Something electric ran through Fia. A shock of love, of the reckless passion that had risen in her heart the day she first felt Miriel stir inside her. It still took Fia by surprise sometimes, that she should be able to sustain such breadth of feeling. But here she stood, and since the moment it had first ignited, love for her daughter had never ceased to burn like fire in her bones. Fia did not fully understand the strength of it or why it often felt like fury. All she knew was that loving Miriel had given her the courage to remake her life.
~art by Bella Bergolts
They were afraid of him—of the ferocious will to live that had led him to give up his name and become known only by the office he’d agreed to take up. That of the Priest Who Dwells in Darkness, spiritual guide of the court, who could behold neither sunlight nor moonlight nor starlight so long as he served the Inver gods.
~art by Bella Bergolts
..and immerse themselves in a time and place both like and unlike our own.
Behind her, the Corrinian countryside lay—that little land of rolling hills and rich grasses, hemmed in by mountains and larger, hungrier nations. She remembered it as it had been, green and simple and calm, rather than as it had become; a place of poverty and privation, riven by plague and famine and drought.
The smell of brine and lye soap and green things growing. The heat of a plains afternoon in high summer, only made bearable by occasional breezes that gusted in from the sea. Sorias laughing and chattering at their work, their constant murmuring a counterpoint to the high, clear voices of the cloister’s small fosters, who played in the shady corners of the many courtyards.
Farther and farther into the heart of the mountain they went, until the weight of it seemed to bear down on them. Or at least, it seemed so to the Priest. From out in the darkness, he heard faint notes of music; delighted whispers; the patter of swift, unshod feet. The spirits of Silith’s long-dead children were happy to have sisters among them, it seemed.
“Priest,” Fia muttered. “Your sanctuary’s haunted.”
