INTERLUDE
T
he years went by easy. The little girl grew slowly toward womanhood. The
glimpses of darkness in her life at the Citadel blended into the background,
innocuous strokes in a grand mural of purpose. Her visits from Atroxus continued, and she continued to be as awed by him as he was delighted by her. She swallowed up her studies with verve and enthusiasm. She began to go on missions with her sister and her fellow acolytes, presenting her god with the trappings of her victories—souls converted to the light. But while the girl loved the approval of her god, she did not do this for glory or praise. The light had saved her when she’d had nothing to offer it at all, and now, she found genuine joy in every sunrise. She and her sister traveled far and wide. Everywhere they went, the girl found more people just like her—hurting people who needed someone to help them home.
“It was all for this,” her sister would tell her. “So that we can be their torch.”
Her sister, indeed, was perhaps even better at this than she was. While the girl thrived upon working with lost souls, she often struggled to sit still in lessons. And though she loved magic, she hated combat training. She was too young to be sent off to fight in the name of the light—battles with rival sects of other gods, or to protect persecuted followers of the light, or, most terrifying of all, vampire hunting —but she dreaded the day she would be called upon for that purpose. Her sister went, sometimes, and the girl never liked how she looked when she returned— exhausted and blood-smeared, with eyes that looked right through her for a few days after.
Her best friend—now a young man, tall and gangly—was called away before she was. They sat together in her room the night before he left. He was a handsome boy, with large eyes and fine features. They had sat next to each other like this countless times, but tonight, the girl could not stop thinking about the spot where their elbows touched. She watched his mouth as he talked and wondered what it would feel like against hers, and as the hours wore on and his pauses grew longer, she knew he was wondering, too.
But before it could go any further, her sister threw the door open. The girl pulled away from her friend, who leapt to his feet and mumbled an excuse to leave.
Her sister watched him go silently, and then she closed the door and unleashed the greatest verbal firestorm that the girl had ever witnessed from her eternally calm, sweet, wonderful sibling.
“Do you have any idea what you almost did?” she said. “Do you not understand what you are? Do you not understand why we have this life at all? You are a chosen one of the sun. He chose you.”
She put great stress upon the word he. It was clear who he was. He was not the sweet fifteen-year-old boy with the big eyes.
“You have been bestowed with the greatest honor anyone could ever dream of,” she went on. “The punishment for disrespecting gods is unimaginable. You cannot betray him. Not ever.”
“Betray him?” the girl gasped. “I would never do that. Why would you think I—”
But even as she said the words, her own stupidity dawned on her.
The acolytes of her sect did not take chastity vows. And for all the years that Atroxus had visited her, he never laid a hand upon her. No one had explicitly told the girl what it meant to be “chosen.” She knew she had given her god her soul; it wasn’t until now that she realized she one day would be expected to give him her body, too. That from the moment he’d plucked her from nothing, it had already belonged to him.
The girl felt foolish and naive. Her sister let out a long sigh and sat beside her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve been given such a great responsibility for your age. But you are extraordinary. He saw that in you. You don’t get the opportunity to make mistakes the way other young people do.”
The girl nodded, mouth dry. She watched her sister as she adjusted her hair, the firelight tracing the outline of her cheek. She was, by any measure, the prettier sibling. Surely, if she had been the sister chosen, she would have understood right away what was expected of her—just as the long hours of prayer and the combat the girl found so distasteful came easily to her, too. She would have made a perfect bride of the sun.
And yet, the girl was the one who received the first pick of food at dinner, who avoided the most dangerous chores, who was treated well by even the strictest priests. Meanwhile, her sister still fought for her respect, and never once complained.
The contrast in their treatment, gone unnoticed for years, now lurched into ugly focus. The full responsibility of her role settled over her, heavy on her shoulders.
But she quickly chased that feeling away. This was no sacrifice. Atroxus had given her and her sister a home, he had given her the magic that brought joy into every facet of her life, and, most valuable of all, he had given her purpose. She loved her life. She loved her god. It was an honor to be chosen.
Still, the next morning, the girl waved her friend off from afar, careful not to notice the dimple in his cheek. She walked the long way back to the Citadel. The lush greenery was wild and untamed out here, but she glimpsed a flash of light among the emerald green. The bars of the gate were lovely polished gold. She wrapped her hands around the warm metal.
She didn’t mean to push against them, but she found herself doing it anyway.
