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A monk and his acolyte stood before us if the coloring of beads on the younger pupils’ arms was any indication, snow white compared to his elder’s blacks and gray.
They were tall, rather pale, and plain, wearing matching large straw hats, worn white robes, the elder wielding a staff. If I were still a child, seeing them would be commonplace. But not anymore, especially not here in this forsaken place.
Who the hell are they? I thought as we all backed up to shield the moonstone. Bracken and Hadi still stood on either side of the temple, dwarfing it.
The youngest monk chanted the same verse I had said before, correcting my mistakes, before adding, “Dio welcomes thee to his mother’s temple.”
Despite the easy, fluid way the monk recited the old saying, I wasn’t fooled. Whoever they were, they were imposters probably after the stone. They certainly weren’t of the priesthood, because as the younger of the two raised his head, I saw the outline of a gruesome scar on his face that could have been from an animal or a noc.
Either way, a normal human couldn’t have survived that type of wound. No doctor could heal that. Unless they dabbled in mysticism even our priests did not have access to…
Unless these things weren’t human at all, but spirits, ghosts who had once served Tsuki’s temple. But that felt wrong too.
The pretenders bowed, the eldest, the chief cultivator smiling, black eyes twinkling with delight. I could see his magical energy leaking out, ruinous and jagged, a faint golden hue seeping into the snow.
“Enjoy your communion,” the younger one with the gruesome scar said.
Before I could react, Clem tugged on my robe, whispering in my ear as my harem closed in to shelter us.
“Do human monks have wings?”
I blinked slowly at him, confused, as the stone trembled in my hand before flying out of it, to my amazement, back into its proper position.
“No,” I whispered back as the stone shook and spun on the tip of the crystal tower. “Why do you ask?”
Clem’s eyes widened, pointing over my shoulder as he said, “Why do those monks have no footsteps?”
What!?
Tensing all over, I turned around, checking for myself. Sure enough, there were no footprints in the snow with a human shape other than my own. I looked into their faces again, horrified to see their eyes had shifted from black to an unnatural golden hue. They hadn’t felt like nocs, and now I wondered if they were something else, something more powerful than spirits.
The eldest monk tapped his staff on the ground, and my heart sped up.
“Enjoy your communion, Batu Sun,” his elder with the ghoulish voice repeated, who apparently knew my name!
They smiled, too broadly to be human, with a mouth full of pointed teeth. As many sets of eyes opened in the brush, it was as if a gigantic evil entity watched us. And then a scream pierced the air, and then another, a symphony of suffering shattering the silence.
“Shit. It’s a trap. Run, everyone, run!” I shouted, sure now that we had been ambushed by demons.
Who else would still serve the false goddess? I had been a fool not to cut them down right away.
But it was too late. Pillars of light closed in like a folding lotus, pressing into us, threatening to kill us all by smashing us to death.
That dreadful bitch and her servants would never be forgiven if we survived this trap. I would make sure of it!
“Sun! Sun!” Clem screamed, reaching for me before he disappeared in a pillar of smoke, here one moment and gone the next.
Bracken was next, followed by Kiar, as the temple snapped under the impossible pressure of the transparent flower petals crushing us.
Charging forward, I swung wildly at the barrier, but Hadi caught my fist with his web. I was shaking, terrified, but his face was a mask of serenity, and he glared at the stone and then down at me with a sneer.
How? His servants, his friends had disappeared into thin air! We were about to die before we had a chance to speak to the goddess or break the tether. How was he so calm?
“You’ll break your fist fighting against this ancient magic,” Hadi said confidently, and damn it, he was right. “For a supposed hero, you don’t know when to use your head. Weaklings like you should step aside.”
With a flourish, he broke through the front walls of the temple with a set of his human arms, while the other two held me, pulling me along with him.
“Speak, Tsuki! Use your words or your visions like you have been doing with Clem. Reveal yourself and separate us now!”
