Her legs decided on their own.
The backs of her knees found the throne, and the Goddess of Purity sat down hard in her own sanctum, eyes wide, while the wailing of a nameless mortal went on faintly through the starlight.
A hell that outlives its keeper.
Permanence was the ink her own sphere rationed above every other. She had petitioned for less and been refused.
A mortal girl had spoken it tonight as a promise, and her class had simply kept it.
"It's not possible," she told her empty sanctum.
'He cannot use that seed. It is dormant. It is a knot of raw entropy that would burn him hollow if he so much as pulled on it. I have watched him not use it for months. That is the single reassuring thing about the man.'
And yet.
She made herself file the evidence as she filed everything: plainly. The seed had moved tonight. She had felt it move, every scrap of ash in her cheek leaning toward Thalorind, and the Withered Flame had come hunting.
