Chapter 20 – Saintess of Light

Chapter 20 – Saintess of Light

The furious roar fell silent, and light stopped pouring down from the torn heavens above. When the ugly skeleton came back into Seris’s view, it looked wretched. Its throne was gone, blasted into molten ruin and drifting cinders. The spiked crown fused to its skull had half-melted into warped black ridges, and thin streams of smoke rose from its charred robes and exposed bone. Faint cracks glowed along its ribs and arms, as if holy fire still burned inside.

But its rage was gone.

What replaced it was an eerie calm, and Seris immediately tensed. This was bad. The ugly skeleton was much scarier when it stopped shouting.

“Conversing with you was a mistake,” said the dead god, voice flat and devoid of emotion. “You are wrong. You are unnatural. You are an abomination that should not exist.”

Seris bristled immediately. No, that’s you! she wanted to shout. But before she could, Vhal’s burning eyes fixed on her with cold, hateful clarity.

The dead god reached out with one clawed hand, and Seris’s angry retort froze on her lips.

“You are Liria Yggdris’s crime against me. Die.”

Pain lanced through her chest.

It was so sudden and so savage that her mind failed to understand it for one stunned moment. Then the agony deepened, and her heart felt as though it had been seized in a merciless skeletal grip and squeezed. Seris gasped and crumpled to one knee, fingers clawing at the front of her robes as if she could pry the invisible hand away by force.

The Ashen Wastes spun around her. Gray sky. Ash. Bone. Smoke.

Everything smeared together as the world narrowed to a single dark point. Vhal looked down at her with naked contempt as she faded in and out of consciousness, its form looming over her blurred and wrong and impossibly distant, as if she were sinking underwater while it stood calmly on the shore and watched.

It hurt. It hurt so much. Seris was scared.

Her breath came in tiny, ragged gasps. Her chest refused to work properly. The pain was too sharp, too deep, too real. It reached into places she could not defend with clenched teeth and stubbornness alone.

Part of her wanted to curl up and cry. Part of her wanted Big Sis.

But Seris was the Saintess of Light, so she had to be brave. It was okay, Seris was used to pain.

Her vision swam. The edges of the world flickered black. She forced herself to breathe anyway, forced herself to remember who she was supposed to be.

Her ideal self.

The Saintess.

The one who stood proud and unyielding against adversity.

The one who did not collapse in front of ugly skeletons.

Words rose in her mind like scripture sung from a distant choir.

Psalm 7: …the Saintess shone with unsurpassed light, and the influence of all things profane burned away beneath her holy radiance.

Golden light burst from her in a wave.

The Ashen Wastes were bathed in sudden brilliance. As holy radiance spilled across cracked earth and gray ruin, the invisible grip around her heart weakened, hissed, and dissolved like rot under sunlight. The pain receded. Not completely, but enough. Enough for Seris to suck in a shaking breath. Enough for her to stagger to her feet.

Across from her, Vhal watched without moving.

“As expected,” it said, voice cold and appraising, “of something that was once part of me.”

Green fire stirred all across the Ashen Wastes. It rose from the fissures in the earth. It leaked from buried bones. It seeped upward through the ash like swamp gas from a poisoned grave, gathering toward the dead god in flickering streams.

“Even broken,” Vhal continued, “even twisted into a mockery of what you should be, you remain… passably competent.”

Shut up, ugly skeleton! Seris’s hands curled into fists. It was not her. It was not!

She wanted to scream it. Wanted to stomp her foot and point dramatically and maybe call down another giant beam of holy judgment directly onto its horrible skull.

But the Saintess of Light should be dignified when confronting an enemy of the world. So Seris drew herself up instead, chin high, robes gleaming, and said in her most saintly voice:

“Let there be light.”

The gray sky split apart with a crack of divine force, and a pillar of searing white-gold radiance came crashing down toward Vhal with all the merciless certainty of sacred judgment.

This time, Vhal was ready.

The dead god made a single, almost bored gesture. It looked insultingly casual.

A great serpent of green fire erupted upward from the earth. It rose with terrifying speed, its body thick as a fortress wall, scales formed from layered flames and shrieking souls. Its jaws opened impossibly wide, and before Seris could even blink, it lunged into the descending beam and swallowed the holy light whole.

The Ashen Wastes screamed.

The serpent convulsed as it fed. Its body swelled. Bright gold and sickly green warred beneath translucent fire-flesh, and every pulse of stolen radiance made it larger, longer, more monstrous. Its coils wound up through the dead sky until its head disappeared beyond the gray clouds.

Then, from somewhere far above, it dove. Seris looked up. And up. And up. Its maw filled her entire world.

Rows of jagged burning fangs closed in around a throat made of writhing green inferno. Heat crashed over her face. The inside of its mouth smelled like grave dirt and burned flesh and old curses.

Seris froze. This was too scary. She wanted to cry.

She wanted to be picked up and hugged and told that she had done very well and could stop fighting now. She wanted Big Sis.

But that was not okay. Seris did not want to become someone who always needed saving. She wanted to stand beside Big Sis. She wanted to become someone worthy of being there.

Even this should be nothing to a true Saintess. And Seris was the Saintess of Light. Big Sis had said so, so it had to be true.

Pages of scripture flipped through her mind’s eye in a blur of gold-edged parchment and sacred calligraphy. Her desperation sharpened into resolve, and she reached for her ideal self with everything she had.

Psalm 23: …the Saintess soared on wings of fire, surrounded by a thousand shining swords.

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The world answered.

Wings of living flame unfurled from her back in a burst of radiant heat. They wrapped around her for one heartbeat like a warm protective cloak, then snapped outward with enough force to blast ash away in every direction. A thousand swords of living light ignited into being around her.

Seris shot upward. The serpent’s jaws slammed shut on empty air.

The monstrous lunge missed her by inches as she soared into the dead sky, laughter bursting out of her before she could stop it. Wind tore through her hair. Heat streamed from her wings. The Ashen Wastes fell away beneath her in a blur of gray and gold and green flame, and for the first time in her life, Seris flew.

It felt incredible.

She let out an exuberant laugh that rang bright and wild across the sky as she wheeled through the air in a tight arc, the serpent thrashing beneath her. The thousand swords moved with her thoughts as naturally as fingers. She barely had to think.

Half of them turned as one and plunged toward Vhal in a rain of radiant blades.

The dead god reacted instantly. A barrier of inky darkness surged up around it, dense and oily and thick enough to distort the air. The first wave of swords slammed into it in a chorus of shrieking light and splintering force, driving the ugly skeleton back half a step.

Good.