Page 18 of Unlikely Omega

“What have I ever done to him?” I whisper, annoyed when tears choke me. I swallow them down. “He’s never acted like this before.”

“The movement against the Fae bloodline is growing, and High Priest Elegos has… bad family memories from the war.”

“He wasn’t even born back then,” I blurt out. “His parents hadn’t been born, either.”

“Sometimes family memory goes back many generations,” he says quietly. “There is a power to stories passed down from parents to children and grandparents to grandchildren, about the bogeymen, the violence and the pain. It gets rooted in phyletic memory. It gets stronger with every retelling. It’s hard to deconstruct. Even harder to forget.”

“But I don’t look like a Fae,” I whisper, finding that I had been sliding down the wall and locking my knees to straighten again. “I don’t have pointy ears or sloe eyes or sharp teeth or any of that. Do I?”

“Being Fae… was more than that,” he says as he turns around to go. “There was an aura about them, a symmetry to their beauty, and a wildness to their nature. Maybe he senses that in you.”

Maybe what he senses are my ever-present doubts, my fear over the more recent happenings. I need to keep away from Elegos, something I hadn’t realized was a priority before today. I’m not safe around him.

Was that why? Had priest Finnen reacted to something wild in me? High Priest Elegos, too?

That can’t be true. I’m not Fae. I’m an ordinary girl, an ordinary human.

I realize I keep telling myself that, like a mantra, like a spell against evil.

But if I’m a normal girl, then why is my life like this? All I crave is affection and warmth and what I get instead is violence and threats.

Had my mother foreseen it? Was that why she got rid of me from the start?

Night finds me scrubbing the Prelate’s floors like a woman possessed. I only realize I should get out of there and perform my evening rituals when it gets too dark to see my reddened hands on the brush or the colors of the marble under my knees. It’s getting dark.

Which makes me think of Priest Finnen and his white, unseeing eyes. I shiver. I wonder how it must be to live a life in the dark, how he gets about his day.

“There are more senses than vision,” he’d said. What did he mean? His hearing is very good, I suppose. He must be used to using his hands or feet to gauge space, to finding obstacles and clearing them.

Was he born blind? Did something happen to take away his vision?

Why am I even thinking about that arrogant ass who kicked me out of his way the day after claiming me as his assistant, acting hot and then cold, acting so strange as if…

As if he’d heard the same voice I heard emanating from the statue.

Which I’d imagined.

Most definitely.

What I want is my routine, suddenly, terribly, needing to fall into the old, familiar pattern, to reassure myself that I’m okay, that nothing has changed, nothing bad is going to happen.

That I’m safe.

It’s what has drawn me to Priest Finnen, I suppose, what made me look at him again, when he stopped Elegos from hitting me, when he offered what I craved.

I should know by now that nobody would take a risk for me, nobody would tie themselves to me—an acolyte with no family backing her, no talent for the Temple and a knack for annoying the high priests and the councilors just by existing, but hope, they say, always dies last.

Let’s see how long it will take for mine to give up the spirit…

6

ARIADNE

Going through the familiar motions of the evening ritual, my silver blades whistling through the air, my bare feet sliding smoothly on the marble floor, I try to get into the right frame of mind, into that zone where time slows and sounds stretch, where I can almost, almost hear Artume’s voice echo inside my head, a soothing caress.

But no, I don’t hear it, and no, this isn’t enough to get me out of my head, or into my head, or whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing or feeling.

My body demands too much of my attention, too heavy and sore, and as I go through the motions, my belly cramps. It’s like a hot poker shoving into my kidneys, the fire moving down my back and into my belly.

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