ORIANA

I ripped free of Sol's grasp and sprinted towards Sebastian, throwing my arms around his neck. We collided with such force that he had to lift me clean off my feet and spin with the momentum; I gasped, and he chuckled, taking me for another spin before setting me down. I only had a second to whisper how much I missed him before he expelled the air from my lungs with a crushing embrace, leaving me to wonder perhaps if he wasn't a bear shifter instead.

I buried my face in his milk-white throat, breathing deeply for the first time in days. Crushed pine and oiled leather. The first tendrils of mist of a morning. And something strange, almost silvery, an elusive hint of power.

Home.

"You're alright." The sheer relief in his voice almost broke me; he was the one thrown off the ramparts and tossed in a dungeon. I'd failed miserably trying to free him.

"I thought I'd lost you," I croaked.

"I'll always find my way back to you," he said, low and meant for my ears only, and then planted a tender kiss on the top of my head. It was the only thing gentle about him, though; I felt the match to my desperation in the pressure of his fingers, the mad rhythm of his heart. It was galloping like a Kirin heading into battle.

Perhaps he was facing a fight. Despite the possessive way he clutched me, Sebastian's body stayed rigid, alert to the threat across the room. Anger edged his next words. "It was you outside my cell."

With extreme effort, I pried myself loose and turned halfway in his embrace, taking a stand against the wyvern who'd betrayed us all. "You knew where he was and you left him there?"

Sol narrowed his eyes. "No, I gave him the incentive to make his own way out."

"You stole the cloak from my room." Heat prickled against the back of my neck as my hair roared to life, whooshing up like a real flame. Sebastian leaned back surreptitiously.

A muscle in the giant's cheek flexed. "Everything else you'd brought with you stank."

I pulled away from Sebastian, finally noting the ethereal glow leaking from his pores. "Your powers." My throat closed around the words. "Is She..."

Sebastian's scowl softened as he glanced my way — just for a second. "No. I didn't open the way for Nya."

Sol went rigid as the stone behind him. "What?"

Spittle accompanied the word. Sebastian eyed it with no small measure of distaste before his deadly gaze fixed on the wyvern's face. With pure, male smugness, he said: "You don't even know what you handed me, do you?"

Rana cocked her head. "Can somebody catch me up here?"

"The cloak is a vessel," I explained quickly. "It stores Nya's Grace but it's disconnected from the source. I think it's because the Queen Weaver harvested my soul bond with Hunter to make it."

Sebastian grimaced at the mention of his brother, but Rana was unfazed. "Right. Carry on."

Kyara was handling this with considerably less grace; her tendons were threatening to emancipate from her neck. "Solas, I expressly ordered you to neuter the dog's power. Now I'm hearing that you directly disobeyed me, at great risk to our home—"

"This is not my home!" Sol exclaimed, at the same time I snarled: "He is not a dog."

Together, our anger was so strong that it shook the mountain. It let out a belly-deep groan that scattered loose pebbles and sent small fissures through the floor. In the commotion, Sol did the unthinkable — he lunged towards his High Priestess and whipped out the dagger on his hip, holding the curved blade to her throat.

"Come and find me when you're ready to use your powers," he said to Sebastian, stepping back into the darkness.

The temperature spiked, as if someone had thrust my face into a campfire. The light that played across Kyara's robes shifted to blue before she disappeared altogether, swallowed by the blackness of the tunnel. Sweat rolled down the back of my neck as I realised the falls had turned the same colour as Rya during Her tantrum.

Rana's brows drew together, disappearing beneath the cloth band. "Did he just..."

"Yep," I said curtly.

She made a gargling noise in the back of her throat. "Why can't anything be easy?"

The situation was dire, but a smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. She was sounding more and more like herself.

"Where do the tunnels go?" Sebastian asked, reaching for the dagger at his hip.

"Damned if I know," Rana muttered. "I wish we could leave them to it. They deserve each other."

"You'd make an excellent leader," I pointed out — then back-stepped, rather sheepishly: "Not that I'm saying we should leave anyone to die."

That disconcerting sadness returned, and she shook her head slowly. "We have to get her back. If I become High Priestess... No," she said firmly. "It's not an option."

Sebastian nodded. "Alright. We need to make a decision, then. Do we go in blind and risk fumbling our way into a trap, or light the path and risk exposing ourselves?"

Neither of us were familiar with the terrain, but...

"No light," Rana declared. "This way."

Once Sebastian tamped down his power and stopped glowing, she led us into the dark, the most practiced at navigating without sight. Only my footfalls seemed to make noise as we climbed higher, the path slowly turning back on itself, the pressure in my ears indicating our gradual ascent.

I stumbled over the uneven flooring. Sebastian caught my arm to steady me, his fingers tightening on my bicep, making my stomach drop in that funny little way it did whenever he looked at me too long.

Light flared beneath his fingers. Rana swore, spinning around. "Can you keep your damn hands off each oth—"

She broke off at the sight of the runes wavering on the walls. For a moment I thought they were floating on thin air; then I realised it was some kind of precious metal beaten into carvings, reflecting the light emanating from my pores. I couldn't help it around Sebastian; I was hyper aware of him, and my inner light rushed to surface.

He only glanced at the wall briefly, a hand on the hilt of his dagger, but I stepped towards it. The runes were swimming together, tugging at strange visuals in my mind — memories that weren't memories. It felt uncannily like the Earth Mother rifling through my mind again, plucking at the deep-running currents of my soul.

"Pilgrimage," I said softly, stepping closer to trace one of the murals. "It says something about a toll?"

Rana did a double take. "You can read the ancient text?"

"You can't?"

I regretted the words the moment they came out of my mouth. She was blind, obviously. Or at the very least pretending to be, in which case I wanted to keep her secret, because she was obviously doing it for a reason.

"We have an entire section of of the temple dedicated to deciphering it, but it's a dead language," Rana explained, after a short pause. "Most of it was lost to time."

Not dead. I recalled the symbol for harmony Rana burned into the mountainside to stave off a Kirin attack. They understood it well enough.

"Is it a story?" Sebastian asked.

I frowned. "More like a warning."

Below the text, hundreds of faces were twisted in agony as they burned alive. A menacing flame bird swooped down from the sky, razing entire villages in search of Blessed Ones, which it would take back to its nest and..."

"What?" Rana asked.

"... eat?" I guessed, cocking my head. "That's what the picture looks like. But the script says transference, like it's sucking out their souls."

"Or their memories," Sebastian murmured.

There was an odd note in his voice. I turned around to face him. "What makes you say that?"

"She asked for one. Well, demanded it," he said, fingers coming up to his lips. "When I passed through the flames, I was... transported, to a castle of mirrors. I saw the Sun Goddess in all Her terrible glory, reflected one hundred hundred times. She said I must pay the toll if I wished to leave. So I did."

The hall of mirrors sounded strange, and certainly different to what I always experienced when visiting, but even stranger was the cloudiness in his ruby eyes.

"What did She take?" I asked through gritted teeth.

"I don't know," he admitted. "She only said it would be my happiest."

"What's around it?" I asked, feeling panicked, now. What if he'd forgotten me? That we'd made amends? But no, that was awfully presumptuous, and besides — he'd barged through the Final Sunset with my name on his lips.

"It feels like trying to poke at a hole where a tooth used to be," he said with a grimace.

As grateful as I was that he remembered me, the thought that something — or someone — else had made him happier was a sore one.

Rana cleared her throat, interrupting our moment with her usual knack. "Let's keep moving. Can you turn that thing off or do you need to keep your hands to yourself?"

I realised she was talking about my glowing skin and I sighed, pulling away. "Let's go."