No one dared to move. We barely dared to breathe.

The goddess strolled past us, Her cursory glance over in the space of a moment as if we were no more important than the rock making up the audience chamber. For our sakes, that’d be the best outcome. The goddess might be unpredictable but I had to hope a whim to destroy Her surroundings wasn’t in the making. That something like that, and us, were beneath Her notice.

The group of fire dancers had decreased considerably in the time it had taken us to take stock of the situation and then interrogate Logar. Perhaps only two-thirds of the dancers still filled the audience chamber and more were disappearing into dust with each minute that passed.

We tracked the goddess’s every step as She inspected the dancers and their intricate movements. A large part of me wanted to lower my head in subservience or close my eyes to reduce the risk that She might find our attention annoying or defiant, but I couldn’t tear my gaze away. Doing so, blessing or not, felt like I’d be inviting my execution. As if, in this moment, that would be the thing to earn Her ire.

So I saw the brief flicker of a frown on Her lips after She brush Her fingers over a passing dancer. It was too quick for me to determine whether the frown had been irritation or disappoint or something else entirely. I was nowhere near the Beloved’s skill at reading the goddess’s moods. Nor was I sure I’d want to stay in the goddess’s presence long enough to learn the skill.

Still, my stomach dropped. A frown, no matter how brief, couldn’t be a good sign.

However, instead of destroying the fire dancers or otherwise interrupting their ritual, She continued Her measured pace around them until Heliquat had reached the throne’s platform.

The Dawn Crawler was still wrapped around the throne, but the beast was no longer spewing lava. It seemed…cowed in the goddess’s presence. Not that I could blame it. Only the suicidal weren’t, but it did truly bring into perspective that no matter how the villagers touted about their Master, in the end the Dawn Crawler was a lizard in a mountain valley. Any authority it held here was at the mercy of the goddess’s whim.

Mishtaw, Nine Claws, Malady, and Creed all knelt on the platform’s back edge, pressed against the basin’s wall, heads bowed and arms crossed over their heads in submission. I knew that we should be doing the same, but it still felt like that if we moved we would draw Her attention. And there was the fact that if I moved to bow to the goddess, then I would also give into the impulse to offer Her blood and I wasn’t sure I would be able to stop once I had begun. The memory of jabbing myself with my prayer needle and the High Priestess’s warning on the Calling Road kept replaying over and over in my mind.

She had stopped my repeated offerings then and I didn’t want to make the same mistake now. Such weakness, such loss of control couldn’t be tolerated.

“A pet.” Despite the distance between us, the goddess’s resonant voice sounded as if She only an arm’s length away. After a long heart stopping moment I realized She wasn’t speaking to me, but rather it was as if the wind couldn’t help but bring Her words to everyone in the vicinity. “Abandoned too?”

Heliquat stopped midway to the throne and held out a hand. The unspoken command was clear to the Dawn Crawler as the beast unwound itself from the throne. Even though its length was enough that it could have still stayed partially wrapped around the throne, the creature purposefully shifted its bulk away from it before tentatively pressing its snout up to touch the goddess’s fingers.

They stayed that way for what felt like a small eternity.

When the goddess lifted Her hand from the Dawn Crawler’s snout, the creature was the one to jolt and shift away. The goddess didn’t pay the beast any further attention. Instead, She took the Dawn Crawler’s place and sat on the throne.

The fire dancers stuttered.

Not as if one of them had misplaced a step and the others had to move around it to continue the dance like what had sometimes happened during the Heartsong Festival. No, all the fire dancers frozen as once, no matter what position they were in, for a single moment. Whatever individuality they’d had when Jika and I hid in Steamer’s Fall was gone. When the dance resumed, the dancers all moved at once, even if their steps were different as they flowed through different parts of the dance. Since we had missed the start of the ritual I wasn’t sure if the unity was the goddess’s influence or if it had already been there. Perhaps both, since the shamble men had been extremely coordinated when they caused the barrier to appear over the Statue Garden.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“Gimley…” Prevna’s voice was scarcely more than a breath.

I tore my gaze from the goddess and dancers to glance back at her out of the corner of my eye, and immediately I noticed that she hadn’t been focused on what I had been. I followed her gaze and inhaled sharply.

The thin lines of lava under the fire dancers’ feet—and all across the audience chamber—were widening. The fire dancers paid no attention to the molten rock but, then again, they had come from the giant lake of lava.

We didn’t have the same imperviousness to molten stone. Nor was I keen to find what would happen if my blessing was tested against it.

