Some part of the last surviving fragment of divinity recognized whose body it was being offered to and try, on principle, to scream the room down rather than submit.
The plume's spine cracked vertically with a sound that travelled through bone instead of air.
Black blood welled at the corners of her eyes and slid down her temples in two slow, conspiratorial rivulets that turned, halfway down her cheeks, to gold.
Sienna smiled, eyes still closed.
"Hush," she murmured, in a voice softer than the room deserved.
And the feather at that very moment, recognized the voice of the woman who owned the corpse it had been shed from, broke.
It started to dissolve in a long, rapturous shudder; the barbs softened into liquid gold while the spine surrendered to the bath, every screaming filament of holy agony at last persuaded to forget what shape it had once worn and remember only that it was, henceforth, hers.
