Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Their long pale hands met in slow sarcastic rhythm, their wine-red eyes glittering with ancient venomous triumph as they looked down into the crater.

”Touching,” the lead noble murmured, his charred face already knitting together behind a mask of cold smug satisfaction. ”Truly, the divine compassion of the sun is a wonder to behold... She never ignores a prayer... Not even when it leads straight to the slaughterhouse.”

Around the perimeter of the clearing, the petrified standing stones began to hum.

A low vibration hummed out of them, so deep it turned the teeth in Lilianel’s jaw to ice.

From the cracks between the standing stones, liquid darkness began to seep into the clearing.

It poured like thick black pitch, pooling across the grass, drowning the burning ferns, rising in a suffocating tide that swallowed the light from her skin.

Lilianel snapped her head up, her golden eyes blazing with sudden furious wrath.

She laid Sela gently on the stone, rose to her feet, and raised both arms toward the canopy, gathering every ounce of her solar core into a roaring sphere of high-noon devastation.

”BURN!” Lilianel screamed, throwing the star-fire outward.

FWHUMP!

The golden blast hit the rising darkness... and vanished. The black pitch drank the heat, swallowed the light and kept climbing.

It was a trap three hundred years in the making.

A pocket realm of pure darkness, carved from the dead void of the border wastes.

...There was no sky inside this space... There was no ground beneath their boots... There were no trees, no horizons, no air, and no edges.

It was an empty stomach of cold void, built for the solitary purpose of swallowing a star.

The darkness rose like a closing fist, curling over the canopy, blotting out the stars, blotting out the clouds, blotting out the smell of pine and blood.

Lilianel lunged toward the narrow gap remaining between the two eastern pillars with her boots kicking off the stone in a desperate golden sprint.

SWISH!

Before her outstretched fingers could touch the pine needles of the real world, the two standing stones groaned and snapped together like iron teeth.

SLAM!

The threshold dissolved into the void.

...The pocket realm sealed shut behind her, cutting her off from Nyxvaris, cutting her off from her skies, cutting her off from the prayers of her people.

Dead silence fell over her.

Lilianel stood in the center of the bottomless blackness, holding up her hands.

Her skin still hummed with faint dying golden embers, but the darkness was heavy pressing against her eyes, her lips, her throat, draining the heat from her fingers with slow relentless malice.

A shiver ran down her spine.

Her knees trembled, and she wrapped her bare arms around her ribs, curling inward against the empty air.

The seal had slammed shut and for the first time in three thousand years of life, Lilianel felt cold.

The dark had no floor and no ceiling, and when she threw her fists against the empty air, there was nothing to strike.

”Let me out!” Lilianel screamed.

The sound tore out of her throat and went nowhere... The black air took the noise, crushed it down to a flat rasp, and swallowed it whole.

She planted her feet in the void, gathered every spark of solar fire left in her chest, and hurled two fists forward.

WHOOSH!

Sheets of blinding liquid sunlight erupted from her knuckles.

Great curving arcs of gold, white, and copper flared into the emptiness, rushing outward like the corona of a waking star.

For half a second she thought she saw seams, faint gray lines where the pocket realm had been stitched together from dead bone and rot then the pitch rose up.

It rolled over the golden fire like cold sea water over an ember, hissing with a dry hollow rattle... The darkness drank it, sucked the color out of the heat, and turned it into cold soot before it traveled ten feet.

She threw another blast.

FWHUMP!

The gold flared, thinned, and died.

She threw another with her teeth bared and her mane whipping wildly around her face.

”Ah! Ah! Ah! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

She struck again, and again, and again, until her shoulders burned with a terrible tearing ache she’d never known in three thousand years of immortality.

Her hands began to shake... The skin across her knuckles cracked, splitting like dry paper, oozing sluggish beads of amber blood that didn’t shine.

When she tried to summon a fifth burst, her palms produced only a pathetic rattle of dry yellow sparks that drifted three inches and vanished.

CLINK!

A sound like cold iron scraping across an anvil whispered against her ears.

Chains she couldn’t see wrapped around her wrists... There was no weight to them, no iron links she could grasp with her fingers, but the grip was absolute.

They slid over her wrists, bit into the delicate skin above her thumbs, and coiled around her ankles like freezing snakes and the moment they settled, the theft began.

A dull pull tugged at her core, a slow sickening siphon that drew the core-fire out of her marrow, ounce by ounce, breath by breath.

The heat left her forearms first... then the warmth seeped out of her toes, her calves, her knees, climbing up her thighs until the center of her chest felt like a hearth packed with gray ash.

Lilianel curled inward with her chin hitting her collarbone. A violent shudder ripped through her spine, rattling her teeth until her tongue bled.

’I’m dying,’ she thought, her eyes widening in sheer terrified bewilderment as she stared at her trembling fingers. ’This is how they end... the mortals... when their breath goes gray and their eyes turn milky in the winter huts... I’m dying.’

She waited for the end to take her... She waited for the void to snap her neck, to pull her spirit into the earth, to silence the hammering of her blood... however the end didn’t come.

She was the Goddess of the Golden Sun.

An immortal star doesn’t die just because someone buries it in mud.

Her divinity remained anchored in her bones, holding her conscious in the freezing pitch so she couldn’t bleed to death, she couldn’t starve and she couldn’t go numb enough to forget the cold.

...Lilianel just stayed there.

Suspended in the black, bound by unseen chains, while the realm above her paid the price.

Her sun was tied to the pulse in her throat.

Across the sky of Nyxvaris, sixty leagues above the frozen pine forest where Sela had died, the great golden eye of the heavens began to spoil.

