Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

...Then he turned and went back to his work.

By forty, his voice had changed again.

It was steady, patient, and carrying the quiet melancholy of a man who was speaking to an old cherished friend who had simply stopped answering letters long ago.

The village had shrunk to twenty families huddling around a communal peat fire.

The great timber halls had collapsed under the weight of thirty years of unmelting snow, their blackened beams jutting out of the drifts like the ribs of beached whales.

”The rye failed again, Lilianel,” Teo said, leaning against his wooden hoe in the gray dusk. ”Old Marcus said we should stop watching the east... He said the sun was just a story the old people told to keep the children quiet in the dark... He said there was never a girl with gold hair riding the light.”

He paused, spitting into the snow with his breath puffing in faint cloudy plumes.

”I told him he was a fool,” Teo continued softly, a faint stubborn warmth touching his words. ”My sister wouldn’t have run into the pines for a fairy tale. She saw you on the river stones... She felt your hands. You’re out there somewhere, aren’t you? Probably stuck behind some mountain we can’t see... It’s alright. We’re still here... We’re still holding on.”

Lilianel pressed her lips to her cold knuckles, a single bitter sob catching in her throat.

”I’m here, Teo,” she whispered into the empty air. ”I’m still here...”

At seventy, his voice was cracked, thin as dried parchment, and whistling with the rattling breath of an old man whose lungs were full of winter water.

...He was lying in a narrow wooden cot, surrounded by the grandchildren who had never seen a blade of green grass in their lives.

”Listen to me, little ones,” the old man rasped, his voice trembling as he told the story one last time. ”You don’t remember... but the stones were warm. You could sit on them in your bare skin, and the rock would bake your thighs like fresh bread... The water was liquid gold, blinding bright, so bright you had to squint until your eyes watered... And the Golden Lady... she had hair like a lion’s mane, wild and heavy, and when she laughed, the wheat danced for miles... She’ll come back. You have to watch the horizon. She came for my sister... she’ll come for you.”

Lilianel lived for those mornings.

In the suffocating lightless tomb of the pocket realm, where hours and centuries bled into a single smear of black ice, Teo’s voice was the solitary anchor that kept her from dissolving into the dark.

It was the only proof that she’d ever existed, that she’d ever brought dawn to a waking world, that she was anything more than a cold spirit chained in an empty box.

She’d wait in the freezing silence for hours, tracking the subtle shifts in the metaphysical pressure, holding her breath until that familiar gravelly cadence drifted down from the ceiling then came the morning that broke the chain.

She sat in the pitch, her ears strained, waiting for the old man’s wheezing breath to clear the frost.

The voice that arrived wasn’t his.

It was light, high, and carrying the crisp brittle timber of a young girl who had grown up eating frozen lichen and boiled bark.

”Grandpa’s gone,” the child whispered to the gray morning. ”He died last night... We’re wrapping him in the old fishing net so the wolves don’t dig him up.”

A long hollow pause followed.

The wind howled through the ruined shingles of the cottage, carrying the dry rattle of frozen thatch.

”Mama says the sun was just a story,” the little girl added, her voice dropping into a dull flat indifference. ”She said he was just an old man with fever in his head... There isn’t any gold on the river... There’s only the ice.”

The whisper faded and the spark died as silence returned.

Lilianel froze.

Her eyes went wide, staring at the black ceiling that gave back nothing.

”Teo?” she called out, her voice small, trembling, and terrified as a child waking alone in an empty house.

There was no answer.

”Teo!” she screamed, lunging against the unseen chains that bound her wrists.

CLINK!

”Teo, where are you?! Wake up! Tell them! Tell them you saw the stones! Tell them about Sela!”

The void remained still as stone.

”Sela!” she wailed, throwing her head back into the pitch. ”Sela, answer me! Marcus! Borin! Elspeth! Anyone... please... someone say my name! Just say my name once!”

Nobody answered.

On Nyxvaris, the last generation that remembered the sunlight had returned to the frozen dirt.

...The children who inherited the gray ice had no gods, no hymns, and no names for the sky.

To them, the cold was simply the only world there had ever been so they didn’t pray for a dawn, because nobody prayed to a story their dying grandfather told them.

The prayers stopped completely.

Lilianel waited anyway.

She waited at the hour the sun used to rise, every single morning, with her face turned up toward a ceiling she couldn’t see, the same way Teo had once waited for her but nobody came.

...That was when she finally understood what she’d put him through.

Not a single spark drifted down through the ceiling... Not a single whisper brushed her ears... The link between the goddess and her people snapped, severed by the cold, leaving her stranded in an impenetrable void that had no ears and no voice.

Then her mind began to slip.

It happened slowly, the way rot eats through wood, peeling away the layers of a soul one grain at a time.

At first, she tried to keep time.

She’d used Teo’s morning prayers as her clock for more than sixty years, using his voice to mark the turning of the realm.

With him gone, she had nothing to measure the void by, so she began to count her own heartbeats.

’One,’ she whispered to the black air. ’Two. Three. Four...’

She’d reach four thousand, or ten thousand, and then an unseen chain would twitch, or a phantom draft of cold would brush her neck, and her thoughts would tangle.

She’d lose the digit, pause in agonized panic, forget whether she was at twelve thousand or twelve hundred, and burst into helpless weeping frustration before starting over from the beginning.

’One. Two. Three...’

Eventually, even the numbers turned into gray meaningless noise that she couldn’t hold between her teeth.

When the counting failed, she began to speak the prayers herself.

She’d sit in the center of the pocket realm, cross her legs in the void, and alter the pitch of her vocal cords until she sounded like an old fisherman with salt in his beard.

