The knock jolted Calla from her trance. The voices surged in volume before quieting. Smoke curled around her clasped hands, as if to tether her to the ring.

"Enter," she called out flatly.

The door creaked open. Remy Thornehail stepped in, one hand braced on the frame, silk-clad and smirking, still bare-chested. He had removed his various adornments, aside from the opal that never seemed to change.

"I wish to meet these false gods of yours," he called to her, a mix of emotions playing behind the cold façade in his blue eyes.

Calla wrinkled her nose beneath her veil, the outline of her features illuminated by the candlelight. When she spoke, her voice had turned distant—back toward heat and screams. "Seek your death elsewhere, concubine. My gods are not kind."

He sneered but stepped forward anyway, offering his hand like a challenge. The opal nestled between his collarbones seemed to dance in the flickering light.

She took his hand and rose easily from where she had been kneeling. Behind her, the circle of candles wavered, casting her face—veiled and golden—as something neither holy nor safe.

"I will not die from something that does not exist," Remy said.

Calla regarded him in silence before nodding.

"So be it."

She stepped from the circle. The candles extinguished all at once, hissing like breath drawn through teeth. Remy blinked. Her eyes glowed faintly in the dark, piercing through the veil.

They left the castle under a velvet-black sky. Summer nights in Zeonial burned cold after sunset, the heat of day twisting into something sharp. Remy shivered, fingers vanishing into his sleeves. Beside him, Calla moved like moonlight—barefoot, unbothered, as if she had felt a cold that made tonight's feel warm.

When she veered from the path, he followed—cursing every snapped branch and tangled root that conspired beneath his boots. He was used to gliding across ballroom floors paved with jewels and lies, and while war had taught him terrain, the forest knew nothing of civility. Every step seemed betrayed by twigs.

The trees seemed to press closer the deeper they went. The night pulsed with rustlings and silver eyes. Then, in a clearing bathed in hush, a stag stood—massive and unblinking. His antlers cradled the nearly full moon. Calla tipped her head to the beast, Remy's eyes widening when the stag's head dipped down in return. When they were beyond his sight, Calla glanced back at him, offering a single, amused sentence.

"It is rumored that the Originals are buried beneath the roots we walk on."

They walked on, until the temple loomed. Half-swallowed by trees, it rose from the forest like a dream forgotten. Vines of Evening Glory drenched its crumbling walls, curling over pillars and archways in moon-fed hunger. Pale blossoms reached skyward through cracks in the roof, their trumpet-throats opening only to the dark.

Beneath the vines, marble—turned ivory from age—gleamed like forgotten bone. Moonlight filtered through shattered arches overhead, casting scattered beams across the temple floor, illuminating the leaves and bones littering the ground. Calla said nothing as she stepped into the ancient place of worship. Remy followed her quietly to the altar, peering into the deep shadows where the moonlight could not reach.

Calla paused and brushed her hand over the cracked surface—clearing dust, clearing time.

Remy stopped at her side, his hand trembling slightly as he reached out to the marble. Calla waited patiently, the embroidery on her veil sparkling in the moon's gaze. He didn't look at her when he finally spoke.

"Do they still speak like the wind through leaves?" he asked, his voice rawer than she had ever heard. "My mother used to say her gods sang with voices too bright to bear." He lapsed into silence, staring at the stone as if willing it to reveal its past.

Calla placed a hand on the small of his back just as the moonlight shifted across the cracked tile. Remy swallowed, his eyes set, and laid himself down. The altar stone was cold beneath him.

Calla said nothing as she unspooled lengths of rope from a pouch at her hip. It smelled faintly of burned rosemary and something older—salt, maybe. She looped it twice around his wrists, then under a rusted hook on either side of the altar. She did the same for his ankles.

"These will keep you safe." He didn't ask what that meant.

The vines that wrapped around the base of the altar shivered, the pale blooms inching upward, closer to the man trembling in the faint light. His breath shuddered when a small, light green tendril draped itself over his hand, curling around two of his fingers.

Calla circled the altar in silence. At its corners, four candles—decorated with the wax of past lives—flared to life as she passed. The flames leaned toward her, like they knew her name.

