FIFTEEN
With the Mothers withholding any new Gifts until the temple was complete, doing just that became my focus. The anger that had loosed my tongue before the Mothers became my fuel.
We were fortunate to have several expert engineers, architects, and stonemasons now living in Black Ridge, and I'd spent hours meeting with each, detailing out the Mothers' requirements for the temple and the visions I had of it in my mind. After many drafts and many weeks, we finally had a workable set of plans to follow in the temple's construction.
Working alongside the craft workers and a few dozen women possessing Avani's Gift, we broke through the first layer of black stone on the face of the mesa.
The deeper we cut into the stone, the stranger the rock itself became. Not because of its remarkably