”Watch my nets, Golden Mother,” she’d rasp into the dark, mimicking the rough gravel of the rivermen.

Then, she’d toss her head back and answer in her own sweet, booming, divine voice.

”I’m coming! I’m coming, just wait! The perch are running today, Borin, just keep your nets wet!”

She’d shift her voice to the high, reedy quaver of the grandmothers:

”Warm my knees today, Lady, the damp is in the joints again...”

And she’d lean down to stroke the empty air, her golden eyes wild and watering.

”I’m right here, grandmother! Sit on the gray stone! I’m bringing the noon heat, you’ll be warm in a second, I swear it, just hold on!”

She did this every ”morning” for decades.

She recited the butcher’s worries, the baker’s complaints, Teo’s anger, and the laughter of the children who had chased the dragonflies through the reeds.

...She played every part in the theater of a dead world, screaming both sides of the covenant into the silent void until her jaw cramped and her tongue was swollen with white sores then the phantom came.

In the absolute silence, when she was too exhausted to speak for herself, she began to hear Sela’s voice whispering from the darkness behind her left shoulder.

”You came...” the voice would sigh, soft and gentle as the rustle of dry marigolds.

Lilianel knew it wasn’t real.

She was a goddess of light so she understood the tricks that an empty mind plays when starved of stimulus.

She knew it was a memory echoing off the walls of her own decaying consciousness but she listened anyway.

She’d turn her head toward the shadow, close her eyes, and let the phantom whisper wash over her ears like a mother’s hand, finding a tiny pathetic shred of comfort in the phantom’s presence.

...Until the day the words changed.

She sat in the black, waiting for the memory to comfort her, her hands resting limply on her knees.

”You came,” the phantom whispered from the dark.

Lilianel smiled with a faint ragged curve of her lips.

”You came too late,” the voice added.

The voice had turned cold and hollow, curdled with the bitter putrid spite of a child left to rot on an ironwood stake.

Lilianel’s eyes snapped wide.

”No,” she gasped, scrambling backward through the void. ”Sela, no... you didn’t say that... you thanked me...”

”You came too late,” the voice repeated, drifting closer, whispering directly into her ear with the reek of dead pine needles. ”You sat on the clouds while they hunted me. You took your time. You let them drive the stake through my spine... and then you came down to look pretty in the smoke.”

”Stop it!” Lilianel shrieked, swinging her fists wildly at the empty air. ”Stop it, Sela! I loved you! I came as fast as I could!”

”Too late,” the phantom laughed, a dry clicking rattle that mirrored the vampires’ applause. ”Too late... Too late... Too late...”

The voice never went back to the kind version.

From that day forward, whenever the phantom spoke from the shadows, it carried only the cold mocking condemnation of the dead girl, until Lilianel began to laugh.

She laughed at nothing for what felt like weeks.

She’d sit in the center of the chains, throw her head back, and let out long, screeching peals of manic jagged laughter that rattled her teeth.

The laughter was wild, sharp, and empty as a cracked jug.

She’d laugh at the black ceiling, laugh at her own purple fingers, laugh at the phantom that whispered in her ear.

And she could never tell when the laughter stopped and the screaming began...

The two sounds blended into a single animalistic howl that tore her throat until her vocal cords collapsed into silence, leaving her panting like a dying dog in the freezing dark.

When the despair grew so thick that she felt her core beginning to petrify into cold granite, she resorted to the burning.

It was her only defense against the absolute void.

With trembling, clumsy fingers, Lilianel would reach up to the back of her head, separate a single thin strand of hair from her scalp, and pull.

The sharp sting brought a tiny grounding jolt of reality.

She’d wrap the golden thread around her index finger, close her eyes, and focus the solitary spark of divinity lingering in her marrow.

FZZZT!

The hair would ignite.

It burned with the pure incandescent radiance of high-noon solar fire.

For five glorious, breathtaking seconds, a halo of warm golden light would bloom in the pitch.

...In that tiny fragile sphere of daylight, she could see her own hands.

She could see the faint lines on her palms, the curve of her nails, the pale skin of her wrists and she could breathe the sweet familiar scent of sun-baked ozone and roasted marigolds.

Then the hair burned down to ash and the light snapped out.

And every single time the tiny flame died, the darkness returned a little heavier and a little more suffocating than before, pressing against her face like an oily wool blanket.

Once, during a year when the phantom’s voice had screamed in her ear for what felt like an eternity without pausing, panic overwhelmed her completely.

”Light!” she screamed, her hands clawing frantically at her scalp. ”Give me the light! I can’t breathe! I CAN’T BREATHE!”

This time, she didn’t stop at a single strand.

She clamped both hands into her mane, twisted her fingers deep into the roots, and tore out an entire handful of hair with a sickening wet rip.

RIP!

She set the entire bundle alight between her palms.

WHOOSH!

A magnificent, roaring burst of solar brilliance flared in the pocket realm, illuminating fifty yards of empty void in dazzling golden majesty.

The warmth washed over her face, soaking into her eyelashes, baking her forehead with the sweet intoxicating heat of summer.

For ten seconds, she was the Sun Mother again then the ash crumbled between her fingers... The blackness rushed back in like an avalanche and Lilianel looked down at her lap, her trembling fingers touching the wide bloody bald patch on the left side of her scalp.

A terrible wailing sob broke from her chest.

She curled over her knees, clutching her bleeding head, weeping with the helpless broken grief of a starving beggar who had just dropped their last crust of bread into a sewer.

...She couldn’t afford it.