Remy's eyes were wide with anticipation, the hope in them running rampant. The opal at his throat pulsed faintly, catching the firelight and refusing to let go. She looked down at him, her face unreadable behind the veil. Then she turned and walked barefoot into the trees—soundless, unapologetic.

Remy's breath caught. "Calla?" Only silence answered him.

He lay there, eyes tracing the vines above him as they thrummed. He felt watched, the weight of what the ancient temple must have seen pressing him down onto the altar. He turned his head, trying to peer into the whispering forest. His eyes focused instead on a moth with wings like stained glass perched on the trumpet-shaped bloom, its tongue unfurling into the throat of the moonflower, drinking greedily.

The candles flickered violently, shadows stretching long across sagging stone.

And then she was there, as if she had simply appeared. The Lord of the Thornehail family jerked against his bonds, his words of question caught in his throat when he saw what she held. Something heavy and wet dripped from her fingers, splattering the flowers surrounding the altar. The blooms pulsed and surged forward, wrapping tighter around Remy's wrists and ankles. His breath turned ragged as she held the thing above his chest, steam curling into the night. Small and glistening, the heart filled the room with the scent of copper. Not human, not quite.

She offered no explanation. She held the heart above his bare chest, paused, looked at him—her head tilted—the blood staining her veil echoing the darkness in her gaze. She crushed the heart in her palm.

Blood spilled across his skin, running into the dips and grooves of his body. A kind of warmth spread through him—made uncomfortable by the knowledge of where it came from. The silk he wore took on a pink tinge. The opal hissed when blood splashed across its surface.

Calla placed her palm flat over his sternum. Her hand radiated heat, burning him when she pushed down.

The chant came like a seizure, dragged from somewhere deeper than lungs—as if she had ripped it from its grave. Syllables she didn't know, shapes her lips feared—and still, the words spilled out of her, faster and faster. Her voice grew raw. Low. Ragged.

The vines recoiled, then unfurled anew—blooms quivering on their stems, swelling under moonlight as if drawing breath through roots laced in memory. The air thickened. After two millennia of silence, the altar stone took its first breath.

Candles flared higher than seemed possible. Heat blossomed within the temple, coating every surface.

The shift began in his spine. A slow tension gathered at the base, then climbed—vertebrae by vertebrae—until it arched him from the altar like a lover caught mid-climax. The ropes groaned as he strained, rubbing his skin raw as he tried to flee. His chest lifted and fell in shallow bursts, slick with sweat and blood, his heart pounding against its cage. Moonflowers hung above him, the tips of their velvet petals brushing his skin. Calla's honey eyes glowed eerily beneath her veil, words still tumbling from her mouth at a fevered pace. She pushed him down steadily, as if his struggles simply didn't register against her strength.

The moment his back met the marble, the temple ignited.

Heat surged—violent, blinding—rising so fast the air itself shimmered. Sweat and blood evaporated into steam. Light exploded behind his eyes, golden pinpricks blooming and collapsing like stars being born too fast. His lungs seized, his breath came in pants, his body strained and arched.

The ropes held.

He screamed as the light expanded into the room, brilliance untethered by the world's laws, forming shapes that shifted and danced on the edges. Whispers grew louder, alien voices speaking in long-lost languages with tongues not made for mortal ears. Calla's eyes glazed over, the words rushing out of her now. The voices joined hers, harmonizing in an impossible cadence, as if the altar itself remembered the song. Remy's screams broke into tears, the droplets evaporating before they could roll down his cheeks.

"I know this," he sobbed. "She—she sang this, my mother—my mother—"

The voices reached the crescendo, a creature of light hovered over him, his eyes burned as he fought to keep them open, staring in disbelief at the faint outline of wings. His body squirmed and bucked against the heat, against the holy, trying to run, and yet trying to be as close as possible. Shapeless light seemed to lower itself closer to his eyes. Just before it touched him, he could see long, slender fingers.

The light covered his eyes.

Time stopped. The temple plunged into darkness. The heat faded, but lingered, heavy with copper and burned rosemary. The tendril slipped off of Remy's hand. A thin crack split the gem at his throat, still sizzling from the heat of the heavens. The moonlight gleamed inside it.

The only sounds left in the temple were the pained breath of mortals, and the wind swirling through leaves.