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The problem with killing gods, Raia thought through the haze of light and glory filling her head, was that they weren't very good at being dead. The goddess Atsura was a softly-rippling luminescent orb in Raia's mind, a scarf of sun and order folded into a knot that made the young acolyte queasy if she started trying to follow its frills. It pulsed softly and sang to her in an unnerving facsimile of a mortal choir with a range from pealing bells to groaning glaciers.

Rya, my child, you vex me even as you amaze me. None before have been called to action by the gods like you have. We have chosen you above all others to save the world. Given this exaltation, you should have leapt forward and been halfway to your destiny at this point. Instead, you still wander the halls of this tabernacle. While I appreciate your dedication, your value to me is far greater as my messiah than as just another worshipper. Why do you not take the relic and leave this place?

Raia hated how Atsura used the archaic pronounciation of her name. It was one item on the long list of minor annoyances the goddess seemed to goad her with, each one a calculated sting to play upon her curse. Just the petty condescenions she had just been woken with drove a tiny part of her to roar and rend until the mockery had been silenced to her satisfaction. She quashed the bellicose voice quickly before it could rally support, and mentally grit her teeth as she replied.

Because you're not real. The first vision I had, I went to the Hierophants. They told me that you and the others haven't spoken directly to anyone since The Slaying, that the few times you rise from your barrows each millennia you pass out directions to the faithful in symbols and miracles. They told me that it was most likely that my curse was making me hallucinate, and if not it was probably a Fair One or mage or some other horrible thing playing with my mind to get at the shard. The way you treat me I'm starting to think they're right.

The wrinkled sphere paused, pulsed, and twisted over itself once. When it spoke, it somehow sounded hurt.

Then they are wrong. If I was a mage who wanted the relic, I already know of a far more pliable servitor. Your bunkmate, Hyrrkeld? She is an exiled alpha, the only surviving loser of a bloody succession. Half the citizens under her sister's rule are still loyal to her. At my command, in a single night she could raise an army powerful enough that no other mage would be a physical or spiritual threat ever again. And yet she remains asleep, dreaming of dipping her sister in molten oil while she fornicates with her husband. It is you who are awake. I could have used her to get the relic far more easily.

Raia rolled over, looking at the pale stains of dawn on the mountains and suppressing a groan at the sight as much as at the argument.

At which point she'd be at least a somewhat-experienced ruler with a holy artifact. I can imagine it would be difficult to take from her. Some mooncalf acolyte with delusions of being the chosen one walking through the gate after a smash-and-grab without even packing to run from the tabernacle? You wouldn't even have to use magic, just a quiet spot to slit my throat and toss my corpse off the side of the road. Tabernacle's been raided and the only lead they could have used is rotting in a ditch. A much better choice for a catspaw than some queen canny enough to survive a purge.

The lights flickered and stretched out, looking like the sea urchins she sometimes saw for sale at the market. Atsura's voices took a sharp edge.

What must be done to convince you? Raia felt more than heard the voice grow desperate. It feared something, and feeling fear made it angry. Seeing the filthy offspring of our betrayers wiped off the face of the earth would be a lovely offering, but those that would gift such a sacrifice to us would take the earth itself as their payment! They would leave us nothing but a dozen rotting numina haunting an empty husk of a world. Is that what you want, child of our betrayers? An annihilation more total than what we brought upon you when you forsook us? Because that cataclysm was but an attempt to prevent the reckoning that is coming now. If you embrace your destiny, millions will die. If you do not, there will be no survivors to curse your name. Do you understand, Rya? Every day you do not move from this cloister, you consign another pack to obliteration, another village to its very memory being sucked dry like a drunkard's wineskin. At first I took vengeful glee in your naive destruction of your own kind, but now it draws too close; another week and so many will die that we will never be given enough worship to be resurrected. If we remain dead during this, then everything you've ever known will join us. What will it take, Rya? What will prove my goddessship?

Raia rolled over, facing the worn stone wall, nearly in tears. She had read that Gor, the eldest child of First Man and First Woman, the first bearer of the curse, had been haunted by visions just such as these, punishment by the vengeful gods for being born. He would see a future of horrors unending should he not intervene, and yet each time he interfered, whether by advising his younger siblings or facing the foretold monster himself, his foresight only showed worse outcomes for his meddling. He grew more and more desperate and controlling trying to protect his kin, and in time was driven away, more monster than man. Was history repeating itself? Was she going to break, steal the relic, and then be shown visions of all her friends and teachers killed slowly and horribly because they lacked the relic to defend themselves? Gods were supposed to inspire and command, not needle and denigrate!

