INTERLUDE
T
he years passed, and the bounds of the girl’s existence grew more defined. Her
ceremony of commitment came and went upon her sixteenth birthday, a grand
affair of treasure and gold and feasts. At the end of it all, the girl was formally a bride of the sun.
Despite her young age, her role advanced her to the upper ranks of the Citadel.
She took it seriously. She pushed herself in her magic studies. She traveled farther for missions, found more lost souls, stitched together more broken hearts.
Atroxus still doted upon her. He visited every few months, much to the delight of the priesthood. He was always kind to her, pleased when she completed the tasks he gave her with ease. He was gentle enough in bed. She was grateful for that, even though she found herself wondering what all the fuss was about—“That’s it?” she’d whispered to her friend once, after her wedding night. “That’s the thing that has people running around betraying vows and starting wars?”
He had turned bright red. “Shh!” he’d hissed, pointing up to the cloudless sky.
“He, uh, probably wouldn’t like you talking like that.”
Still, for all Atroxus’s kindness to her, the girl never forgot the nature of what he was and what she was to him. No one else forgot it, either. Sometimes, the girl thought she could smell something shifting in the air, see a darkness out of the corner of her eye. She would sit up at night and stare out over the courtyard, lining up seeds on her balcony railing for the firefinches, and she’d whisper to them, “What do you think, little friends? What’s coming?”
The answer to her question came when the vampire arrived.
It had been the subject of much celebration. The uproar at the gates was just as loud as the day the girl had seen the Turned warrior killed at the center of the church. But these shouts were far more celebratory. That man all those years ago had been one of their brethren. This one was just a monster. The girl rushed down to the church to see the acolytes—her sister among them—wrestling the vampire to the ground, shouting praises to the sun. He was bound in silver chains blessed by Atroxus’s light and strengthened by the work of Srana, goddess of machinery. They burned into his flesh, smoke rising to the stained glass ceiling. He hissed and spat words that the girl didn’t understand but was certain were curses.
“An offering to Atroxus!” her sister shouted, falling to her knees before the altar, the words bringing forth a wave of cheers.
The vampire, her sister told her later, had been found miles to the south. They’d received word of sightings. Acolytes often went vampire hunting, but never before had they brought a living one back to the Citadel.
The girl had never been good at denying her curiosity. She stole away when she could. The vampire was kept in an open-air cell with barely enough shade to keep the sun from killing him, though he had to hug the wall during the high daylight hours. The girl was surprised by just how human he looked. He had the appearance of a man in his twenties, though he had streaks of silver in his ashy brown hair.
They had bound his throat, wrists, and ankles with the blessed chains, which continued to smoke against his skin. The girl winced at the sight of them. It looked unimaginably painful.
She sat next to his cage, watching him. He watched her, too, in silence. He was doing something with his hands. At first, she couldn’t see what—then, she realized that he had a small, crumpled-up flower pinched between his fingers. It was wilted, like he’d been carrying it for a long time.
The girl thought of a day she now barely remembered. When she had come to this very place and she’d pulled something out of her pocket, too—that dirty golden feather.
The next day, she went to visit him again. This time, she brought him a tiny yellow flower from the courtyard, which she dropped through the bars above him before climbing down. She sat beside him for a few hours until her duties called her away. And then she did it again, and again, and again. She talked to him often, and sometimes, he tried to say a few words to her, but she didn’t understand his language. It didn’t matter, though—words, she’d learned, were only one small part of a connection. And she sensed something in this man that was much more complicated than what she’d been told vampires were.
She had given her life to spreading the light. She had reached out to countless broken souls. She’d seen time and time again that no matter how dark a person’s past, a little flicker of light still shone in every single heart.
Could that not be true, too, for vampires?
She chanced asking this question of Atroxus, upon his next visit.
Atroxus had scoffed cruelly, fire in his eyes. “Vampires are tainted. They are the
product of their goddess’s betrayal.”
“But that isn’t their fault.”
“No, a’mara. It is not. But their goddess is to blame for that. She is the one who damned them to such a fate. There is nothing left in them to save.”
The girl thought of the flowers lined up on the floor of the vampire’s cell.
She knew she should stop talking. But the words came anyway.
“There has to be a way to redeem them,” she said. “No living creature is soulless. And no living creature deserves to be killed for fun.”
She knew right away that she had spoken too bluntly. Once, Atroxus had found her mortal imperfections amusing. His tolerance for such things was growing thinner as the years passed. She was not as young and harmless as she used to be.
“Fun,” he growled. “This is how you refer to the mission of the dawn—”
“No,” she said quickly. “Of course not, my light.” She swallowed the rest of her protests, slipping instead into bright, agreeable chatter for the rest of the day.
Atroxus remained with her for a long time. She was gone for many hours. She did not discover what had happened until near dusk.
The priests had decided to finish their sacrifice. The vampire hung by his chains, upside down, in the courtyard. His shirt had been stripped off, leaving most of his skin exposed to the sun. The burns, purple and bubbling, extended across his entire body. A gold arrow was buried in his chest, black dripping down his chin.
The blood was much fresher than the burns. Befitting of their offering, the priests had let the sun do most of the work.
The girl walked into the courtyard. She knelt beneath the body and picked up five wilted flower petals, which had fallen from the vampire’s pockets.
The girl was rarely angry. But this—this enraged her. It made her think of dead firefinches scattering the forest floor for no reason at all. She turned around and ascended the Citadel stairs until she reached the top balcony of the courtyard.
Then, she climbed from the rail onto the trellises.
A crowd had gathered below, her sister at its forefront, watching in horror.
“What are you doing?” she cried. “Come down! It’s dangerous!”
It’s dangerous.
She knew her sister was not talking about the height or the unsteady climb or even the infected corpse. She was talking about something far deadlier.
She was right. It definitely was dangerous.
But the girl had always been too reckless. She sawed away at the restraints at the top of the arch anyway, and when that vampire corpse fell, her blessed life went crashing down with it.
