Selena shivered. Always shivered.
Her shoulders burned and hours on the wooden planking bruised her knees, but she did not rise. Outside the small sanctuary’s thin clapboard walls, the ocean crashed, roaring and subsiding, louder and louder as the high tide came in. Within, a salty draft swirled gritty sand over the planking and groaned in the eaves. She listened for the Two-Faced God’s voice in those whispers or the rumble of the sea.
“Please,” she whispered. “What must I do?”
The blackness behind her closed eyes shifted and morphed. A pier jutted out over mist-laden water. The night was deep but stars and a crescent moon shed silvery light. Everything was aglow: the pier, the water; even the mist glittered faintly, and so thick Selena couldn’t see anything but the pier, the water, and the light.
An orange light hovered over the water in the distance, like a small, fiery sun.
If I could just reach it…
Selena walked faster, then ran. The pier stretched out under her feet, on and on, and the light grew no closer. The mist thickened and stole her breath with sudden chill. She felt each particle like a pinprick on her skin—like glass dust—cutting her, biting her with icy teeth and filling her lungs until it felt as though she were drowning. Stiffened limbs slowed her until she fell. She raised her head with creaking tendons and a jaw clenched shut. The orange light, like a small, fiery sun, hung within reach; hung impossibly far away.
Biting pain encased her hands. She looked down. A molten silver puddle of ice spread beneath her knees. The biting agony of her flesh freezing, locking her to the pier, brought a scream to her lips but she hadn’t the breath. The mist thickened, gripped her in a frigid embrace, obscuring everything until there was only it, and she, and the cold that seemed to emanate from her very bones. A voice as old as oceans and just as deep, spoke and she knew from where it came.
From the hole over her heart.
From the icy chasm of her god-blasted chest.
The wound.
Find me, said the voice.
Selena’s eyes flew open and she gasped. The cold mist and the ice encasing her to the pier were gone. She was back in the chapel, clinging to the crossbar of her sword with both hands as a shiver wracked her hard enough to make her chainmail creak.
Find me…
“I’m trying, O god,” she whispered, her lips struggling to form the words.
Find me, the voice said, but the real message behind the simple words was clear: Find the light or die. These words resounded in her mind like a clanging bell of a lighthouse warning a ship it had come too close to the rocks that would rip it apart and send it to the Deeps.
Selena set down her sword and stood on creaking knees. Her small ampulla hung from the right side of her belt, opposite her sword’s scabbard, but the sanctuary had its own bowl of ocean water. She took off one leather glove and dipped her hand into the two-handled bowl on the altar. Unable to feel heat of any kind, the faint tingles on her skin meant the water was warm, having sat in the slant of summer sun all day. The moon was not yet visible, but with her other hand, Selena reached for the sky beyond the sanctuary’s clapboard roof exactly where the moon hid, and spoke the sacred word.
“Illuria.”
An orange glow emanated from her submerged palm, tinting the water as the setting sun does to the ocean along the horizon. She laid her hand, still glowing orange and dripping seawater onto the thick, blue wool of her overtunic. The stiffness and ache in her shoulder vanished. She touched the left shoulder and the muscles loosened there too. Before the healing glow faded altogether—and before she could change her mind—she laid her hand over her heart.
The cold draft was tangible on her bare wet hand, blowing faintly through the soft linen of her undershirt, her chainmail vest, her overtunic. She found the crescent moon shape of the hole in her chest, and pressed hard, as if she could push the healing light inside it.
“Illuria,” she said with the same beseeching tone that colored her prayers.
The glow faded to nothing. Her shoulders felt strong and free of pain as if she hadn’t spent the last few hours in unmoving prostration to the Two-Faced God. The wound remained, a hollow chasm of endless cold bored into the very core of her being by the god’s wrath. She let her hand drop and bowed her head.
Selena had spent the last few weeks sailing about the lesser islands of the archipelago, watching the orange glow of her magic ease pain and lift the pallor of illness from the inhabitants. She prayed to the Shining face of the Two-Faced god to heal these people as she had so many others during the last five years, and her prayers were always answered. For everyone but herself.
A voice came at the door, soft and hesitant. “Paladin Koren?”
Selena gave a start and turned, wiping her eyes quickly. “Good afternoon, abbot.”
An older man, portly, his skin weathered from salt and spray, leaned against the doorway. Sweat darkened his plain sackcloth robes under his arms and down his chest. From a pocket, he withdrew a letter written on a rich vellum not found on this tiny island and held it to her, his expression soft with kindness.
“My deepest pardons for interrupting your meditations, but a peliteryx has come from the Moon Temple for you. Just arrived here, though our man at the birdhouse says it looks to have been chasing you around the islands these last weeks.”
Selena took the parchment. It looked to be one copy of a letter, wrinkled and wanting to scroll itself, as if it had been rolled in and out of peliteryx pouches more than once. She noted with a pounding heart the other names in the address.
Justarch Yuri Osten, House of Rights and Laws, Isle Parish
Admiral Archer Crane, Alliance Admiralty, Citadel
Paladin Selena Koren, Moon Temple of the Aluren, Isle Lillomet
This issue hereby gives notice that a congress of the above-named Alliance allies and authorities will convene on the 5th of Setilix, NDE, in the Vestibule of the Moon Temple, noontime. Her Reverence Celestine Pollis, Reverent Taliah Ka-Mat-Al, and Reverent Gerus Hannak presiding.
This assembly is classified as High Security. All attendants will adhere to the bylaws of the New Dawn Era treaties and use proper discretion upon penalty of death.
H.R. Celestine
18th of Agout, NDE
Selena felt the blood drain from her face. The 5th of Setilix. “Two day’s time,” she breathed.
“Paladin?”
“I am called back to Isle Lillomet.” She strove to keep her voice even. “I must depart immediately. Tonight.”
“Of course, of course,” the abbot said. “I’ll tell the harbormaster to ready your ship.”
“There’s no time. I’ll go myself.” Selena took up her sword from the planked floor. The sapphire glinted in the twilight hues.
“A thing of beauty,” the abbot said with a nod at her weapon.