Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 835: I’m Not Qiu Ling But I Can Be Big Sister Morwenna [Bonus Chapter]

The memory hit her like a wave of burning salt spray.

...She was back on the blood-slicked deck of the Leviathan’s Wake.

The sky overhead blazed a blinding molten gold, boiling with the descending chariots of the Corporate Pantheons... The hull groaned under the weight of divine artillery, and the astral sea churned into white foam as holy harpoons tore through the rigging.

At the base of the mainmast, kneeling beside the glowing anchor stone of the Morwenna Aegis, was sixteen-year-old Lyra.

Her curls were plastered to her forehead with sweat, and her fingers were trembling so violently that the ritual knife in her hand rattled against the crystal.

Morwenna had pulled that girl off a holy sacrificial altar three years before the sky fell.

She had wiped the ash from her cheeks, fed her bowls of hot stew in the galley, taught her to tie knots and weave wards, and treated her like a little sister who would never have to bow to a temple priest again...

Lyra used to follow her around the ship like a duckling.

She used to steal the last sweet roll from the galley and blame it on Barnaby, and she used to fall asleep in the captain’s quarters with her head on Morwenna’s lap while Morwenna read sea charts by lantern light.

The first time she’d laughed out loud, a full year after the altar, the whole crew had stopped what they were doing just to listen to it...

Now Lyra was staring at the glowing ley-line that fed the great shield.

The heralds of the Pantheons had made her a promise. Lower the barrier, little ward-weaver, and your brother walks out of the purification camps alive...

Lyra looked back at Morwenna across the splintered deck.

Her eyes were wide and brimming with the exact same frantic, broken terror that Rèn was wearing right now.

”I’m sorry, Captain!” Lyra screamed, the words ripping out of her in a ragged sob. ”I’m so sorry!”

The knife came down.

CRACK!

The anchor stone split.

The great barrier of the Morwenna Aegis, the ward that had shielded her crew across a thousand leagues of hostile void, flickered once and shattered into ten thousand glittering shards as the gods poured in.

The slaughter was instant.

Barnaby, her six-armed goblin, was vaporized by celestial light before his cannon could fire... The deckhands were cut down where they stood, and their blood washed through the scuppers into the black sea.

Morwenna fought until her knees gave out under the weight of the divine iron chains that pierced her and dragged her down onto the bloody timbers and right there on the ruined deck, the gods kept their promise the way gods always did.

Lord Aurelius didn’t even look at the sobbing girl.

He brushed a speck of ash off his golden pauldron and told her the contract was void, that a Pantheon of light had never once intended to bargain in good faith with a filthy trench-rat.

Lyra’s face went white as the truth sank in.

She turned her head and looked at Morwenna, chained against the mainmast three paces away.

”Captain...” the girl whispered. ”I... I’m so sorry.”

Morwenna remembered the hot sting of her own tears dripping onto the wood.

”Close your eyes, Lyra,” she had rasped. ”Just close your eyes.”

The girl closed them.

A six-winged angel stepped forward, raised his glowing spear and drove it down through her small body, pinning her to the deck.

SHLUNK!

Lyra gasped once, and then she was gone.

...The memory receded like a black tide pulling back from the shore, and Morwenna was sitting in a cool pond in Blessed Land again with her chest tight and aching.

Even now, centuries later, she couldn’t bring herself to hate that little girl.

She couldn’t blame Lyra for anything.

A frightened child, cornered by gods who had her family’s throat in their fist, clutching a knife and weeping for her brother... How could anyone blame a lamb for flinching when the wolves showed their teeth?

It was her own fault.

’If I’d been faster...’ Morwenna thought, staring down at her pale hands in the water. ’If I’d sailed straight into those camps and ripped her little brother out myself before the fleet ever found us... maybe all of us would still be together. Maybe Barnaby would still be singing off-key at the helm... Maybe Lyra would still be laughing in the galley, tossing apple peels to the gulls...’

A bitter lump rose in her throat then, as the water rippled against her shins, the thought shifted.

If the Leviathan’s Wake hadn’t burned... If the Aegis hadn’t fallen and the divine chains hadn’t dragged her down into the dark...

She would never have stood on the altar... She would never have looked up into those dark blue eyes with their warm ridiculous golden rings... She would never have spent that night in the Captain’s arms, never have shared tea with Elu under the roots of the World Tree, and never have laughed herself breathless watching Lupina chase her own tail across the courtyard...

Morwenna would never have found the people she’d come to love more than the sea itself.

She’d never have met the brat with the golden-ringed eyes who let her tease him shamelessly and then teased her right back twice as hard.

She’d never have woken up to Lupina’s howling, or to Kaelia’s pans clattering, or to the sound of a whole valley of women laughing at something stupid the Captain had done.

A faint bittersweet breath slipped past her lips.

From somewhere far back, from long before she ever laid a hand on a ship’s wheel, an old memory floated up.

It was of her mother and it was pretty important as Morwenna murmured it out loud without even realizing she was doing it.

”Everything happens for a reason...”

Rèn flinched.

The wooden sword dipped an inch in her trembling hands, and her tear-filled crimson eyes blinked up at Morwenna in confusion.

Lyra’s betrayal had nearly broken her soul, and it had also steered her ship straight into this valley... She had learned from it.

She’d learned exactly what happened when you let a frightened child carry something far too heavy on her own then the fear crept in, cold and sudden as a current under the surface.

Her fingers curled against her wet trousers.

