to wasn't anyone Aili recognized: a sentinel, judging by her belt. She was standing on a boat manned by another sentinel a few years younger.

The water all around shined with reflections that rivaled Aili's own golden light. The sun was low over the sea, halfway toward sunset. Soon it would be late enough to make all of the monks standing in the presence of a god automatically exiled.

There wasn't just one god either. The flecks of viss in her domain registered the presence of four other spheres even before her senses could perceive the other boats: they were standing on a line parallel to the shore, with about twenty armlengths of distance between one and the next. Each was occupied by two sentinels, one holding a sphere, one the oars. Her boat was the second one to the left, between two gods whose viss she didn't recognize.

The shore wasn't Lausune's: it curved gently towards the mountain, forming a bay, and the climb to the temple was so steep the streets were essentially long staircases. She immediately recognized Suimer from her trips as a letter carrier.

The other gods must have been awakened too, because she felt their domains expand and intersect with her own. She felt Dore's imprint mixed in with all the rest. She tried to withdraw from that unwanted contact, but the gods were so close to each other that her domain would be inside someone else's even if reduced to a speck. Besides, nobody else was retreating, so she endured the discomfort in order not to betray her ignorance of what was happening.

A light flashed from the mountain, and the monks with the rows pushed to bring the boats forward. To her horror, Aili's domain touched a sixth one: Zeles’s. A barrier of light flickered for an instant halfway through the bay when one of the gods tried to push their domain past him.

Aili noticed the tall merchant ship anchored in the harbor and understood: the monks were following her plan, but they had changed it.

She had suggested they used three distractions: the first one was the arrival of a ship where at least half of the crew was composed of monks disguised as sailors. Some of them would remain in the taverns and docks area, trying to cause problems and stir up fights. The rest would head to the temple under the pretence of wanting to pray to Vizena, then feign surprise and request explanations once they saw she’d been replaced by another god.

The second distraction was the attack of the other monks from the forest on the north side and from the two nearby villages. That was probably the reason why Dore wasn’t inside Tilau: they needed to set up the attack, which surely had required more than one day and night, and by the rules they couldn’t do anything with a deity present. Which also meant that there was Lorin too, among the gods she didn’t know.

The third and final distraction, once everything else was in place, was a fake Saia approaching from the sea. It would have been the final signal, the moment for the true attack to happen. An attack that would be possible to foil, Aili hoped, even if Zeles didn’t know about it.

Except in place of Saia, the monks had brought four gods. Aili would have never thought them capable of taking such a huge risk. But their commitment was clear in the way they chose such a late hour for the attack, sending a message to both Zeles and the sentinels: nobody would return home until he was defeated.

The boats stopped half a towerlength from the shore.

“Now!” a monk from the central boat yelled, and Aili felt the other gods push their collective energies forward, against Zeles’s barrier.

Lamps of light sparkled in the atmosphere. Aili was sure they could be seen even from the other villages. The monks surely had explanations ready to divulge everywhere, groups of sentinels that would have descended the mountain every day just to remove the evidence of what was happening.

“Why aren’t you attacking?” a deep feminine voice said, and Aili understood she was talking to her because she was the only one that wasn’t throwing viss at the barrier. Even Lorin, who apparently had been on Zeles’s side, was pushing against him.

Aili realized she needed to do the same. The whole point of her plan was regaining the monks’ trust after she’d almost lost it.

She expanded her domain and started attacking too, using only the minimum amount of energy to make her efforts believable. She looked for a point where her domain was mostly outside of the other gods’, but they were overlapping so much it was difficult to distinguish her own viss from the others’. Still, she needed to alert him. What they were doing wasn’t an attack, but only a distraction.

“Zeles,” she started, keeping her voice near the ground and as low as she could.

“What are you doing?” another voice interrupted her.

She recognized him as one of the gods of the biggest villages, on the northern side of the mountain.

“Distract him?” she could only answer, hoping Zeles would understand.

“Don’t waste your energy. Focus on the attack.”

There was a flare of light in the temple. One of the sailor-monks who had reached it was waiving a torch, the signal for the attack. Aili tried to look at the dark flank of the mountain, to see what the monks were rolling into place. Or maybe the preparations were already complete and the ballistae had been aimed at Zeles for days. And he had no clue.

She held back her connection to the mountain. She tried to resist as much as she could, despite the feeling of being about to burst, of burning and freezing at the same time, of her viss turning with a speed that threw her mind in confusion.

The mountain started to tremble.

