My Scars, My Rebirth

A Goddess Who Withholds

Now, kneeling on cold stone, she felt only the ache of waiting.

The temple exhaled quiet around her, vast and hollow, its pale arches swallowing every sound except the soft rhythm of breath and the distant dripping of water. Silver light seeped through the high slits in the walls, pooling across the floor in uneven patches that looked almost solid. Veronica had not moved in hours. Her legs had long since gone numb, but she did not dare shift her position. The priests had said the Goddess came only to those who proved themselves beyond discomfort.

Pain, then, was a prerequisite for divinity.

She folded her hands tighter in her lap, steadying the tremor that had begun to creep into her fingers. Every instinct urged her to stand, to leave, to break the ritual and reclaim her own body. But that instinct had always been described as weakness. Doubt. A deviation from the path.

So she remained still.

“Do you think she hears you?” the voice whispered.

Veronica’s eyes opened at once.

The temple had not changed. The light still pooled in its strange quiet geometry, the air still heavy with incense and old stone. But the silence now felt different, as though something within it had shifted to make space.

“I am here,” the voice continued.

It did not echo. It did not reverberate from wall to wall like a normal sound. It arrived fully formed, close and precise, as though spoken directly into the space behind her thoughts.

Veronica did not turn around. She wasn’t sure turning would reveal anything at all.

“My Goddess,” she said, careful, reverent, each word measured against the lessons drilled into her. “I have come for guidance.”

The response was not immediate. For a long moment, there was only the slow climb of her own pulse.

“Guidance,” the voice repeated, almost amused. “Such a large word for such a small creature.”

Veronica swallowed. This, too, she had been prepared for, the Goddess’s enigmatic nature, her tendency to answer questions with questions, to unravel certainty rather than provide it.

“I seek understanding,” she corrected softly.

“Do you?” the Goddess asked. “Or do you seek comfort shaped like understanding?”

The distinction struck harder than she expected. Veronica’s lips parted, but no answer came.

“I see your life,” the voice continued, neither kind nor cruel, only distant. “Threads pulled tight enough to convince you they are fate. Hands that guided you, though you called it choice. Tell me, child... if I offered you the truth, would you still recognise yourself within it?”

A flicker of unease stirred beneath Veronica’s composure. This was not how the prayers were meant to go. There was supposed to be a moment of clarity, a sign, a path illuminated.

Instead, there was only dissection.

“I trust your wisdom,” she said, though the words felt thinner than they should have.

“Trust,” the Goddess echoed. “Another word so often mistaken for submission.”

The silver light shifted. Or perhaps Veronica only imagined it. For a brief moment, the shape of it seemed to gather, forming something like a silhouette at the edge of her vision. She tried to focus on it, but the harder she looked, the more it dissolved.

“Tell me,” the Goddess went on, “why you came.”

Veronica inhaled slowly, grounding herself.

“There are forces moving against me,” she said. “Things I cannot see. I need to know what they are. I need to know how to fight them.”

“And you believe I will give you that.”

“Yes.”

There was no answer for several seconds. Then:

“No.”

The word landed without weight, yet it hollowed something inside her.

Veronica’s breath hitched before she could stop it. “No?”

“No,” the Goddess repeated, untroubled. “Knowledge is a burden you are not yet prepared to carry. It would distort you. Or break you. Or worse, make you think you are free.”

A slow, creeping frustration curled in Veronica’s chest, unfamiliar and dangerously warm.

“I came here because I was told-”

“You were told many things,” the voice interrupted, mildly. “Most of them useful. Few of them true.”

The frustration sharpened.

“Then tell me what is true,” Veronica pressed, the edge in her voice slipping out before she could file it down. “If everything I know is incomplete, then what am I meant to do with that?”

“Continue,” the Goddess said simply.

“To do what?” Veronica demanded.

“To live as though the answers matter less than your compliance.”

Silence followed, but it was no longer the sacred silence she had been taught to revere. It felt deliberate now, like a door closed just before it might have revealed something important.

“You’re withholding,” Veronica said quietly.

The words seemed to settle into the temple, heavy and undeniable.

“Yes,” the Goddess replied, without hesitation.

The honesty startled her more than any denial could have.

