The sun carried her.

In its bright hold, pain returned.

Her head. Her chest. Her arms.

And then sound.

Voices as if underwater.

She opened her eyes.

It was not the sun that cradled her, but Andar of Tyr. His face was above hers, furious and burning and shouting. His bronze armor gleamed in raw daylight.

No. She watched orange and gold flicker upon it. Not daylight.

The world was on fire.

But that was wrong too.

For it was not aflame, but aglow. Her sight was slow to focus. In the street that should have been empty and dark, hundreds held candles and torches. Flaming tongues of bright light illuminated the doorframe. Mathais was before it, poised with a spear as if waiting for monsters and beasts to break through its threshold. In his guardian's shadow, her priestesses cowered, prayed, and wept as they moved through the routines of healing.

Andar's shouts became words. A word.

"Yalira!"

Yalira returned her gaze to the man who felt too large in the infirmary he had built for them.

"What have you done?"

"I—"

If she had not been trapped in his armored embrace, the weight of her returning memories might have felled her. Hopelessness, desperation, submission. Nightshade and oleander.

"Where is Tala?" Her voice scratched out words, her lips cracked and bled.

Andar's jaw clenched.

Silence was enough.

The sorrow of her people made sense, then. Another priestess lost.

But it was more than grief. Yalira watched their faces, their trembling mouths as they recited prayers that would not save them. It hadn't mattered that she'd surrendered, that she'd embraced the dark unknown. Antala, Eheia—it did not matter. Death still waited.

The torchlight shifted and its eerie glow cast sharp shadows into Andar's narrowed gaze. Yalira returned it with her own accusation.

"You said we had until sunrise"

"I did not start this." His words were acidic as he gestured to the heavy presence of beckoning torches. "You did."

Yalira twisted out of Andar's grasp to gain a better view. Reaching the window, she realized it was not the line of executioners she had feared, not the fiery dawn. It was the people, hundreds gathered. Dread did not abate.

Their lit faces, hollow and shadowed, were hungry, searching.

"What have you done?"

Andar's voice, rough across the silence, was anchoring.

"I—"

What had she done? A desperate descent into familiar bondage? She could not make words leave her throat. Despite the spirit and fire she'd dedicated to liberating herself, it had been so easy to freefall into the shackles of tradition. How could it have seemed so simple when it felt so foolish now?

The twenty-seventh chosen to die. Herb-addled.

"Yalira." Andar was softer An unfamiliar thread of doubt touched his words that made her blood shiver. "They say you breathed life into the dead."

"I did nothing," she whispered, pulling at the cleverly tied bandages on her arms Her blood still coursed through her own veins. The sick still languished, neighboring corpses asleep in their beds; Tala's body was wrapped in the corner. Dark anger rose and died. Memories of Tala laughing, out of place in this imprisoning tomb, threatened to surface. They choked her, a stubborn lump in her throat. Yalira swallowed. "The dead are all here. Which bodies do they think I've woken?"

Unsatisfied laughter echoed uncomfortably between them. "Does it matter?"

Faces hungry, searching. Perhaps it did not matter. Even without proof, no cries of joyous victory, the rumor was tempting enough. Faith fed when truth was hollow.

And the truth was hollow. There was no power. If the goddesses spun their threads and heard their prayers, then they did not share their divinity with mortals. Yalira's heart echoed in her empty chest. If, and Yalira's faith was thinnest vellum, the goddesses watched from seats on high, the only gift they granted was suffering.

In the desperate energy that surrounded her—the aching dreams of the people, the faint pleas of her priestesses—Yalira could hear the stubborn denial of this bitter realization. It did not matter that she had hallucinated under the bondage of nightshade, that she made a worthless sacrifice of crimson and pain. Belief was stronger than truth.

"I cannot save them," Yalira whispered.

Andar's features did not flicker. He had long accepted the inevitability of their people's deaths,.pPague or fire did not matter. The toiling days she had spent among the sick and dying had slowed the progression: there had not been a single new case while she labored at the altar. But a steady current would still wear away the mountainside. Threats, despite how small, would inspire the forum to act.

"Fool that I was to let you come here." Andar swore. "Twice so for choosing such a damnable place."

Yalira frowned. The windows that afforded clean air and sunlight through the sickroom made for a poor defense. Poorer still was the aged and creaking wood that littered its construction. An indefensible prison, a pyre for the waiting torches.

"They won't attack us." Yalira did not like how the words rang with doubt. Her heart wanted to protest, to cling to the memory of the fervent love they'd shown for Andar, for her. Their tears and admiration had echoed through the city. But now? Hollow and haunted, faced with desperate hunger?

She amended. "Surely the threat of your warriors is too great."

