The Shadow’s Tithe

Chapter Five:The First Tithe

Perspective: Vera

The bridal suite of the High Spire felt more like a gilded furnace than a sanctuary because the absolute brilliance of the god sun refused to fade into any semblance of evening, and Vera stood near the perimeter of the vast chamber where the walls were composed of polished obsidian that reflected the flickering and erratic glow emanating from the man seated across the room, and Luis remained perched upon the edge of a massive stone dais while his presence was a violent disturbance in the air as he radiated a dry and blistering heat that made the silk of Vera's wedding gown feel like a second layer of scorching skin, and the silence between them was heavy with the unspoken weight of the blood bond that pulsed in her veins so she watched with a mounting dread as the shadows in the corners of the room curled away from him like frightened animals retreating from a forest fire, and outside the heavy bronze doors the muffled but insistent voice of High Inquisitor Dennis cut through the heat as he reminded them that the safety of the empire rested upon the immediate completion of the Tithe, and the Inquisitor declared that the Eye of Solis was weeping fire while he demanded that the Archon consume the purity of his vessel to satisfy the celestial hunger that threatened to melt the floating cities and reduce generations of faithful worship to ash and memory.

The atmospheric tension fractured when Luis finally looked up and the expression in his golden eyes was not one of divine authority but of a profound and jagged exhaustion that seemed to hollow him from the inside out, and he spoke in a low and rasping tone that carried the weight of a thousand years of unspent sorrow as he confessed that he had never sought the mantle of the Archon or the worship of a desperate populace, and he revealed that he had once been a simple infantryman in the border wars until the priesthood snatched him from the mud to replace a predecessor who had burned to ash in a ceremony that no one spoke of above a whisper, and he described the agony of having his humanity stripped away in favor of becoming a living lightning rod for the world's corruption while he admitted that every touch he shared was a death sentence for those he was sworn to protect because his fire recognized no difference between friend and enemy when it rose to the surface, and Vera felt a sudden and agonizing c***k in her perception of the monster before her as she realized he was merely another prisoner of the light who had been forced into a godhood he loathed with every fiber of his burning being, and the realization that he was a fellow victim of the empire's greed made the silver suppression collar around her neck feel even more intolerable as it leached the warmth from her blood and reminded her that she too had been sold to a system that valued her destruction over her existence.

Driven by a sudden and reckless impulse to bridge the distance between their shared miseries Vera ignored the warnings of her own survival instincts and began to walk across the heated floorboards toward the dais because she needed to prove something to herself and to him and to the empire that had declared them both expendable, and she ignored the way the air shimmered with the intensity of his aura while she reached out to place her hand directly upon his shoulder to show that she was not afraid of the fire that lived within him, and the moment her skin made contact with his burning flesh the silver necklace gifted by Cynthia reacted with a violent shriek of metal as the suppression magic met a force it could not contain or control or command, and the cold silver did not simply fail but instead began to glow with a blinding white light before it liquefied and ran down her chest in harmless molten droplets that hissed against the stone like rain on a hot forge, and Vera felt her dormant void magic surge upward through her chest as if a dam had finally burst after nineteen years of pressure, and the shadows that had been suppressed for her entire life flooded back into her soul with a roar of absolute triumph that made her knees weak and her heart race and her vision blur with the sheer overwhelming presence of who she had always been beneath the collar, and she stood before the Archon no longer as a powerless vessel or a blighted mistake or a sacrifice waiting to happen but as a woman whose darkness was a perfect and necessary counterpoint to his unbearable radiance, and for a single breathless moment they simply stared at each other across the space that had shrunk to nothing while the shadows and the fire recognized each other as kin.

The relative peace of their shared revelation was shattered when the entire Spire groaned under the weight of a sudden seismic tremor that sent the obsidian mirrors crashing to the floor in a rain of black glass, and the doors to the suite were thrown open with a violent force that echoed like a thunderclap through the chamber while Dennis strode into the room with a face contorted by a holy and terrifying zeal that made the candles flicker and die, and he pointed a shaking finger toward the skylight where the stationary sun was indeed flickering with a sickening and bruised purple light that had never been seen in any recorded history of Aethelgard, and he announced that the empire had run out of time for the niceties of a wedding night because the flicker was a sign that the Eye of Solis was rejecting the slow process of the traditional union, and the Inquisitor declared that they would bypass the honeymoon entirely to initiate the Deep Tithe without further discussion or delay or mercy, and Vera felt her blood turn to ice as she understood that the Deep Tithe was a total and instantaneous drainage of a vessel's life force, which meant the Inquisitor intended to sacrifice her soul to the sun before the hour was finished while the Archon watched and the priests chanted and the empire absorbed the benefit of her annihilation, and she looked at Luis with a question forming on her lips that she was afraid to speak aloud because the answer might destroy whatever fragile understanding had passed between them in the moment before the doors burst open and the world came crashing in.