On the first morning of her capture, the sky broke in a muddy bruised violet... The dawn dragged itself over the eastern sea like a sick beast, its edges fraying into a sickly clotted crimson.

On the third week, the crimson died.

The disk turned the color of stagnant river clay, a dull brown scab hanging motionless behind the clouds, casting no shadows and offering no warmth then the brown turned to ash.

The sun of Nyxvaris became a blind gray stone in a sky the color of slate.

The mountain passes choked with blue ice, the rivers froze to their gravel beds, the wheat fields, the golden plains where she’d napped like a stray cat, withered into brittle gray straw that broke beneath the hooves of starving deer.

The frost climbed the village walls, crawling through the mortar, sealing the wooden doors shut with weeping rime and through the bottomless dark, the voices began to arrive.

They came as tiny faint sparks of warmth, drifting down through the cold void like falling thistledown, landing against her ears and whispering their grief into her hair.

”The hearth won’t catch, Lady...”

”My toes are black... please, Sun Mother...”

”Where is the light? Where did she go...?”

Every single prayer was an amber needle driven into her heart.

She could hear the baker weeping over his stone oven as the dough froze solid in the trough.

She could hear the old women dying on the flat river stones, their skirts crusted with ice, their papery fingers clutching cold pebbles while they waited for the heat that never came.

She opened her mouth to answer... She screamed until her throat was raw and bloody, throwing her voice against the unseen chains.

”I’m here!” she cried. ”I hear you! I’m trying! Don’t let the fire go out... please, don’t let it go out!”

Not a single syllable breached the threshold... The dark took her voice, ground it into dust, and dropped it into the silence.

Yet, among the thousands of dying whispers that drifted down through the ceiling of the pocket realm, there was one voice that came every single morning.

It was the voice of a boy who had run through the dark with his sister’s blood on his boots, standing in the gray snow of the forest verge, looking at the dead sky.

...Teo.

The first winter, the voice was small and broken, shivering with the terror of a child who had seen the monsters take his world.

”Please come back,” the little boy cried, his voice trembling against the cold. ”Please... Sela said you’d come. She told me you always come when we call with our whole hearts... She said you’d never let the dark have us. Where’s my sister? Lady Lilianel... where’s Sela? Did you find her? Why is it so cold...?”

Lilianel dropped to her knees in the void.

She pressed her forehead flat against the invisible wall of the dark, her fingernails clawing at the empty space until the skin tore away from her cuticles.

”I’m sorry,” she sobbed, the tears freezing against her cheeks before they could drip from her chin. ”Teo, I’m so sorry... I went to her. I caught her... but I was too late. I was too late, Teo! I’m right here! Don’t look at the sky... please don’t look at the sky like that...”

He couldn’t hear her.

He wept until his mother dragged him inside by the collar of his rough tunic, leaving only the sound of the wind rattling the frozen needles.

Nine years passed.

In the dark, there were no seasons, no sunrise, and no noon, but she knew the passage of time by the changing timbre of his throat.

...At fifteen, the tears were gone, replaced by a bitter burning rage that crackled through the dark like dry kindling.

Teo stood outside the ruined abbey, where the snow reached the window sills, his bare hands purple, his knuckles split from chopping frozen pine logs.

”Why weren’t you faster?!” he screamed at the gray clouds, his teenage voice cracking with furious suffocating grief. ”You’re a goddess! You had all the light in the world! She believed in you! Sela walked into those trees because she thought you were real! She thought you’d come down like the stories said and burn those leeches to cinders! Where were you?!”

He didn’t walk away.

He stayed on his knees in the gray drift, his head thrown back, screaming his sister’s name and cursing the empty heavens until his vocal cords tore and his voice dissolved into a wet wheezing rasp that could only whisper into the wind.

Lilianel sat in the dark, her knees pulled to her chest, her hands clamped over her ears.

”I tried,” she whispered to her bruised knees. ”Teo... I broke the clouds. I gave her everything I had... I tried...”

At twenty-five, the anger had burnt itself out, leaving behind a deep hollow exhaustion that weighed more than stone.

His voice came from inside a low wooden hut, where the frost clung to the roof beams.

Beside him, a bundle of sheepskins gave a thin rattling cough that sounded like dry birch bark scraping together.

”She won’t stop shivering,” Teo said, his voice quiet, and drained of all fury. ”She’s only three months, Lady... Her hands are the color of a winter turnip... I don’t care about the wheat... I don’t care about the village... Just let her be warm... Just for one day... Just enough for her to sleep without crying.”

Lilianel knelt in the void, holding her cold palms over her own empty chest, listening to the tiny shallow breaths of his baby daughter.

She listened all winter.

Every night, the baby’s thin reedy wailing would drift into the dark cutting through the silence like a dull knife.

Lilianel stayed awake, rocking back and forth on the invisible floor, humming the old harvest songs she’d sung to the wheat fields, praying to whatever lay beyond the gods that the child’s pulse would hold until the thaw then came a morning when the wailing stopped.

The silence was heavier than the chains on her wrists.

That morning, Teo didn’t pray as no words came down through the dark.

...There was only the distant muffled sound of an iron spade striking frozen earth, over and over, until the sunless dusk settled over the valley.

Lilianel lay flat in the pitch, staring unblinkingly into the black with her heart aching with a hollow crushing despair that tasted of cold iron.

The next morning, his voice returned.

He didn’t ask for a miracle and he didn’t ask for warmth. Teo merely stood by the low mound of stones behind his hut and whispered.

”...Her name was Sela.”