Golden eyes dark and burning, Andar flashed his teeth without joy. "When word came you lay bleeding to death in a tomb scheduled to burn, do you think I hesitated?"

Andar can be short-sighted. The sunlit memory of Gallus's words tasted sour in her mouth. Though her spirit rejoiced in any flaw she could find in the king, the weight of it now pressed against her chest. Yalira could picture his flight to the slums, just as thoughtless and wild as the day he'd brought her to the altar's threshold. It meant he came alone.

Another bitter truth. "You cannot protect all of us."

Andar scowled at the words, the muscle in his jaw twitching. His answer echoed in promised violence: "I don't need to."

The orange glow against half his face illuminated the sliver of silver she'd inflicted upon it. Brutal and logical, he would leave them to die if it meant their survival. Her survival. Yalira's teeth met in fierce resolve.

"I die with them."

"You accept death so easily?" His words became both rough and incredulous. "Where is the woman who risked everything to save them?"

Gone, Yalira ached to say. If she had anything left to surrender, Yalira might have risen to his baiting. Her listless spirit smothered the ire he aimed to provoke in her.

Though she kept her eyes focused from them, Yalira could feel the heavy stare of Mathais, the soft brush of the begging whispers of her priestesses, their flinching cadence as they clung to their tasks. The last handful of Antalis. She had dragged Tala through the ether-thick bowels of the mountain, had carefully cloaked these women in the only armor she could give them. She had thrown Mathais into the arena so that he might live one day longer. Haunting nightshade still lingered at her lips. Recklessness now seemed futile.

Stripped of her convictions, her traditions, her power, what was left of Yalira dao Eheia, High Priestess? In the wake of her herb-addled desperation, she saw herself for what she was trained. A vessel. To be used.

As if he could read her thoughts, Andar swore again. The fire in him hardened.

"I thought you were more."

Then you were wrong.

Her silence frustrated him into motion. Yalira saw in each hard line of his body, in each of his circling steps. The wavering light that illuminated their prison set him aglow. A lion trapped behind bars.

He laughed. "All of your fight. All of your pretty words. For what?" His pacing stopped, but the horrible edge of his laughter echoed. "After everything, you'll let them die?"

Slow anger tore through her bones, unforgiving and bright, as she matched his bitterness. "What does it matter?"

"What does it matter?" He repeated. His incredulity became a frustrated growl, a determined angle to his mouth. Golden eyes stared out into the sea of faces. A silent calculus played out across his features in each muscle that tightened, in each breath that hissed between his teeth. Traces of movement, the barest shifting of sand. And then stillness.

Without a word, he replaced his helmet and in the stripe of his face that remained bare to her, Yalira could not read the decision he'd made. This calm before chaos, the held stillness that preceded the wind, matched the taut energy that silently watched from the eyes that surrounded the altar's threshold.

Andar turned to Mathais as he pulled Yalira to him, against the cold contours of his armor. The frustration that had cracked through now retreated behind perfect stoicism. Where Yalira could not read his intent, Mathais nodded.

The silent guard opened the wooden door to let a swathe of firelight fall upon them. Breathing in anticipation, the crowd shifted and shivered, but the uncomfortable stillness held firm. Andar took a breath of his own, tightened the grip around her shoulder, and marched into the ocean of bodies. With each step into the waiting mass, he gleamed, but the flickering dark eyes followed her, tucked beneath his shield arm.

A forgiving tide, the calm lingered. Whispers of her name preceded reaching fingers that stretched toward her hem. Heads bowed as she passed, eyelash-sheltered gazes hopeful. Caught in the memories, eerily reminiscent, Yalira remembered her sojourns into the temple-city, the masses who had begged her blessing. The wedding revelers who'd wept with joy. Only the week before, her sunlit circuit of the city had been without fear, the crowds even greater.

Beneath the moonless sky, faces skeletal, each hand was a claw.

Where Andar was guiding her, Yalira could not say. The street she'd grown used to had become and unfamiliar. Their steps were strange eternities, a flickering time that jumped between tongues of firelight. Though his weapon was not drawn, the crowd parted, allowing a slowly twisting path. Andar did not fight it. He let this living mass control their route, drawing them deeper into a shadowed human labyrinth.

What lived at its center, Yalira could not guess.

A gray warhorse, mighty Shadow, stirred at Andar's approach, pawed the stone beneath his hooves in anticipation. Trained though he was, the beast radiated frantic energy. The surrounding darkness and fire, shifted and reflected in his dark eyes.

Behind him, mirrored in the clear water she'd fought for, steps echoing through the street, firelight emblazoned across their bronze armor, Andar's approaching warriors held torches of their own. They reinforced the invisible line drawn in quarantine. Their steady hands, their numbers, did not give her relief. Yalira could not read their faces. They had bound strips of cloth around mouths to ward off the feared miasma that weighed heavily in the air. She wanted to tell them it was without use, that this disease did not seem to travel in the breath. But there was no time for reason .aN ears that would hear it.