If you truly are Atsura, Lady of Light, then why don't you appear to all of us faithful at once, in all your glory? The relic is a shard of your shield! You could order us to throw it in the midden and our only protest would be that half of us must pray downwind of it! Telling the Hierophants that one of the acolytes needs to take it on some holy pilgrimage should be easy for you, shouldn't it?

Atsura roiled slightly, darkening, then brightening for just a moment, the sorrow in her voice enough to leave Raia sobbing.

Has it been so long? Are the rules of our existence that arcane now? Rya, my child, even if I somehow had the strength to manifest myself bodily before you all, the most likely effect would be to strike you all blind. And yet we are in such dire straits I would do it gladly if I could; I would blind each and every worshipper for a chance to save half of them from the coming storm, but I doubt that I can earn an outcome as good as that anymore. Please, Rya...Raia. I know you never wished to be a priestess, and you never had a say, but right now your faith in me determines the fate of the world. Pray with all your might today when you begin your ritual. If you can pray hard enough, I might be able to give you proof, and as soon as you touch the relic I should be able to do anything you need to show I am Atsura. Please, in the name of the Lady of Light, steal my shield's shard. I've risen too much to do so now, but this evening, right after I set, there will be an opening as guards switch. You have sweeping duty of the courtyard it is set in. You are the only one that can do this.

As abruptly as it had woken her, the voice and the light vanished. It left Raia feeling alone and cold as the sun crept up the mountains behind her.

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Raia awoke with a start as the faithful began Morningsong. She blinked, letting the rising and falling howls as the clergy greeted their goddess wash over her and soak away the dregs of sleep and confusion. She must have cried herself back to sleep for a few minutes, a fact corroborated by the dampness of her eyes. Still, even the merest barrier of sleep let her look back on her conversation more lucidly, just as the thick enchanted lenses the priests used allowed them to stare at the sun without ill effects.

Atsura had seemed truly worried, which was more than enough to terrify Raia. Atsura had been badgering her for nearly a year now, and until tonight had never been anything but imperious, rude, and condescending. The entirety of their conversations had always been Atsura demanding Raia go and fetch the Immaculate Shard. Atsura had never asked nor explained what for, just like how Raia imagined a mage might do it.

Unlike a mage, however, not even the tabernacle's Hierophants had been able to shield Raia from these sporadic haunts. About two months ago they had politely explained to Raia that it was most likely that these visions were yet another function of her curse, and she would just have to learn to ignore them. Raia had been trying to do that, but she didn't think it was fair that her hallucinations argued with her, or made emotional pleas that sounded somewhat reasonable.

She shuddered. Her defenses were already weakening. She would talk with her teacher at her morning lessons, perhaps he could help her cope; few lived to his age with the curse upon them. Before all that though, she needed to see to breakfast. Raia pulled off the thick preybeast furs she had been curled up in, quietly cursing at the chilliness of the stone dormitory. Slipping on the simple felt dress of an acolyte, she cinched her belt and made sure her dagger was in place before stepping through the heavy leather curtain of the dormitories into the morning sun.

The courtyard was a galling slice of Eden in the thin alpine steppes. Partly it was the natural spring that burst through the stone here, allowing more than sparse grass to grow, a gift from the mountains to the west. Partly it was the careful aesthetic and ecological efforts of the two hundred supplicants willingly or unwillingly exiled here. Mostly, it was the Od. The animating force of the universe surged and hummed in a dozen different configurations in this little half-ruined fort. It burbled up from the earth along with the water from the spring and was just as carefully dammed and channeled. This particular theurgic gulag was as ruined and worn as any other, but the foundations below had pinned the local leylines like a knife skewered meat. Benedictions and wards and pacts had then been heaped atop the place like gaudy trinkets on a whore until the place jangled with supernatural energy. And sleeping beneath this all was the corpus of a dead god, a chunk of Atsura drawn here by her relic and the carefully-harvested faith of centuries of priests, pilgrims, and prophets cramming their Od down her unmoving throat. It was just such an act of cramming that would occupy much of Raia's day, as it had every day for the last eighteen years.

