Page 116 of Sanctifier

Ru sat hunched over herself, sobbing. The artifact was somehow in her hands again, though now it was sticky with blood. Blood was everywhere. On Ru’s dress, her hands and hair, dripping from Lady Bellenet’s blade.

Ru shook violently. Everything she loved was gone. It was only Ru Delara now, and Dulcie Bellenet. Alone together at the end of the world.

“Do itnow.” Blood flecked Lady Bellenet’s desperate face. Taryel’s blood.

The artifact seemed to fit so perfectly in Ru’s palm, blood and all. Her fingers curled around it as if seeking salvation.

“I want to be very clear,” Ru said, her voice as hard as granite, “that I’m not doing this for you.”

Who for, then?a thought drifted in from the darkness.Forme.

With no effort at all, Ru’s mind reached out and ignited the artifact. Without the weight of fear, the need to hold back, it was as easy as breathing. She simply stretched out a fingertip of affection in her mind, and it responded.

Golden light burst in Ru’s vision like an exploding star. It was endless, swirling, both glowing within the artifact and radiating outward from it, enveloping the chapel, the world, in millions of rivulets of luminous gold. Ru held the stone in her hands while her mind seemed suspended in an infinite night, as if her mind was gone and replaced by a dancing web of light.

For the first time, Rusawthe artifact as it truly was. The power that had lain within it, dormant, waiting. It now lay open to her, yearning for more. A god’s heart, aching for forgiveness. A thing of beauty, its power unending.

But even in that glorious epiphany, she could only think of Taryel: The man she loved, whose soul had found its counterpart in hers. The man who was now gone.

Andgodshe loved him, she loved him.

She fell forward, one hand braced against the blood-wet floor.

The other held the artifact.Yes, it said, thrumming against her consciousness.

Her only thought was of Taryel. And as her mind seemed to drift further and further from the present moment, swept up in the power of the artifact, she found that shewasTaryel. She was standing with King Alaric II in the early morning. Ocean wind whipped at her hair and skin. It seemed to her that she was offered a choice: a small death for the sake of the many?

Or an annihilation?

She opened her eyes, and through the artifact’s shimmering glow, she saw Taryel. Limp and lifeless, his hair matted with blood. One hand lay across his belly, the other palm upward, by his face.

From what seemed like miles away, a chapel full of Children gazed at her. A hopeless scene.

Ru took a shuddering breath. She was Ruellian Delara, Destroyer. Doomed by the hands of fate. Hugon and Dulcinea had taken everything from her. They had found her and molded her as they liked, pushed her. As if she were nothing but an experiment, a tool, a simpleconduit.

She had nothing left.

In the end, Lady Bellenet might have succeeded. She might have driven Ru to utter despair, even now. She would have made Ru the Destroyer a second time over.

But Gwyneth and Archie were still holding hands.

A small death? Or annihilation?

Ru clenched her fist around the artifact, sticky and blood-wet.

Neither, she thought.

CHAPTER 45

Ru’s world lit up.

The artifact exploded in an infinite array. Again and again, waves of boundless golden light surged outward from Ru and the stone until the chapel was gone and all Ru could see was the artifact’s power, filaments and ropes of gold weaving through a sea of energy.

She reached out a hesitant hand and found she could feel the golden strands. She ran her finger along a thread of power, and it vibrated at her touch.

It was the same golden light she had seen before with Taryel’s hand in hers.Taryel. She remembered exactly how his voice had sounded in the dark of the Shattered City all those months ago, the voice of a stranger. Yet he had never felt unknown to her.

Somehow, there in that liminal space with her senses engulfed by the artifact’s energy, Ru found that the idea of Taryel’s death seemed distant. Impossible. How could he have died, when so much bright love was flowing through Ru, through Taryel, through the whole world?

---