But power always collected its debt.
And this latest debt had nearly emptied the temple of her body.
The fracture had not simply hurt; pain was too small a word, too human, too flattering to the body that still believed suffering belonged to flesh alone.
This had gone deeper and reached into the structure of her existence and found every seam where goddess and mortal vessel had been stitched together badly.
Sienna vividly remembered the mountain inside her Soul Realm, the pulse beneath the dead earth, the buried scream of the Great Immortal God on that impossible continent-big mountain, and then the moment her own form decided it could no longer continue pretending to be a single thing.
