Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Lilianel imagined the pocket realm suddenly groaning under the weight of an outside force.

She imagined the ancient unbreakable seals of dead god-bone cracking like cheap kindling... And then, the black wall would simply blow inward in an explosion of dust and pulverized slate, and Silas Graves would step through the breach like a hero out of the grandmothers’ fireside tales.

He’d have his sword drawn, his dark hair whipped by the wind, his dark blue eyes blazing with furious golden authority as he looked around the tomb, saw her shivering in her chains, and shattered the unseen iron with a single, contemptuous sweep of his boot.

He’d sweep her up into his broad arms, carry her out into the blinding midday sun, and tell the royal vampires that if they ever looked toward the sky again, he’d tear their needle spires down with his bare hands.

Lilianel pressed her burning face into her knees, a hot furious blush rushing through her cold cheeks.

She was the Goddess of the Golden Sun... she was three thousand years old.

She’d watched kingdoms rise and rot into the dust, yet here she was, curling her toes in the dark and giggling like an untended village girl behind the sheep pens, embarrassed to her very core by how desperately, hopelessly she loved the thought of being rescued.

She began to practice what she’d say to him when that golden day finally arrived.

She cleared her throat, smoothed down the tattered rags of her tunic, and stood up as tall as her trembling legs would allow, puffing out her chest with all the majestic divine authority she could muster.

”Hello, Silas Graves,” she declared into the empty air, trying to make her voice sound deep and terribly impressive. ”I’m Lilianel, the Goddess of the Golden Sun, Mistress of the Daylight and Queen of the Dawn... You’ve served me well by arriving here, so you might as well marry me now and save us both the paperwork.”

The words hung in the silence for two seconds before she slapped both hands over her mouth, her face turning brilliant scarlet.

”No, no, no!” she squeaked in mortified panic, violently shaking her head until her thin hair whipped her nose. ”What are you doing, you daft idiot?! You can’t just tell a strange man to marry you before he even knows your favorite fruit! He’ll think you’ve completely lost your mind!”

She took a deep breath, dropping her hands to her sides, trying for something sweet and gentle.

”Hello...” she whispered, offering a shy fragile little smile to the darkness, her voice trembling slightly. ”My name is Lilianel... I, um... I really like your face.”

She froze.

Her jaw dropped open in pure cosmic horror at herself.

”That’s worse!” she wailed softly, dropping back onto her knees and burying her face in her hands. ”That’s a thousand times worse! You sound like a clumsy milkmaid who dropped her bucket in front of the miller’s boy! You’re a goddess! Speak like you’ve got a brain!”

Yet, despite the clumsy words, the warmth of the fantasy carried her forward.

She imagined what it would feel like when his hand touched her head, just like in the vision.

She imagined his long calloused fingers sinking into her thick golden mane, playfully trying to smooth out the wild tangles, only for his knuckles to get completely stuck in the golden curls.

She could see him scowling in mock frustration, tugging gently while she laughed up at him, teasing him, throwing cheeky insults at his broad nose until that handsome rugged face flushed red with embarrassed exasperation.

She kicked her chained feet against the void, a tiny, breathless giggle slipping past her lips.

For thousands of years, her existence had belonged entirely to others.

Her daylight belonged to the wheat... her warmth belonged to the aching joints of the old women; her rising belonged to the prayers of a realm that never once asked who she was... She’d been nothing but a golden wheel turning in the sky.

This... this ridiculous stubborn dream of a green valley and a man with gold-ringed eyes was the first thing she’d ever wanted that was entirely, exclusively hers.

Nyxvaris had no claim on it, and neither did any temple. It was hers alone yet the dark was cruel.

Every time the daydream faded, every time the silence asserted itself once more, the cold returned with a heavier and more malicious weight.

The contrast between the warm green grass of her mind and the freezing pitch of the pocket realm felt like plunging into an icy river after sitting by a roaring hearth.

She indulged in the daydreams anyway as she had nothing else to spend.

Then slowly the daydreams began to turn.

After what felt like decades of speaking into the black, the line between her thoughts and the external world began to fray like an old hemp rope.

...Talking to him in the silence gradually slid into him talking back.

At first, it was harmless.

She’d ask what the stone of his Keep was called, and her mind would supply a deep gravelly answer that sounded like mountain granite.

She’d ask what he ate for breakfast, and she’d imagine him describing warm, crusty bread and roasted marrow stew until her empty belly ached with phantom hunger.

She stopped noticing that she was the one crafting the answers.

She began to argue with him.

She’d sit in her chains and bicker with the empty air about the proper way to trim a wick, or how fast a river current should run, her voice rising and falling in sharp animated rhythms then came the nights when the guilt dragged her down into the cellar of her soul.

She’d sit in the black, her knees pulled tight, weeping quietly as she confessed the sins that had broken her.

She told the imaginary Silas about Sela... She told him about the blood on the flat stone, the three nights of hunting through the pines, and the three-foot ironwood stake that had pinned the child’s lungs to the rock.

”I tried to be fast,” she whispered to the shadows, her tears burning against her bruised skin. ”Silas... I broke the clouds... I threw all my light into the trees... but I was too late. I was too late for her...”

And on the darkest nights, when the phantom of the dead girl was whispering in her left ear, the voice of the imaginary Silas would change.

The deep baritone would lose its warmth, turning flat and heavy as a falling portcullis.