“Why?” Veronica asked.

“Because it serves me.”

The simplicity of it fractured something.

Veronica’s hands clenched in her lap. This was not how divine benevolence had been described. Not how grace was meant to look.

“Am I… only a tool to you?” she asked, the question slipping out before she could dress it in something more palatable.

“Aren’t you a tool to yourself?” the Goddess countered. “You shape your actions toward outcomes you barely understand. You call it purpose. I call it utility.”

The temple felt colder.

Veronica lowered her gaze, staring at the blurred edges of moonlight on stone. A part of her wanted to argue, to insist on her independence, her intention. But another part, quieter, more watchful, noticed how often her choices had been framed by expectation. By training. By fear of deviation.

“Is there nothing you can tell me?” she asked at last.

“Oh, there are many things I can tell you,” the Goddess said. “Just not the things you want.”

“Then tell me something I need.”

A pause.

Then, softer than before, almost curious:

“Very well. Be careful of the people who offer certainty. They are always hiding something. Including me.”

Veronica looked up sharply, but again there was nothing to see.

“That’s it?” she asked.

“For now.”

“That doesn’t help me.”

“It does,” the Goddess said. “You simply do not yet understand how.”

The light shifted again, thinning this time, retreating into its earlier, formless spread.

“Wait,” Veronica said, the word escaping as she felt the presence recede. “I’m not finished-”

“You are,” the Goddess replied.

And just like that, the voice vanished.

The silence that followed was absolute.

Veronica remained kneeling, her body still locked in ritual form, but something inside her had shifted entirely out of alignment. She had come seeking answers and left with something far more destabilising, a suggestion that the absence of answers was not a failure, but a design.

Slowly, she rose to her feet. Her legs protested, stiff and unsteady, but she forced herself upright.

As she turned toward the temple doors, movement caught her eye. Figures stood along the perimeter, priests, silent and observant. She had not noticed them before, or perhaps they had entered during her communion.

Their faces were calm, almost expectant.

“Well?” one of them asked.

The question felt rehearsed, like a line performed countless times before.

Veronica hesitated.

“She spoke to me,” she said.

“And?” another prompted gently.

Veronica searched for the right way to phrase it. The acceptable way. The way that would align with everything she had been taught about divine encounters.

“She… offered guidance,” she said carefully.

The priests nodded, satisfied.

“What form did it take?” the first asked.

“Questions,” Veronica said. That, at least, was undeniably true.

A faint smile touched his lips.

“Then you have been blessed,” he said. “The Goddess does not waste words on those unworthy of her attention.”

Veronica studied his face. There was no trace of doubt there. No flicker of curiosity about what had actually been said. Only affirmation.

As though the content mattered less than the occurrence.

“And if the guidance is unclear?” she asked.

“Clarity comes through obedience,” he replied without hesitation. “In time, all things reveal themselves to those who remain loyal.”

The response settled into her thoughts with uncomfortable precision. It echoed the Goddess’s own words, but stripped of their ambiguity, their unsettling edges.

A translation, perhaps. Or a simplification.

“And if it never becomes clear?” Veronica pressed.

The priest’s expression did not change.

“Then the fault lies not with the Goddess.”

Of course it did.

Veronica felt something tighten in her chest, not quite anger, not yet, but something adjacent. Something awakening.

She inclined her head, playing her part. “Of course.”

The priests stepped aside, allowing her passage. As she walked past them, she felt their gazes following her, not with suspicion, but with a quiet satisfaction.

A system functioning as intended.

Outside, the night air was sharp and real, cutting through the lingering haze of incense. Veronica paused on the temple steps, drawing in a slow breath.

The moon hung above her, distant and immaculate.

Unreachable.

For the first time, she wondered whether that distance was not a reflection of divine perfection, but a deliberate choice.

A strategy.

Below her, the path stretched out into darkness, familiar yet subtly altered by everything she had just experienced. The world had not changed, and yet it felt different to walk in it now. As though the ground beneath her feet had been rearranged in ways too small to see but too significant to ignore.

She moved forward anyway.

Because that, it seemed, was what was expected of her.

And expectation, she was beginning to realise, was one of the most powerful forms of control there was.