Book 2 The Gods of Light and Liars

Chapter Eight: The Bitter

The little garden they had worked in was actually the corner of something greater. Taking her hand, the Archon lead her from this small and courtly garden ("A little thing," he dismissed it. "It is enough for me, and I am comfortable in it, but really, it is rather small") to a great expanse of flawless lawn. It was made of moss, but a moss that came lush and thick, springy and moist to the touch and green as emeralds. It lay beneath the brilliance of regular, small, star-like objects. The radiance from them shimmered, as if it gave off great heat, but was cool to the touch. She paused in front of one and looked to the Archon. "Can I touch it?"

He shrugged. "It is light."

"It's cool," she said, because it was. It did have a substance, and it lapped at her fingers a bit like water. But it ignored gravity, and a small bit of it clung to a fingertip as if it were a droplet of water, only to race away skyward when it fell off her finger. "No fire."

"Well, when one gets to know fire well enough, one may ask it to behave. Not quite so much with the children of Light, though I can at least make cold fire." He gestured, cold fire, and made an orb of it as she watched, with a singular gesture.

"How are you doing that?" she said.

He put the "cold fire" out. "It is a simple matter for even the most basic acolyte. Easier if you follow the Firemaster than if you do not, but even a secular hedge-wizard could make such a thing work."

Wizard, she thought, with some alarm. She decided that was less important than whatever lay inside the temple. Clearly this moss-lawn was something belonging to the Temple, so she looked to the wall. It was carved, she thought, from the same milky crystal as the geode, and very elaborately done. Every green and growing thing she could think of—and quite a few she couldn't—seemed to be represented here, as were rabbits, cats, dogs, honeypot ants, and quite a few other creatures of familiar earthly beauty. But as she toured the wall, she soon found herself frozen by the thing in the very center of it.

A large, three-sided building, made of slabs of perfectly clear crystal.

She'd been imagining it for days, what that building-sized Prism would look like. Enough like a building to fool Alex into stepping inside of it, she thought. She wondered what it had looked like before, when it was part of a school. Had that obscured part of it? Had one third of its bulk been swallowed by brick and mortar?

It had been broken apart at some point, she thought, because it was not fitted entirely together. The huge ceiling slabs, once supported by the best architecture modern life could provide, had collapsed during some storm or battle or unseen tectonic blitz. She imagined they had broken up, because she couldn't believe anyone here would develop the technology to cut it. They'd chopped the slabs in bits, about six feet wide and as long as the slabs would run, and set these huge roofing tiles up on struts of stone. Some of the original texture remained, the patterns she remembered from...oh, it must have just been last week, in her living room, in a world where things like this didn't happen. It looked a bit like the Lovre's thrilling architecture had been shored up by some poor and desperate primitive.

And it was a Prism, just as Alex had said.

She stood there staring for what felt like eternity, and white hot pulse flash at the same time, and she must really have stood there for a while because the Archon said, "Madam Hawk, are you well?"

"Alex," She breathed, and then she was running. Barefoot across a walk of slate stone, ignoring a truly impressive mosaic in gray, she pelted across that wide lawn. She ignored the flowers that were all of them almost-like. Something almost like bouganvilla, something almost like hydrangea. It didn't matter what it was almost like. What mattered was that this thing was, and it was a Prism and it was the last thing that Alex had touched before he was dragged down into this hellscape, and she was going to go inside.