A rippling cascade, the glow of orange firelight shifted.

"No!" Andar yelled.

But the order did not reach his men.

The hiss of her name turned into a cry, a chant—Yalira. Yalira of Tyr. Yalira the Waker. Help us.—and then, without warning, it became a wild roaring that had no words.

A man cried out, a horrible, keening note that rang above the frenzy. Trapped in Andar's shielding embrace, Yalira did not see who struck whom. Whether soldier or slave, it did not matter. Chaos echoed in the wake of violence. Fear and longing broke into madness and terror. Faces twisted and spun ar Andar attempted to push through the suffocating current, as he drew his sword to threaten a path for them. His voice was lost in the torrent.

Trapped in this deadly whirlpool, their wild gazes swam around them, blotted out the stars. Darker and darker as ravenous hands searched for a piece of salvation, some souvenir of her body that might buy them a shred of divinity. Sound was ringing thunder, but its message was clear. She belongs to us.

Heedless of injury, the bodies pushed forth. Nails caught in the fabric of her skirts, in her loose strands of hair. Breath echoing in her head, her limbs were too heavy, too stubborn to shield against them. Andar pulled her closer, so that their grasping hands might meet him instead. Hungry and twisting, they still found pieces of her to tear away.

A horse screamed. The piercing sound of it brought forth a roar from Andar. He towered above her, furious and glowing. Body numb, her skin had no feeling for the cool stone beneath her bruises. Yalira had not realized she'd fallen. She only had eyes for the blade in his hand, the rest of the world too blurred in darkness and fire. It burned against the night sky, bright and wicked. Hypnotizing. Though the fingers around the hilt were calloused and sure, the biting edge hesitated. Andar used his fist, his shoulder, non-lethal force, a shining dervish, against the swarm that threatened to swallow them.

New screams found her on that patch of trampled stone. That mad tide of flesh and sinew eased, shifted in retreat. The sky re-emerged with vicious intensity, a swathe of red and golden embers, plumes of choking darkness.

Fire caught hold.

The dung-and-straw-caked roofs, the lime and plaster over timber scaffolding. A hot summer season. The slums will burn until only the foundation remains. It felt a strangely rational and melancholic thought to have, above her thundering of her pulse, beneath a tide of people choking on smoke and ashes. Her shoulder screamed from far away as Andar ripped her to her feet, dragged her through the suffocating masses. No longer the center of a hungry gravity, she was prisoner to his shackled hold, his determined course. Fleeing the searing heat, the bright sheets of fire, bodies collided into her, shifting their path Adrift in its sea, time skipped in the flashes she saw, the brief pieces of sound. A face streaked with blood. The wailing of a lone child. Wild eyes. A call for water, for help, for anything.

"Andar."

Yalira could not hear her own voice, but the man turned to her, his bright gaze determined. Despite the wildness that surged like poison, he was steady. A stone in the current,.tTrough the chaos, he was in focus. His sweat-streaked hair beneath his helmet, body tense beneath burnished bronze. The furious glow of his sharp gaze, the brutal strength in his arms, Andar of Tyr was the monster who razed her home to ashes.

And still she asked.

"Help them."

Her words barely met her own ears, but his mouth moved in an unheard, vicious answer before jerking her forward again at an unforgiving pace. Each breath was agony in her chest. Every twist at her shoulder seared in their dancing path through discord. Bruising fingers burned into her arms before the world titled and gave way. Against burning screams, horseflesh felt cool beneath her. Andar had found Shadow. He had thrown her onto the nervous creature. Hands above him, Yalira waited for him to join her, for a mad escape through fire and night.

Behind his helmet's shadow, molten gold answered.

Andar slapped Shadow's flanks, his shout echoing above the thundering hooves, the roar of terror and flame. Yalira wound her fists into mane, clung to the beast as he surged through the river of fleeing people.

Where Andar could not control the tide, Shadow pushed through it, parting the masses for an escape lit by death. Holding fast, Yalira turned to glimpse a shining figure running towards the flames.

Fingers twisted and bound into horsehair, knees digging into hide, Yalira dared not search for the loose reins. Her bruised spirit might have once cried against a retreat, but its voice had been quieted. Captive to the rolling gait, she clung to the wreckage amidst the storm. 

A/N

Prowritingaid glitched this week so please let me know if you find any strange errors (I hopefully caught most of them). I didn't want to leave you all hanging on a cliffhanger :) 

I did have a bit of trouble writing this scene. I'd love to know if I captured that strangeness and discomfort of being in a tense crowd--partially inspired by my experience at the Boston Marathon in 2013 and the more recent 2020 protests.