A flash of silver light appeared in the air, then the top of Vizena's temple exploded, ejecting debris in the air. Despite the destruction, Aili felt relieved: the original aim had been Zeles's statue, with the goal of breaking it to allow the monks inside the temple access to the sphere it contained. There was the danger of destroying the sphere as well, but the monks were prepared: the next candidate to become a god was probably standing inside the well right at that moment, ready to be transformed as soon as Zeles was dead.

That first dart shot by one of the monks' huge ballistae was the crux of her plan. Once the attack had been foiled, Zeles would have pretended to be hurt enough for it to almost succeed, barely avoiding any subsequent attack. Then, he’d have pushed the monks away with a show of strength, discouraging future attacks. But now that he was alone against five gods, the attack risked transforming into a siege with only one possible outcome. She could see one possibility to save Zeles, but she'd need to send someone...

“Deactivate her!”

Aili had been too focused on the barrier of light and overwhelmed by the storm of feelings to notice the approaching boat. It was a sixth one that didn't contain any god, only a very angry Riena and a monk rowing behind her.

The sentinel holding Aili started trembling violently.

“But she might…”

“She's the only one who knew about the ballistae!”

Aili realized her mistake in an instant. Since the other gods seemed to know they needed to attack Zeles, she hadn't considered even for a moment that they might not know about the ballistae too.

She rolled away from the sentinel’s hands, trying to plunge into the water of the bay to gain a few seconds before the monks used her shard. But a strong wind stopped her fall, and before she could even guess which god had evoked it, Riena's hand closed onto her sphere.

Zeles had not expected the dart. His barrier of wind had faltered when the combined power of five gods had pushed at once against his domain, and the projectile had been fast enough to pierce what was left without even being deviated. He was sure it would have done even more damage if the earth hadn't trembled while it was being fired. Maybe it was just luck, or maybe he had to thank Aili for that: he had felt her presence clearly for a moment, and now could perceive specks of viss with her imprint, mixed with all the rest.

He couldn't focus enough on the damage to repair the temple, so he just held the debris in place, suspended above all of the people inside the room. He checked that nobody was hurt and put the sailors to sleep. They had been loudly wondering about Vizena the whole time, while more of them yelled at everyone they met back at the docks. He’d been foolish to trust the ship, when almost everyone that came out of it had proven to be a monk.

Above all, he was terrified at the monks' willingness to hurt Suimer's people.

“What happened?” a woman asked his statue, glancing up at the ceiling of debris.

Zeles made sure the rest of his barriers were secure before answering.

“Nothing you have to worry about. Please return to your houses and stay inside until all of this is over.”

“All of what?” someone else asked.

As much as Zeles wanted to reassure them, he needed the viss and focus it would require. He looked for Aili's imprint in the attackers’ midst, trying to find a way to communicate. It was clear now that she had wanted to warn him about the attack, so she could have an idea about how to foil it. Short of somehow getting the envelope with her instructions from Lausune, asking her was the quickest way to get an answer.

He waited to feel her viss against his barrier, but could only distinguish Dore's, Lorin's, and two other gods that he didn't know. One boat was slowly turning to leave the bay, headed toward Tilau, and he realized they had deactivated her.

The pressure had eased a bit on that side of the border, but the monks were trying to enter from the forest, Tilau and Kivari at once. Even if normally humans couldn't pose an actual threat to him, there were so many sentinels pushing from so many directions he feared they could slip through a temporary breach.

With so much effort being poured into defeating him, he wondered how many people were actually keeping an eye on the villages compared to all the forces that were deployed to Suimer. It reminded him of the events narrated in the book Rabam had brought, of the monks gathering most deities where the danger was and moving the rest halfway between two villages, so that they could offer at least a partial protection to both. That meant the book contained the truth, or at least not complete lies.

He didn't have the time to think about the implication of that discovery, because more people started to enter the temple than the ones who were leaving. Lada was the first one inside, followed by other students of magic.

“What's happening?” She saw the debris suspended over her and stopped next to the wall. “Who did that?”

Zeles could feel their voices and distress grow, to the point it started to affect his focus more than answering them would.

“There's nothing to worry about. They don't want to hurt you.”

“Then why did they shoot the temple?”

“Who are these people?” someone else shouted.

“Calm down, please,” Zeles said. “I’ll explain in... A second.”

His barrier on the gods' side faltered. He gave up a dozen of armlengths, in order to use less viss and force the boats to advance before the gods could put on the same pressure.

“These people are the monks I warned you about. They want to kill me because I didn't put myself and Suimer under their control. They only attacked the temple as a distraction, they knew I would protect you.”