The boxes of old military rations had already been set out, overseen by an arthritic old nun with a bladed cane to mete bloody discipline should any be foolish enough to try for a second helping. Not that anyone would reach for a second helping of the leathery meat for any reason save starvation, but the portions were for fighting men and women in heavy armor and enough to satiate even Raia, barely. The pack-lords that supplied the temples played a dangerous game. They needed to keep being sent to the temple a sufficiently pleasant fate that those given it wouldn't choose bloody rebellion, but keep them poor and isolated and dependent enough that those banished wouldn't decide to begin their bloody rebellion here. She grabbed one of the scrolls of meat with dried vegetables wrapped inside, and helped herself to a mug of hot tea from the cauldron. She sat hunched on a stone bench, carefully husbanding the hot liquid's twin abilities of warming her and making her rock-hard food edible. As a result she didn't notice the heavy black paw as it clapped down on her shoulder.

"Another visitation? You look as ragged as Hierophant Kemsar's hide this morning." Etark smiled lazily, sitting down next to her and shifting his phylactery, the mark of a voluntary monk. She demurely sipped her tea to hide her grin. She rarely found him right, but always found him funny, and she suspected that's how Etark liked it.

"How long have you been saving that? It sounds polished."

"Well, it's been what, a month since he overloaded that old Od battery? Serves him right for acting like a mage, might as well get the scars of it too."

Raia shook her head, snapping off another stretch of meat.

"They're scared of something. Kemsar was a warlord for pack Varnar before he came here, he sees how indefensible this place would be in an actual fight, and he's scrabbling to find tools if something bad happens."

"Yeah, but messing around with arcane artifacts is just a plain bad idea. Od is for Atsura, not for us mortals to be playing around with. There's a reason mages have to rip open their soul to use it."

"Then what about Progenitors? Scions? Back in the old days before the bloodlines mixed we all could fling Od around like them."

"Like I said, not for us mortals. Emphasis on mortals. When you can live centuries and bend elementals to your will with a single word before you even understand what Od is, I think maybe you get to play by different rules than us."

"So when you say 'mortals' you actually mean 'gutterbloods'."

Etark waggled his finger with the same smug bombast as a mage expounding on the nature of reality.

"I must politely protest the nature of that word. Considering Odic power comes from purity of bloodline, all us naturally non-magical folks could be considered such. For anything but Scions and up, 'gutterblood' stands more for 'people beneath me' than any relevant measure of pure blood. I don't see the difference between me and you since neither of us can wield Od. Just because I can trace my family back generations and you can't doesn't make my inability any less an inability."

Raia rolled her eyes.

"It matters more than you think. Yes, neither of us is naturally magical. But it affects skill with other things too. Can you read the duty roster from here?" She pointed across the stone courtyard to a wax block incised with names. Etark paused for a moment, drawing upon the natural enhancements given by purity of purpose to Atsura. To one focused on obeisance to the All-Seeing Mother, all things under the sun could only be seen truly.

"Yeah. Why do you ask?"

"I've been here twice as long as you and I can barely make it magnify when I stare at it with all my strength. This is even with the curse making me 'brilliant with matters arcane' according to all the old scrolls. That's proof I'm gutterblooded and you're not."

Etark leaned back, eyes downcast. Raia wished being right were more satisfying. After an awkward silence Etark spoke again.

"Your morning's all for the ritual, and I have doling out benedictions for the usual hours. Meet you at lunch?"

"I'm not sure, I was planning to see Itsohr. I have more questions about my curse."

The weakly-resuscitated conversation died more thoroughly this time. Etrak made a delicate goodbye and went to go see to the petitioners.

Raia finished her breakfast curtly and did the same, if one could consider Atsura a "petitioner".

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Raia checked her face in the mirror one more time. She must be flawless, perfectly clean and unspeakably pure, if the ritual was to work. The same blunt face as ever, her grey-brown muzzle and paler hair stolidly glared back. She was not pretty, though given that as a young woman she was a head taller and more bulkily muscular than many adult men, a pretty face would have been a waste. But Atsura did not care about beauty. She cared about perfection. That, Raia could provide. Her hair had been washed and combed deadly-sleek, her fangs polished into shining white daggers. Her clothes were spotless, her knife sharpened to hairsplitting precision. Everything she could make into its ideal had been carefully done. The process had only taken her six hours.

