* * *
Three years ago, the human armies marched into our city. They sliced through our armies, burned through our streets. They broke down the doors of our temple and profaned our holy ground with the stink of human sweat, with the shouts of human voices. With the blood of countless Lura’e dripping from their blades.
The temple housed three hundred priestesses. Two of us survived.
I had been assigned to wash the temple’s linens on the day of the attack. From the courtyard, I heard the first screams. Someone older, someone braver, would have run to help. I hid. I burrowed under a pile of sodden fabric, and didn’t move until the last of my sisters’ death cries had faded from the air.
I still hear their voices in my dreams.
When the soldiers had gone, I searched the temple for survivors. I tripped over the bodies of my sisters, my feet sticky with their blood. Every room held the same scene—until I found the high priestess.
She lay in front of the central altar, her legs all but severed from her body. When I saw her, I knew she was dead, that I was the only survivor. I knelt beside her body, bent double from grief, and found myself staring into her eyes, cloudy with pain but still very much alive.
Only the quick work of the healers saved her. But not even they could restore what she had lost. Since that day, she has remained confined to her bed, communing with the Goddess in private while I act as her hands.
Three years ago, I—the youngest of us—took over the high priestess’s duties, and those of every other priestess we had lost.
Three years ago, our defending army captured a prisoner, a human soldier barely older than myself. At the high priestess’s command, they delivered him to the temple, where I locked him in a cell I had never known about before that day.
Three years ago, the high priestess told me of the Sleeping Goddess.
Three years ago, I learned my prisoner’s purpose, and my own.
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