He hoped his words were true and not merely a projection of his own hopes. He didn’t want to think of how brutal the attack could become, if the monks were willing to hurt the inhabitants.

“And if they succeed, what happens next?” Misia, Saia's sister, asked.

“They'll replace me with someone else.”

“Who?”

Zeles knew they were all thinking of the same goddess, of the past they had left behind.

“I don't know. Not Vizena, but someone else.”

“Did they give us Vizena?” an older woman asked.

“I… Yes, but my successor won't be as bad as she was. They will probably be a normal person.”

The attack had resumed, so he went quiet before he could add something he would regret.

“A normal person?” Lada repeated.

“Yes. One of them, most likely.”

The people in the temple looked at each other.

“So,” a man said. “These people are attacking the temple, want to kill you, put Vizena in place, and one of them will become our new god?”

“Unacceptable,” someone else said, and Zeles realized at that moment just how many people had entered the temple. More were coming, probably after seeing from afar the small crowd that had gathered at the entrance.

“Please, return home,” he could only repeat. “They don’t want you, but me. They could attack again, and I can’t save every one of you if I’m focused elsewhere.”

He felt bad about lying: of course he would have saved them and let the monks in if it came to that, but he wanted to do everything he could to avoid that scenario.

“You trained us to resist if they try to make us sleep,” Lada said. “We can talk to them. If they don’t want to hurt us as you say, we won’t need your protection.”

“I appreciate the thought,” Zeles paused as the monks on the left border pushed all together in a moment where the gods were sending him a spike of intense viss. “I appreciate it, but these people have been following the same rules for hundreds of years. They’re past the point of convincing.”

“Then what should we do?” Heilam, Saia’s older brother, said. “Wait in our houses while they do whatever they want with our village?”

“Yes,” Zeles only had the strength to answer.

“We’ll at least try,” Lada said, then gestured for the people who had been training with her to follow her out.

“Wait,” Morìc yelled as the crowd started to disperse and split into groups. “Has any of you bought a carpet from Lausune, by chance?”

Only a few heads turned his way and shook from side to side. He walked deeper into the thick of people and asked again.

“Why do you need a carpet?” Zeles said in his ears.

Morìc stopped, letting the crowd flow past him.

“Now I know how to make a carpet fly. I can fix one of the ones I’ve sold and if you power it, I can go to Lausune to ask for help.”

“It’s better if this situation doesn’t spread further.”

“Why?” Morìc asked, stepping toward the statue. “If I can convince them, they’ll come here and argue with these people who want to attack you.”

Zeles was about to reply that it would have been pointless, then noticed that the temple was almost empty.

“Can you please go outside?”

Morìc reluctantly obeyed. As soon as he was past the door, Zeles pushed the unconscious monks out and let go of the debris that he’d been holding up in place of the roof. He stopped the cloud of dust from travelling too far, then used the focus he had freed up to strengthen his barriers.

“If you’re worried that I might escape with Dan…” Morìc started, fists closed at his sides.

“It’s not that. If they see you fly using magic, they might target you.”

“They can’t reach me if I fly high enough.”

Zeles observed the determinate buzzing of his viss. Morìc believed his words completely, and he didn’t have the strength to argue or stop him anyway. Plus, there was something else he could do to help.

“There’s a carpet in the fifth house to the left on backers street,” he said. “Tell me when you have fixed it, and I’ll fill it with viss. But wait,” he added when Morìc started to run away, “If they hurt you, I won’t be there to save you.”

“I know,” he said, huffing from the run. “I can live without a god acting as my nanny, you know.”

“Don’t bring lights with you as you fly, or they’ll detect you.”

Morìc rolled his eyes.

“I know.”

Despite his confidence, Zeles couldn’t help but worry. The monks would have looked for him everywhere once they knew there was someone that could fly a carpet. And yet, having Morìc out of Suimer meant they couldn’t capture him, finding out he came from the outside and kick him out of the mountain, or worse.

And, he realized, there was something he could do to help.

“Don’t waste time talking to people once you’re there,” he said. “There are seven pieces of glass hidden somewhere in Lausune. Try to put them to sleep as you would do with a person.”

Morìc slowed down, breathing hard as he answered.

“How do I find them?”

“You could ask Rabam, if he’s there.”

“Who’s Rabam?”

Zeles gave him bits and pieces of his description in between the most intense moments of the monks’ push against him.

“If you meet him, tell him that Aili is in danger,” he added. “They want to break her.”