’What if I fail again...? What if I let another broken girl lean on me? What if I let her sleep under our roof and trust me, and it all falls apart? What if I let someone rely on me, and it ends with the people I love dying in the fire all over again...?’

Her jaw clenched, and the gray in her eyes darkened like a gathering squall.

Who was she to guide anyone through the dark? She was a pirate... She stole wine, she cursed in front of deities, and she solved most of her problems with a boot to the ribs.

Morwenna took a slow deep breath of the air as she stopped herself.

’No,’ she thought, and the stubborn iron that had kept her alive through the black rifts settled back into her spine. ’I’m not alone on a burning deck anymore...’

She had the Captain, who could take a demon’s claws to the chest without spilling his tea.

She had Elu, whose gentle roots could stitch a broken soul back together.

She had Aurelia, Kaelia, Lupina, Solenne, Rowenna and all the fierce, stubborn, beautiful women who filled the Keep with noise every single night...

She even had Thor, though that blonde war goddess was basically part-time at this point and only seemed to show up when the tables were full of roast meat.

’I’ll do fine...’ Morwenna thought, and a small crooked smile finally tugged at the corner of her mouth.

Morwenna leaned forward in the water as she reached out with her left hand and rested her wet calloused palm softly against Rèn’s cheek, wiping away a smear of tears with her thumb.

Rèn’s breath hitched.

Her crimson eyes searched Morwenna’s face, desperate for the answer she’d been waiting twenty-six years to hear.

”Listen to me, little stray,” Morwenna said quietly, every trace of pirate mockery gone from her rough voice. ”I’m not your Senior Sister Qiu Ling...”

The words landed in the clearing like a falling stone as Rèn’s face fell.

The trembling hope that had lit her up collapsed all at once.

Her lips parted in a silent wounded gasp, the color drained from her cheeks, and her hands slowly lost their strength until the tip of the wooden sword touched the surface of the pond, sending tiny ripples through the moonlight.

The fragile spark in her eyes, the one that had caught fire the moment the memory came back, flickered and went out.

...She’d made a mistake.

The woman in front of her was a stranger with stormy gray eyes in a foreign world.

The veranda where Qiu Ling had braided her hair was ash, buried under twenty-six years of blood.

Rèn started pulling her hands back, her shoulders curling inward, ready to drop the sword and crawl back into the dark where a demon belonged...

Morwenna didn’t let her.

She leaned in closer, the moonlight beaming down on them both through the silver branches, and a wide unshakeable smile spread across her face.

She lifted her right hand out of the water and placed it flat on top of Rèn’s head, resting her fingers right between the two black horns.

Her palm was warm and solid.

”I’m not Qiu Ling,” Morwenna said again, her voice steady as an anchor sinking into deep harbor sand. ”...But you’re not in those pens anymore, darling, and you’re not in that pit... You’re here.”

She ruffled the damp black hair between the horns and tapped her knuckles affectionately against the bone.

”So from tonight on,” Morwenna smiled, ”I’ll be your Big Sister Morwenna...”

Rèn froze.

”Eluned will be your Big Sister Eluned,” Morwenna went on, her voice light and teasing and warm. ”Aurelia and Kaelia will be your big sisters too, and Lupina and Solenne will probably end up as your little sisters... Well, all the girls in Blessed Land will be your big sisters and little sisters... Even the wolves who’ll chew on your boots.”

She paused, and a small awkward grimace twitched at the corner of her lips as she forced out a title that practically stuck in her throat.

”And... L-Lord Silas will be your Big Brother.”

She cleared her throat with a raspy, embarrassed cough and rolled her eyes up at the treetops, but her palm never left Rèn’s head.

”Though if you ever tell him I called him that out loud,” Morwenna added with a conspiratorial wink, ”I’ll throw you right back in this pond...”

Rèn didn’t blink.

Her crimson eyes widened until the moon reflected clearly in them as her mouth hung slightly open, and her breath caught somewhere between her ribs and her throat.

For as long as she could remember, her heart had only ever raced for one reason.

The last time it had truly leaped was when the grate rattled open above the pit and she knew she was the only one left breathing...

Every pounding heartbeat since that day had been paid for in boiling blood and the smell of her own death.

Now she was sitting in cool water in a silver-leafed clearing, with a warm hand resting between her horns and an old wooden sword lying across her knees.

Her heart skipped.

It gave a single trembling leap behind her breastbone, like a newly hatched bird stretching its wings in the morning sun for the very first time.

Fresh tears slid down her cheeks, and this time she didn’t even notice them.

Her fingers tightened slowly around the grip of the wooden sword, the same way a small girl had once clutched it on a veranda while a voice behind her told her to hold still so the braid would come out straight.

She had no idea what to do with her face... She had no idea what to do with her hands... Nobody had ever offered her anything without wanting her blood in return.

Rèn looked at Morwenna’s crooked grin.

She looked at the rough calluses on the hand touching her hair, at the half-finished braid hanging over her shoulder, and at the clean water lapping against her ribs.

’Big Sisters...’ Rèn thought, the words echoing through her mind, soft and hesitant and impossibly fragile.

’...and a Big Brother...?’

She didn’t know how a pirate, a wolf-girl and a Lord with golden rings in his eyes could ever make a family out of a demon who had burned thirty sects to the ground...

She only knew the freezing dark of the pens was gone.

The smell of rot and dried iron had been replaced by pine needles, clean water and the warm lingering scent of the dinner Morwenna had shoved into her hands earlier.

It felt...

It felt like home.