We watched in horror as the lines widened further and stretched closer to where we were at the audience chamber’s entrance. The goddess was still here and, going by instinct, moving unless invited was still not ideal. But nor was staying put and waiting to be swamped by molten rock.

My focus snapped back up to Mishtaw and the others. They’d be protected from the rising lava longer than we would, but they also be trapped sooner with the goddess a handful of feet away and nowhere to retreat to once the molten rock covered the floor of the audience chamber.

There wasn’t any way to save them either unless the lava stopped below the lip of the platform and then subsided back to the lines that had broken up the basin’s floor. Perhaps with enough time and effort they could scale the audience chamber’s steep wall, but the goddess’s presence kept them as still as it did us.

Heliquat seemed utterly unmoved by the rising lava even though it was a far cry from her domains. She might have given most tribesfolk the common blessing but it was difficult to reconcile a flicker of flame with the red hot rock bubbling up from the ground. Even if it was difficult to imagine anything hurting the goddess, the lava might, possibly, trap Her too since there weren’t shadows to step through in this place.

But it was also a distinct possibility that didn’t matter. After all, She had stepped out fog as if She had always been there but I knew there weren’t any pines near the entrance of the audience chamber. Unless She had grown one.

The fire dancers kept crumbling into dust and the lava kept rising. It was to the dancers’ ankles now but they stepped in and out of the molten rock as if it was no more than regular puddle of rain water.

An offshoot of the pool of lava was slowing expanding towards Prevna, Logar, and me. My mind flashed to the pathway of hardened melted earth leading up to audience chamber and I realized that if this wishing ceremony was repeatable, like the barrier for the Statue Garden was, then the state of the path might not be due to just the fire dancers making their way up the mountain. Like water, if more destructive, the lava was taking the path of least resistance.

Risk the goddess’s wrath or be melted?

I honestly wasn’t sure what would be worse.

The lava pressed closer.

Six feet or so from us Logar could no longer take it. He flung Prevna and me off him and we were too distracted to do anything to keep him in place. The village leader went racing off down the fog shrouded mountainside.

But in the same moment he moved I felt the all encompassing weight of Her gaze. Between one step and the next a pine sapling had grown next to him and tangled him in its roots and branches. Logar couldn’t have moved if he tried.

“Follower,” the goddess spoke again and I focused back on the throne’s platform to see that another pine sapling had grown from the audience chamber’s wall. It seemed She was speaking to one of the whisper women. “This is mine. That,” a dismissive flick of one finger toward the bound village leader, “is for you. They hid a gift from me. Unsully these valleys.”

Mishtaw and Nine Claws, Malady and Creed, all pressed their foreheads to the ground before they slowly rose to their feet. Each whisper woman took their fire starter in hand and then one after another they stepped into the pine tree’s provided shadow. A moment later and both pairs stepped out of the shadow of the tree that had bound Logar. The tree twisted and bent until Logar was free of its clutches but he didn’t have chance to run before they captured him again.

The lava was still rolling towards us. Prevna and I shared a look, quietly still trying to decide if risking the goddess’s wrath was worth it. But then the ground a foot from us burst apart. We ducked down out of instinct and, when dirt and bits of broken rock stopped pelting me, I carefully peeked my head out from behind my arms.

Much like the root wall that had encircled the encampment on the shore when I had been forced to join the fight against the Lady Blue’s monsters, a sphere of roots and branches had risen out of the ground and enclosed the audience chamber. They didn’t look like normal tree limbs either. The bark was dark gray, nearly black, while the the needles that poked from the branches glittered like the stars in the goddess’s hair.

I could only stare at the unexpected phenomenon. At least, the lava that had been sliding towards us had been blocked off, though I doubted the goddess had done it to protect us.

I waited for the lava to seep through the roots and branches, to burn some of them away, but nothing happened. The woven together trees held. For some reason, the goddess either didn’t want the lava to escape or She simply didn’t want us to see the conclusion of the wishing ceremony. Those were the immediate possibilities for Her actions that came to mind, but part of me wouldn’t have put it past Her that She’d wanted to display some Her own power in this place full of Her sister’s presence or that there was another reason I couldn’t piece together.

Either way, the lava had been stopped and now that we had clearly been dismissed, we could move. Prevna and I hurried to where the others were still gathered around the newly grown pine tree so we could learn what we were supposed to do next.

One thing was clear, however: this valley would no longer be allowed the respite it had grown accustomed to from the goddess’s influence now that Her indifference was at an end.