“I want to read her letter,” Morìc said, slowing down in front of the house with his carpet. “It seemed important.”

“You’ll find a scalpel inside a cavity under the statue. There’s a small pattern you have to activate to the side of the pedestal in order to access it.”

Morìc nodded, taking out his sewing kit from the meager backpack he’d brought from Lausune.

“Good luck,” Zeles said, then focused all of his energies on the attack.

The boat that carried Aili was getting away from the range of the gods. He could imagine what would happen next: they would dock somewhere inside Tilau, have a brief consultation with the priors, communicated to the sentinels back home that they had found a rebel god, then promptly break her. He couldn’t imagine anyone having the same discussion about preserving viss the priors apparently had for Vizena. She hadn’t directly defied them, after all, but merely hurt the people in her care. Somehow, the monks thought it was a lesser evil.

She needed to stop her, but couldn’t move from his spot. Even in the remote chance he could create a breach in a barrier held up by four hostile gods, he couldn’t get closer without leaving Suimer’s inhabitants to face the monks alone.

There was only one other person he could possibly count on, but only if he managed to convince her to help despite the others’ presence.

“This is the moment to make a choice,” he started, making sure his voice was low enough it could reach the gods without alerting the monks. “You know who you are. That boat right there contains my friend. She’ll be killed only to protect me, without hurting anyone.”

“There’s another one,” an unknown god said, addressing the monks. “One of us is a traitor.”

Zeles fought past the frustration. He didn’t see any way forward but to keep talking.

“I know acting would put you in danger, but I beg you to consider this: the monks are ready to kill two gods, not three. Cracking you would require more time and planning. They don’t know the extent of your involvement. And second, I have enough strength to keep the others at bay. I can push all of my power into keeping them distracted. But you have to act first.”

He waited, taking in the four imprints of the viss that was being used against him. He could distinguish Lorin’s, but she was too tangled up with the others to give him a clear view of what she was feeling. Fear, surely, for being put on the spot. The gods didn’t know it was her he was addressing, but if she panicked they would find out. Unless she acted, throwing everyone into a panicked frenzy.

He observed the boat approaching the white rocks that delimitated the border with Tilau’s waters. Only the more distant half of the territory was currently guarded by a god, since the monks were occupying the rest. Once the boat was past those rocks, there would be nothing either he or Lorin could do to save Aili.

“If they win, everything will return as it always was,” he continued. “These people don’t change unless they’re forced to. And who knows what the next crisis might be. Anything that requires quick adapting would destroy them, and everyone in the village as a consequence.”

He stopped talking, since a wave had begun to form on the northwest side of the harbor. It became bigger as it approached the shore, moving diagonally. The monks at the rows inside each boat tried to push themselves out of range. Some winds broke the crest, trying to slow down the water. Zeles increased his push against the barrier of gods, capturing their attention again.

In the end, the wave reached the boat that was carrying Aili. It was flipped upside down, everyone inside falling into the wave. The momentum carried them past the white rocks, outside of the gods’ range. Which wasn’t a bad thing, considering it meant the other gods couldn’t fix the problem without moving away from Suimer first.

“Thank you,” Zeles said, sure his relief was evident to everyone in the way his viss moved.

“Who did this?” one of the monks yelled.

The pressure decreased as the gods tried to disentangle their domains as much as that forced proximity would allow.

“I don’t know,” one of them said.

“I do,” Dore’s voice sounded clear on top of everyone else’s. “It was Lorin. See? I’ve always been on the monks’ side, even if you suspected me.”

“You’re a bit too quick to accuse me,” Lorin said. “Maybe it was you, instead.”

Suddenly, Zeles couldn’t feel the pressure of their domains anymore. For an instant he thought they’d been both deactivated. Then, a barrier of light cut the bay in half, splitting the four boats into two groups.

“It was you,” Dore screamed. “Deactivate her!”

“He’s wasting viss and attacking a fellow god. It’s clearly him.”

“Riena!” One of the monks on the left side of the harbor yelled. “We need her to read their emotions, I can’t tell if Dore’s lying.”

But Riena was currently out of earshot, grasping the side of her boat’s hull with the rest of her body submerged in water.

“Just deactivate him,” another monk said. “Let’s deactivate them both, then we’ll see.”

They kept bickering, calling for a prior or for someone to send a message to the sentinels left behind. Lorin and Dore kept pushing against each other, which only left Zeles with two gods to deal with. The monks would have sorted everything out, given enough time. He hoped it would be enough for Morìc to find the shards.