Chapter One

Itha Lolin

“Bless the Mothers, for they bring the future. Bless the Sick, for they are helpless. Bless us Mortals, for we are the needy. Bless us Attara, Goddess of First Breaths and Healing, for we are damned. In your light, we are sheltered. In your love, we are saved.”

Itha Lolin finished her morning prayers as the High Priestess’s incessant bell rang in the hall. She was late, per usual, and she knew if she didn’t hurry, the stern-faced woman would drag her out for her duties, dressed or not.

She donned the loose gray robes of a novice, pulling a drab cowl over her mossy hair. Itha didn’t bother brushing it. What was the point when it stayed hidden beneath a sheet of muslin?

The Sisters of First Breaths were already gathered in the hall outside her room, filing out of the dormitory towards the cathedral. She fell in line with them, crossing the courtyard garden and adjusting the heel of her shoe as she left.

The cathedral doors parted and a wave of music filtered out. The Sisters of Last Breaths signaled the end of their night’s watch with joyful song, flowing out fromthe cathedral and nodding to the Sisters of First Breaths as they went. It was a pageantry changing of the guard, a tradition as old as the monastery itself.

As the Sisters of First Breath’s entered, Itha’s gaze swept over the aged granite forming the arched door frame. Once, carefully carved figures and ornamentals had decorated the molding, and now they had weathered to barely discernible ridges along the stone. The monastery was old. Nearly forgotten by most of the world.

Three hundred years ago, the Goddess Attara would have had shrines all along Ighten’s coast. People would have traveled for weeks to make pilgrimages to her churches and temples, to ask for blessings on their families and healing for their sick loved ones.

But a jealous god killed Her, and robbed the world of the watcher of mothers and the sick.

Attara’s temples and monasteries slowly shuttered as prayers went unanswered until only Telana Toro Attara—Remember the Goddess Attara—was left.

In the old days, the monastery was called Belina os Toro Attara—Home of the Goddess Attara. It was said to be her first, true temple, and so Itha thought it made sense to also be her last.

Where there had once been hundreds of Priestesses, there were fewer than sixty now. Thirty to watch the day, and twenty-five to watch the night, and if not for the vague interest of tourists, there would be no need for those either.

In fact, these “priestesses” who watched the monastery day and night were mostly all for show. This ritual of going back and forth was for the few people who still made the pilgrimage—who dropped their coin-based offerings into collection boxes at the center of the great cathedral and whispered their prayers on dead ears. Those poor desperate fools who longed to have children and couldn’t, or whose loved ones were near death with plague and sickness. They came seeking a miracle, unwittingly surrounded by non-believers.

The priestesses weren’t holy. They were widows and whores and lost girls looking for refuge. They were paid in food, protection, and a safe place to sleep far south of the raging war at Ighten’s border.

Their prayers weren’t even real. Their bowed heads were often empty or pondering what might be on the kitchen’s menu that day. When they weren’t pretending to worship a dead goddess, they did chores. They mopped and scrubbed the floors or tended the garden by pulling weeds and reigning in the thick vines, threatening to swallow the crumbling brickwork.

Itha realized she might be the only one, other than the High Priestess, who actually prayed when called to worship. As they entered the church and went to their respective rows, Itha watched the novices and priestesses kneel before the altar to their Goddess and bow their heads and close their eyes. But there was nothing. No whispered prayer. No creased, earnest brow. She did not need to see their eyes to know their minds were vacant. Was she really the only one who believed gods and goddesses could not die—not really—and that Attara would return to the world someday?

She had to believe there was a reason—other than convenience for the local economy—that Telana Toro Attara still stood as a functioning monastery. It was, after all, the source of Attara’s final, most wondrous miracle.

The story was told in tapestries hanging on the library walls, in the spaces between rows of bookcases and shelves. A fable woven in gold thread and blood. Of how, on the day Attara was slain by a vengeful god, a virgin novice grew and birthed a child in a single day.

To Itha’s great disappointment, that was where the story ended. The tapestry laid unfinished.

Three hundred years ago, a goddess died, a child was born, and no one knew what became of it. Itha liked to think the child was Attara, reborn in human form. Everyone assumed she was crazy, and no one thought the child had existed at all.

After morning prayers, Itha continued to the garden house and grabbed her basket and clippers before heading to the rose bushes growing along the courtyard walls. She spent the hour clipping the dead heads and placing their browning petaled bodies in the basket. Summer heat bore down, a sweltering pressure that soaked her robes in sweat.

The garden was quiet. In fact, the whole city was little more than a tomb for bodies lost far north at the border, never to return. Most of the men had gone, conscripts to a seemingly endless war. The war had been going for so long, in fact, most had forgotten how it even started. Itha knew, though. Verin, the God of Monsters, had gifted Ighten’s northern neighbor, Alykith, a horde of beasts, and Alykith had used them to invade.

Itha snipped her skin while clipping off a drooping purple rose. She hissed at the bead of blood swelling on the edge of her finger, bringing it to her lips to suck the copper taste into her mouth and soothe the wound. She was always so wrapped up in her thoughts, always half in the world and half with legends.

A thunderous boom rattled the earth, like the first clap of thunder without the continuous rolling clatter afterwards. Those standing in the courtyard looked up at the blue, cloudless sky before returning to their duties. A second later, a burst of air blasted over the monastery, blowing limbs and trees to the ground and sending all the priestesses and novices to their knees.

When the screaming died, Itha dragged herself up, feeling a nervous flutter in her belly. Her heart raced in her ears as the flutter turned painful.

She wrapped her arms around her stomach, groaning at the pressure building within. Her abdomen grew, swelling as her skin stretched beneath the drab cotton. She screamed, belly bulging bigger by the second, until she felt it might burst. Several of her sisters gathered around, their faces drawn with horror.

This morning she had been a frail, idealistic girl, and now she was swollen around her middle, heavy with what looked to be a child…

But that wasn’t possible.

Itha had never been with a man.

Her bones and muscles strained, her joints popping and stretching by the second. The Sisters pulled her to her feet. A terrible throb wrenched through her. Itha doubled over, screaming. A minute later, it appeared again, and as they led her into the cathedral, before a collecting gaggle of witnesses, water rushed down her parted legs, spilling across the marble floor.

Itha choked on a cry. She felt the thing inside her role, felt it wiggle and shift. She saw its form ripple grotesquely beneath her dress. Pressure and pain, compounded and built until Itha knew she was being torn in half from the inside.

Something told her to stop. To squat. To reach down, and so she did. She pushed, a throaty groan cracking into a piercing cry as she curled her hands beneath her and caught the blood-soaked child as it came free, taking its first, screaming breath in the world.