Page 41 of Sanctifier

Ru’s skin crawled.

“We have long awaited her arrival,” said Lady Bellenet, her deep voice spreading honey-like through the great room. Every face turned to her as the crowd murmured in response. “For we have seen Festra in his greatness, at the site of the Shattered City. And we have seen his heart. But who holds the blessed organ in her hands? Who will be the conduit between our mortal souls and the effervescent beauty that is our god?”

“Ruellian Delara!” shouted the courtiers.

Despite the artifact’s ongoing warmth, ice began to form in Ru’s veins.

“Who will show us the shining road to paradise?” said Lady Bellenet, almost chanting.

“Ruellian Delara!” came the disturbing response.

Ru felt as if she were in a nightmare.

“This is a day of beauty,” Lady Bellenet went on, her tone bright and animated. “It is a pivotal day, in which we shed the selves we once were and take up new mantles. Too long has Mirith simply existed, persisted, survived. Should we not strive for more? Should we not strive tolive?”

Roaring applause engulfed the room once more. A number of courtiers seemed to faint at this pronouncement, and more than a few exaggerated sobs cut through the din.

Ru tried to look passively pleasant, to keep the disgust from her face.

But Lady Bellenet continued to speak, gesturing broadly as she did. She seemed to glow in the light of the chandeliers. Even from that awkward angle across the dais, with two thrones and a regent in the way, Ru found herself captured by Lady Bellenet’s words. She was beginning to understand how this woman had whipped the court into such a frenzy.

Even so, charisma alone didn’t explain what had happened to Regent Sigrun or the Children. It didn’t explain Taryel.

“Scientific progress, the study of the arts, literature, philosophy,” Lady Bellenet was saying, “can only take us so far as a kingdom. As asociety. Have you never yearned for more? Have you never heard a beautiful song, or gazed up at the heavens on a clear night, and wondered what awaited you in the after?”

Yes, Ru thought, and she was immediately embarrassed at her reaction. But she had. Who hadn’t wondered what else lay beyond the known? It was those yearnings that had made Ru who she was, had driven her to study magic and archaeology.

“Have you ever loved someone, treasured a soul as true as yours, only to lose it?” Lady Bellenet continued.

Ru’s stomach lurched. She sensed Taryel behind her, still lurking in the shadows. The man who had broken her heart.

“There is no pain to rival it,” said Lady Bellenet, and Ru felt as if the words cut straight to her core. “You may still be healing. The wound may still hang open; your soul laid bare to the world. And every day, the winds of life ravage you, a tumult of mundanity and misery. And when you look up at the sky at night, perhaps you see not what is possible, but what you’ve lost. How little is left to you.”

A cacophony of sniffles and strangled sobs broke out amongst the gathered courtiers. Ru blinked, hard, her eyes stinging.

Lady Bellenet stepped forward so that she stood just ahead of the regent. Ru could see her clearly, the lady’s almond-brown hair hanging loose down her back. “But what if I told you,” Lady Bellenet said, “that your pain was not part of you? That you were not beholden to it? My loves, you are not bound to misery. Thereismore to the world than what we see, what we feel, what is measurable by science. Have you not felt it in those joyous moments? Have you not heard it on the wind?”

Yes!Ru wanted to say, then bit her lip, hard.

“Together, we can find a way to eternal joy,” Lady Bellenet said, raising one hand as if holding that joy within it, and Ru watched as every eye in the room fixated on her. “Together, we will discover the mysteries of the universe. We will journey together to paradise. You only have to choose it. You must simply give in to the will of your god.”

That flicker of interest in Ru’s chest vanished. She had been swept up in the drama, the rhetoric, without even trying. But the reference to Festra sent her tumbling back to reality. There was no paradise, no eternal joy in store for these people. Only darkness.

Only death at Ru’s hand.

Movement from behind Ru distracted her from the applause that rose from the crowd, the clinking of crystal glasses, the cheers of enraptured courtiers. She turned just in time to see Taryel at last emerge from behind the crimson banner.

He was still dressed head to toe in black, but now he wore something new. Something that caught Ru’s eye and held it — a shining circlet of gold, arcing across his brow.

He glanced toward her for an infinitesimal moment, and for a split second of eternity, the artifact roared forth within her, hot and beautiful and wild. And then it subsided like a violent tide, and he was moving away from her to the front of the dais.

Lady Bellenet raised her arm to greet him, smiling, as the courtiers and Children and footmen, every pair of eyes in the room, gazed up at him.

“Behold,” she said, and all those gathered watched in breathless awe as he lowered himself into the king’s throne, resting one foot on his knee, an elbow languorously propped on a crimson velvet armrest.

“Behold your god.”

And Lady Bellenet fell to her knees.

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