The weight of her realm and what she kept in that mountain still pressed against Sienna’s ribs.

The insurmountable presence of it was the last thing she felt before the leaving her Soul Realm — the colossal monolithic spike of fused gods and titans rising at the centre of her Soul Realm, the slow peristaltic pulse of its slope, the screaming heart-crater at its summit weeping rivers of corrupted divinity down flanks made of broken divinity.

Sienna had stood on that slope for what felt like an hour ago in her own black-blood-streaked finery, gazing up at the continent-sized corpse embedded in the peak... th every heart of the mountain, and she had reached — carefully, sovereignly, with the unhurried possessiveness of a thief who legally owned the vault — into the lowest of its shattered wings and taken one single feather for herself.

Just one.

The Great Immortal God had screamed in their half-death the entire time, and such screams had braided into the thump-and-squelch of her realm’s wet heartbeat until even her generals had quieted in deference.

Then she had turned away from the mountain; mounted the Abyssal Dragon before she begun the long and brutal flight back across the black tar and the gold-veined skies, back toward the throne where her body waited in fracture-state:

Finally back toward the mortal world.

But Sienna had made a few preparations before she left both the mountain and her Soul Realm itself!

Eventually Sienna had crossed the threshold already broken open inside herself; she remembered that part as one remembers stepping out of very cold water — the moment of thinning, the moment when one set of laws released her and another set reluctantly accepted her in.

The golden corruption clinging to her hair had fallen behind in slow heavy ribbons, refused entry by the mortal realm’s pettier physics:

The nether-violet light in her bones had banked down to its lowest ember while the feather had folded itself, screaming softly, into the small private dark behind her should and agreed — under duress — to wait.

That had been an hour ago. Or three. Or none. Time in the Soul Realm was a toy she allowed to exist, and the toy did not always travel well across the border.

Sienna’s room had changed when she got back and into the reality of the mortal realm: Earth.

She was back in her room but it was different, if that wasn’t an understatement, if anything.

The now onyx walls of her room drank what little light remained, the great obsidian veins beneath the floor pulsing with a slow, blue-black luminescence that was less illumination than suggestion, as though the room itself were exhaling around her in long, considered breaths.

Censers hung at the four corners, smoking with crushed nether-resin and the powdered bone of things whose names had been struck from holier languages, and the perfume of it curled across the silk-draped bed in lazy serpentine ribbons — sweet, mineral, faintly funereal, the incense of the Nether Goddess who had grown bored of pretending mortality was anything but a costume.

In the centre of all this dim, attentive devotion lay a girl the world had pronounced dead three quarters of an hour ago.

Huuufff

Then the girl who the world had almost pronounced dead inhaled:

It was not a breath so much as a reclamation — air dragged in long and starved through her parted lips, deepening and deepening until her ribs strained against the architecture of her own resurrected chest, until every cell of her remembered the indignity of having briefly forgotten how to exist.

Sienna’s chest rose, sank and rose again, slower, more sovereign, the second pull a deliberate refinement of the first, because Sienna had been doing this long enough to have opinions about how a body ought to be reinhabited.

Her lashes lifted:

What ought to have been startlement arrived instead as a slow, glacial composure — like the wide-eyed serenity of a creature who had been in this nearly-dead state often enough that resurrection had been demoted from miracle to mild domestic chore.

Her irises were dark as cooled basalt and shot through with veins of seething nether-violet, drifted across the ceiling above her with the unhurried curiosity of a duchess inspecting unfamiliar wallpaper.

The world reassembled itself in obedient layers for her viewing pleasure — shadow first, then the silver-thread embroidery climbing the bedposts in coiled serpents, then the faint, distant moan of stone settling somewhere far beneath the floorboards as the room registered her return and adjusted its expectations accordingly.

Perfect.

Catastrophically, vexingly perfect.

Sienna let the air out of her mouth with the slow patience of poured oil, and let her newly-knit (she was still broken but not so much) body remember the rest of itself in its own indolent time — the slow ripple of sensation returning to her fingertips, the languid uncurl of feeling along the elegant, exhausted lengths of her thighs, the obedient click of vertebra into vertebra along the inkdark column of her spine like a string of black pearls being restrung by patient, invisible hands.

Somewhere along her shoulder blade a single nether-rune flared briefly into visibility beneath the skin, sketched itself across her flesh in molten violet ink, and then sank back into hiding — chased inward, almost shyly, by the faint golden ember she could already feel waiting behind her chest.

This had been the worst one

This time’s fracture in her body had been worse than what she had got the night Sienna reached into the sky itself and stole the light out of Paradise.

That night, the moon had still been seated proudly above the Paradise, pale and sovereign in the dark, while the stars glittered around it like lesser courtiers pretending they mattered.

The Legacy boys had been closing in on Phei then, expensive perfume and expensive bloodlines wrapped around the cheap hunger of young men who thought cruelty became nobility once it wore tailored coats.

They had hunted him through the dark with bright eyes, sharp intent and the kind of confidence only boys born too close to power could mistake for strength.

So Sienna had raised her hand but not toward them: she would’ve killed them if she had aimed at them from anger.

So, she had raised her hand toward the heavens:

Her fingers had curled around moonlight and starlight as though the sky were nothing more than silk gathered inside her fist, and then she had pulled the brightness out of the night. The moon smeared beneath her will and the stars dimmed and choked.

The darkness had fell over the hunters like a velvet hood drawn across arrogant eyes, swallowing distance, direction and certainty in one quiet act of violence.

She had bought Phei minutes.

Only minutes, yes, but minutes were sometimes the difference between a boy who lived and a boy whose name became a cautionary whisper among rich cowards drinking behind locked doors.

Those minutes had been enough for Maya’s convoy to come tearing out of the darkness with predatory headlamps and a cargo of vengeance sharp enough to make even legacy Boyd and the hunters they’d come with remember fear.

If the Empress ever learned that Sienna had interfered that night, there would be consequences.

Not scolding or disappointment.

Consequences...

...The kind even the Nether Goddess learned to fear before they were old enough to understand mercy, the kind whispered in old rooms where powerful things pretended not to tremble.

Sienna knew that. She had known it then. She knew it now.

Yet Sienna did not regret what she’d done that night no matter what it cost her.

Not the smothered moon, the strangled stars, the stolen darkness she dropped over their eyes or even a single breath of the power she had spent for him.

But power always collected its debt...