Page 11 of Unlikely Omega

What in the goddess’ name is going on?

Panting, groaning softly through the pain, I lift my eyes back to the statue, and I swear I see a symbol glowing on the god’s forehead, bright gold set in the white marble, burning so bright my eyes water.

Though that could be because of the pain.

I’m not one given to flights of fancy. I don’t hear voices. I don’t see things that aren’t there.

And yet I think I hear a voice speaking to me, inside my head, speaking words I don’t understand but with an urgency I feel in my bones.

Oh no, somebody help. I’ve gone around the bend. I think I’m hearing the unnamed god in my mind. Which absolutely can’t be. Everyone knows that the only divine voice you can ever hear is the one of the god or goddess who claims you.

The words coalesce into one string of sounds. It’s like a name.

“Si-dde-dra-kai.”

Over and over.

Maybe it’s something else, though, maybe this whole strangeness is caused by something else—and the blood flowing between my thighs is an indication. I’ve heard of such things before, though the intensity is unusual, if the gossip mill of the Temple is anything to go by.

I’m about to awaken as a woman.

The Temple says that all humans awaken sexually, their bodies maturing and opening to conception by the age of eighteen. My eighteenth year had come and gone and I had thought I’d perhaps turn out to be asexual, like a zeta.

Wrong again. My body only delayed my awakening to catch me by surprise, I’m sure, and then make me think I’ve gone mad. I had somehow looked forward to being asexual. It would have made my path in the Temple easier, but no, and that probably also explains the dreams and weird thoughts, and…

This week is shaping up to be utter shit.

4

FINNEN

She’s bleeding.

That’s all I can think of as I enter the Divine Circle, and I know it’s her. Her blood smells like an echo of her body perfume from earlier, a whiff of unbearably delicate sweetness that hit me right in the balls, but at the same time wrenched my mind, an arrow straight to where my thoughts sometimes stray.

Want.

Arousal.

Desire.

Need.

Impossible things for a priest, especially one who has been doubly claimed. My place is in the Temple, in abstinence and contemplation, in the rituals that steer my life like a boat over troubled water toward a distant light I think that I sometimes see at the horizon.

What other life is there for a blind man?

“Are you all right?” I snap as I crouch down beside her, take her face in my hands, trying to figure out what has happened. “Did you hurt yourself? Did someone—did High Priest Elegos—?”

“I’m fine,” she says quietly, leaning back, away from my touch.

I let my hands fall. “And the blood I smelled?”

“It’s nothing,” she insists and slowly pushes to her feet. I grab for her arm to help her up and she yanks it away. “I said I’m fine.”

Mixed with the metallic tang of blood, I detect a hint of sourness. Fear. She’s hiding something, hiding a lot, but she obviously has no intention of telling me what the problem is.

The tactile memory of her smooth skin and rounded jaw, the fragile bones under the surface, lingers on my palms. Her scent has invaded my senses and refuses to quit.

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