She angled the mirror she had been using with the five others in a semicircle about her until each caught the noonday sun, bathing her in glaring radiance that picked at even the most minor flaws. She felt sweat spring up along the back of her neck, felt the burning itch as failures too small for a mortal eye to catch were seared away: frayed edges of cloth, ingrown hairs, every last blemish of flesh and fur were abominations to this ritual. Raia relaxed as she felt the burning fade, her own efforts sufficient to prevent any more serious harm than minor discomfort. So purified, she began reaching for her inner essence, the Od swirling about inside the glass ball of her soul. While her mind and spirit quested, her body began the ritual by rote. Sage soaked in her blood was burnt in the golden thimble, ignited by the supernaturally-empowered sun surrounding her. The smoke was waved in the cardinal directions, and a small chime was struck, its soft, shimmering tones fading so slowly Raia's ears pricked as it faded below threshold. Slowly, she began praying.

This was the hard part. It was not enough to mouth the words. The words were irrelevant. She needed to feel what the words were supposed to mean, to reach inside herself and somehow desire Atsura's revival with all her being. For a woman bound to temple service since childhood, a woman nagged and mocked almost nightly by an "Atsura" that sent her into flurries of animal rage, this was a challenge greater than anything else.

"Golden Atsura. Radiant Lord. Queen of the Perfected Eye. This humble nun asks a great boon from you. We were fools and blind children when we disobeyed you, and traitorous monsters when we slew you. We have been but squirming pups mewling for the teat since the day we betrayed you, we have wallowed in our imperfections without your rule. We repent! The sins of our fathers are monstrous, and only your mercy is greater. Bestow upon us your majesty once more so that we may never again defy you! World-Huntress! Lord of the Trilithon! Mother of All! This miserable runt implores you to return to us!"

She was shaking with effort by the end, but not emotion. Her small prayer alcove remained quiet, somnolent. It was with significant relief that she felt her Od sublimate, gently empty from her soul and seep into the altar, leaving her empty and limp. She closed her eyes and slumped back to catch her breath.

RAIA.

She tried to jump in alarm but her body refused to obey her panicked struggles.

RAIA. YOU HAVE REFUSED TO SET YOUR FEET UPON THE PATH TO SAVE THE WORLD. YOUR OBSTINACY CAN NO LONGER BE TOLERATED. I MUST SACRIFICE A MILLION MILLION HOURS OF PRAYER TO GIVE YOU THE PROOF YOU CRAVE SO DEARLY. RAIA, DAUGHTER OF PARENTS UNKNOWN, YOUR BLOODLINE IS UNCERTAIN BUT YOUR DESCENDANCE UNMISTAKABLE. I CALL UPON THE TROTH YOUR ANCESTOR MADE WITH ME, SERVICE IN RETURN FOR SURVIVAL.

Raia gagged. There was no gravity anymore, she felt like a puppet limply dangling on strings. She could not control her limbs. Pathetically, she began to vomit, tea-flavored bile overflowing her mouth as she crumpled like a collapsed balloon.

YOU ARE MY CHAMPION NOW AND ALWAYS, A MADWOMAN BOUND TO A DEAD GODDESS. FOR YOUR FIRST TASK, YOU SHALL NOT REST UNTIL MY SHIELD LIES WHOLE BEFORE THE TRILITHON. FETCH THE SUPERNAL REMNANT AND LEAVE THIS PLACE BEFORE I RISE TWICE MORE; I WILL INSTRUCT YOU FURTHER FROM THERE. KNOW THAT THIS WAS UNNECESSARY, CHILD OF THE FIFTH HOUSE, AND DESPAIR FOR THE FREEDOM YOU HAVE LOST.

Raia gasped, slumped over awkwardly, suddenly able to breathe again. She looked about shamefully for the result of her nausea. There were none. Her dress wasn't even crumpled. She must have fallen asleep. In fact, she would swear on it.

If it weren't for the buzz behind her eyes. Taketheshardtaketheshardtaketheshardtaketheshard...