“Csilla!“ Before anyone else could move, Ilan had his arms around her waist to pull her back, but she shook her head.
“It’s alright,” she whispered. Inside she was painfully alive, her skin thin with the brittleness of a cicada shell waiting to be shed. She’d felt the crackle of divinity when Mihály had healed her, the sizzle of darkness on the bodies, her own erasure when she’d done her miracle, but this radiance was consuming. This was a power that had taken the unknowable and turned it into the physical world in an act of reckless yearning.
The darkness began to die on her skin, flaking into dry powder, consumed.
A presence surrounded her, vast and ancient and alive, lodging in her bones to root. The tears that came to her eyes were sharp like splinters of glass.
Sandor gurgled and lay twitching, hand clasped to his throat. Csilla stepped to help him, but her touch didn’t heal. Ilan was still bleeding.
“Mihály.”
He froze from where he was struggling to his feet as if she’d spoken a word of magic and not merely his name. The whites around his eyes were visible, staring down at her as if she were a thing freshly consecrated.
She was.
The demon whispered a line of corrupted creation, cutting through the raw power singing over her skin. She reached forward. Around her she could feel the pure energy of life, the people with her, the breath of the soil and the small things that crawled through it, the ageless crush of minerals that had led to the rocks that built their walls, the strength of her own bones.
The creature before her was none of that. It was a mistake, a corruption, nothing but endless want to be more than empty, and no means of making it so save stealing the lives of others and dragging them into shadow with it.
A prick of pity, one fully Csilla and none of the greatness that filled her, lanced the dizziness of power. This thing, dead and hungry as it was, was equally close to humanity as the pure brilliance around them. It had been created by the same hands, even unintentionally. “I understand. But you’re nothing meant to live. Here.” She stretched out her glowing hand to the lumping darkness. “It’s alright.” She gestured to the wound on her cheek in welcome. “I’m ready now. Please come in.”
Once again the creature slipped inside. The pure connection to creation echoed in a trillion invocations, stronger than every combined voice of the Union. A darkened haze surrounded her, smoke on her skin, her mind echoing with angry confusion.
All she felt inside was sorrow as it struggled to latch onto her and manipulate her flesh. It was only obeying its nature, and it wasn’t its fault its nature was antithetical to the divine. She brushed a finger over her lips as her mouth filled with tar.
I’m sorry.
She exhaled, and it fell to powder at her feet, not sealed, destroyed. One mistake of creation corrected.
When she opened her eyes, Ilan was on his knees before her, eyes alight with reverence. “Csilla.”
He breathed her name like a prayer and looked near to kissing her hands. She did have a second miracle to her name now. But not the most important one.
The seal was still dark. She’d extinguished one creature of shadow, but there would be dozens more, finding hosts, and none of the priests would be able to seal them again, much less banish them.
Csilla moved to the dirt, willing the magic back. Fierce power rolled inside her, but nothing manifested. Arany’s remaining blood was ordinary loam.
You had me fix one life. They’d used her to bring Madame Varga back, out of everything broken. Why was that the one thing They fixed? Not Ágnes, who could have lived another twenty years doing good in the world. Not this, the remains of Arany’s rebellion that had ensured people still had a chance to save themselves.
She slammed her hands on the ground, wincing at the helpless smack. She was going to be just a conduit for the divine will.
Everything but that blood in the dirt is a lie. The words echoed and hit home.
There was still something there. Everyone who had taken vows in the Union had lent a drop of brilliance in their blood, save her. Now it was her turn to do it properly.
If she were to be a conduit, she would be a conduit for them all. If Arany could bleed and weep, so could she. She picked up the dropped knife.
“Csilla, what are you doing?” Ilan asked as she slipped off Ágnes’ robes. There was no need for them to be stained with the rest of her. She folded them, and held the knife to her breast.
If Asten wanted to stop this, They could. Inside there was only endless quiet. She was being watched, not helped.
Was Tamas right? Do You truly want us to suffer?
But want seemed a distant and far too human concept. There was something alien in the quiet that answered her.
“Csilla, stop. The Church isn’t worth this. We’ll find another way,” Ilan said, but Csilla shook her head, everything in her far too old and heavy.
“This isn’t for the Church.” This was to give the people hope that a power beyond them still paid attention and cared, and to save them from immediate threat. To give her hope that all of this wouldn’t end in a second Severing, one even more disastrous than the last.
Mihály’s hand closed over hers on the blade. For a second her heart skipped, wondering if he was going to push it in.
“Don’t,” he said, eyes filled with a measure of the sweet affection she used to see when he would pretend she was what he wanted. Her fingers loosened on the hilt, and he pried it from her sweating hands.
Then he placed it against his own neck. “If a divine sacrifice must be made, let it be my legacy.”
“No!” Csilla reached for him again. Mihály’s sins were born from love and grief, he didn’t deserve death for them. “No.” Her voice could barely rise above a whisper, and she forced a smile, though the stretch of her cheek was agony. “You can still leave. Go somewhere far away, and do good. This must be what I was born for.” She’d always quietly hoped her strange life would have purpose. If this was the purpose, she would accept it.
He shook his head, beautiful and resigned. “You have to let others burn sometimes. You’re too important to die. You can’t help anyone if you’re throwing yourself on every blade offered to you. And you’re not the kind of girl to take an easy out.”
He was using the same smooth voice he did to persuade her of other things, so calm and soothing it seemed the most natural thing in the world. She still hadn’t developed perfect immunity to it.
“Ilan, tell him not to do this,” she said, as if that would do any good. “And what if it doesn’t work? You’ve told me all along you’re no real angel.”
“Divinity freely sacrificed will always be a powerful thing.” He reached out to cup her cheek, where their touch glowed and her open scrapes knit back together. “This started with me. Let me end it.”
Ilan held out his hand. “Give me the knife. If you shake while you do it you’ll make it worse on yourself.”
Csilla put her hand over the handle again. “No. If someone is going to die for me, I’ll be the one to do it. Because he’s right.” She was nauseous and her heart might fail itself, but she had to. Ilan’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t protest.