”You were too late,” the imaginary voice would say, echoing from the void directly in front of her face. ”You let her bleed in the mud. You sat in your sky and watched the monsters hunt her... Why should I take a broken useless thing like you into my place?”

Lilianel’s heart would shatter into a thousand jagged pieces.

”No!” she’d scream, lunging forward, clawing at the empty air where she imagined his boots standing. ”Silas, don’t say that! Please, not you too! Don’t look at me like that! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! Don’t leave me here! Silas! SILAS!”

She’d scream his name until her vocal cords shredded, until the blood pooled in the back of her mouth, thrashing against the unseen chains until her wrists were purple and swollen.

She’d weep, beg, and claw at the blackness, pleading with a phantom of her own making not to turn his back on her in the dark.

...Eventually, exhaustion would claim her.

She’d wake hours, or days, or years later, curled into a pathetic shivering ball on the invisible floor, her throat swollen shut, whispering frantic, broken apologies into the freezing air, completely unable to remember what the voice had actually said, knowing only that she’d failed him too.

By the end, she could no longer tell what was real.

Did she really see snow on the mountains, or had she imagined it because she was so terribly cold...? Did he really have a gold ring in his dark blue eyes, or had she painted her own dying color into his gaze to make him feel familiar...?

She grew terrified of looking at the vision at all.

Whenever her foresight flickered in the marrow of her bones, she’d squeeze her eyes shut and turn her face away, paralyzed by the horrific fear that if she pulled the vision forward, she’d find that his face was gone, replaced by a grotesque mocking mask that her broken mind had painted over the truth.

Untold years crawled past... Decades vanished into the freezing pitch without a mark to count them by...

Lilianel sat entirely motionless in the center of the pocket realm.

Her divine mane was gone.

The wild magnificent lion’s crown had been plucked, burned, and withered away until only a few thin, greasy, ragged strands clung to her scarred scalp, dull and faded to the sickly lifeless yellow of tarnished old brass.

Her skin was gray pulled tight over protruding ribs, and her once-blinding golden eyes had guttered down until they were nothing more than two dim, dying embers buried deep within shadowed, hollow sockets.

The unseen chains barely pulled at her now, because there was almost nothing left to steal.

Her solar core was a pinch of cold gray soot.

Her breath came once every few hours rattling with the silence of a star that had reached the end of its life.

She was dying... Truly dying...

The immortality of a goddess was unravelling, its foundation crumbling into the void.

In a few more months, the last ember in her chest would flicker out, and she’d become nothing more than a frozen statue of dead brass drifting in an eternal box then the universe fractured.

DING!

A melodic chime echoed through the pocket realm.

It carried the pristine undeniable ring of authority, slicing cleanly through the thick suffocating dark like a silver bell rung in an empty cathedral.

Before Lilianel’s dim, unblinking eyes, a brilliant translucent rectangular interface flared into existence.

The radiant blue light illuminated the void, reflecting in the dying embers of her pupils.

...It was the first light she’d seen that hadn’t come from the burning of her own hair in untold centuries.

Hovering motionless against the black air, crisp letters pulsed within the blue frame.

[You have been summoned to be a Hero for a Lord.]

[Y / N]

Lilianel stared at the floating window.

She didn’t gasp.

Her cracked lips pulled back from her teeth in a dry, rattling, soundless laugh that shook her thin ribs with bitter hollow mockery.

’My mind has finally shattered,’ she thought, the realization settling into her chest with weary certainty. ’The very last gear in my head has snapped. I’m hallucinating words in the air... blue boxes that speak of lords and summons... What a ridiculous pathetic delusion to die with.’

She tilted her head toward the darkness behind her left shoulder, her voice coming as a raspy papery croak.

”Did you send this, Silas...?”

Lilianel waited for the shadow to answer... She waited for the phantom baritone to tell her it was another trick, or for Sela’s voice to tell her she was too late.

The silence gave back nothing as the phantom was gone, banished by the cool steady glow of the blue interface.

Her ember eyes drifted back to the glowing text and a sudden cold suspicion pricked at the edge of her thoughts.

’Is it the vampires...?’ she wondered, her fingers twitching against her knees. ’Have they grown tired of waiting for the cold to finish me? Have they crafted a new illusion, a false dawn to draw out the last drop of my divinity before they crack my bones for the marrow...?’

She stared at the two letters hovering at the bottom of the pane.

[Y / N]

If it was real... if this wasn’t an illusion crafted from her own rot, and she touched it... she’d leave Nyxvaris.

She’d leave the realm she’d nurtured for three thousand years... She’d leave the frozen pine woods where Sela had died... She’d leave the gray river where the perch had run in the morning light... She’d turn her back on the world that had called her Sun Mother.

’Leave it for what...?’ a bitter aching whisper echoed through her thoughts.

Nobody on Nyxvaris had spoken her name in centuries.

The grandfathers were dust, the wheat was gray ice and the altars were buried under six feet of unmelting snow.

They’d forgotten the color of her light and they’d decided she was a fairy tale told to quiet children in the cold.

She thought of Teo, standing in the gray snow by his daughter’s tiny stone mound, whispering...

”Her name was Sela.”

She thought of Sela’s dying hand falling limp from her cheek into the freezing pool of blood and then, deep within the frozen embers of her soul, she saw a pair of dark blue eyes ringed with pure gold, laughing in the mountain sun.

Lilianel drew a slow shuddering breath of the dead air.

”Even if it’s a lie,” she whispered, her cracked voice trembling with raw desperate hunger, ”even if it’s another cage... it has light.”