The stairs wound narrow beneath the earth, the air growing heavier with each step. The scent of hot mineral stone mingled with smoke and moss. At intervals, candles lined shallow alcoves along the wall, these, too, beeswax, rather than scale light. Each flame bowed faintly as she passed, as if acknowledging what she came here to do. Her fingers trembled along the stone rail, and her tail brushed the back of her calves. The robeâs gold embroidery glinted dully in the flickering light.
They reached the final corridor: a long, carved tunnel, curving in gentle spirals toward the chamberâs core. Incense burned here, myrrh and something she didnât know the name for, something medicinal. Moisture clung to the walls, the floor slick with condensation. Hooded Sisters lined either side of the passage, their heads bowed. She could feel their gazes beneath their veils. None spoke.
They brought her into a stone alcove and stripped away the blue and gold. All wore silken gloves for this task, none given permission to touch the freshly washed Bellborn. A robe of white silk was waiting, impossibly fine, its sleeves edged in glimmering thread. They lowered it over her head in silence, then anointed her brow, her heart, her belly, the tops of her hooves. The oils were warm, their scent like forest and clove.
Finally, High Glinnel Seli approached, wearing her formal white robes, a new-fashioned bell collar in hand. She belted it around Lainâs throat.
By the time she stepped barehoofed onto the final path, her pulse quavered inside her like a bell clapper. The chamber opened at last, vast and round. At its heart, a sunken pool shimmered with oil-slick reflections, nearly the full width of the chamber.
The Underserpentâs nest.
Coiled within was a shape so immense she mistook it at first for shadowed boulders. Then she saw the curve of scale, the line of long antlers, the mane of white fur like underwater kelp. Her breath caught. Itâs tail shifted faintly and she saw it was tufted like hers.
She recognized that movement, the listless twitch of a body in discomfort, like the small movements she made when the draught dulled everything but the ache. Perhaps the serpent was like her. Not sleeping. Dying.
Sheâd seen depictions, mosaics and drawings, embroidered likenesses. Nothing had prepared her for the real shape of it, the immensity. The Underserpentâs head was long and sleek; she doubted such a head could fit in two cloistered cells, its eye larger by degrees than her chamberâs window. Its closed eyes moved behind their lids. Dreaming. She could sense it dreaming. Its antlers curved back, forested with tines. It was beautiful, and somehow familiar, like something sheâd lost long ago but forgotten about.
The Heat was steady now, soft and rooted. She had been trained to expect hunger, nerves, even pain. But no one had told her death might feel like this: like waiting for something to bloom. It wasnât want or lust, but ache. Recognition, even. Resonance. Her breath shook, her tail flexing beneath her robes. She wished she could brush her fingers along its scales, the sturdy density of its antlers.
High Glinnel Seli guided her to the platform just above the pool. A vessel waited there, a golden bowl, faintly steaming. A single Starbloom flower floated within, its pistils as golden as the bowl, its petals pink on their ends and fading to a deep purple at their centers. She knew it had been brewed the evening before, and yet its petals seemed fresh, as if no heat had marred its perfection.
She knelt on the stone, as instructed, but had to turn her legs aside to sit upon her hips, her legs stretched out to the side.
âDrink,â said High Glinnel Seli.
She did. The liquid burned bitter on her tongue, floral and acrid. But beneath that was sweetness, not unlike the raspberry. Her hands trembled in her lap. The incense filled her lungs, and her Heat rose again, swelling low and molten in her belly.
Then all at once her scales flared with pain, and she jerked back as if struck. Her tail lashed, then stiffened with terrible pain. Her legs kicked reflexively. She wrapped her arms about herself.
âSing,â said Glinnel Seli.
âPlease, High Glinnel ââ she gasped with the shock of it, searing across her scales, and she never thought herself afraid of death, but now she knew there were worse things, and she very much feared this pain, the way it shot through her eyes, forcing tears. âBrother Tanel â is he here? I â I would like ââ
âSing, Bellborn.â
The command was like a slap, devoid of any sense of care. She would have begged for relief if the thought didnât shame her so deeply.
Tanel had said she would feel it. Heâd said it wouldnât last long.
She leaned into that, groaning as she tried to sit up straight, wishing with hopeless desperation that he was here to put a hand on her shoulder as she succumbed to this transfer of life to the wyrm. Shouldnât he have done that? Shouldnât she just have one small gift in exchange for all she was giving to them?
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But she remembered her blasphemy this morning, the cheese and the raspberry, and she steeled herself; perhaps it was her due, to be so alone now in this pain. She had eaten when she was meant to be fasting. She had tasted the forbidden fruit.
She would do it again, given the chance.
Lain unbound the bell around her neck with trembling fingers, each movement a searing reminder of the hurt she was swallowing. She loosed the clapper, and it rang sweetly in her hand.
She steadied her voice as best she could, and sang.
Starbloom bright, in shadow grown,
Bind the breath to blood and bone.
Still the heart and seal the flame,
Sleep the wyrm, and speak no name.
The song grew as she sang, her voice vibrating as the chamber hummed with it. The Underserpent stilled. Even the serpentâs breath, if it had one, seemed to quiet. Her pain receded just enough to feel holy. Measured. Like she was dwindling in service, as she was meant to
Her voice wavered, but the serpent remained still, obedient to the sacrament. The wyrm slipped down, its thoughts once nearer to consciousness slipping into a deeper sleep, this sleep deep enough that Lain sensed no dreaming at all.
Her own thoughts cooled, the pain ascending, now so wild and hot that she did not know where the pain ended and her own existence began.
This was the trade. She was taking the pain of the wyrm, trading it her soothing song, trading it her life.
She took a breath to sing the second stanza and faltered.
The pulse in her belly flared. Her scales lit like sparks across her neck and shoulders. Her tail lashed with fury. The ache expanded behind her eyes, across her scalp, down her spine. Her antlers threatened to grow.
The Candles guttered. The stone vibrated beneath her. The coils of the beast slid in the water, the motion sending ripples out to the rim of the pool. A low sound gathered in the chamber, tightening in her chest and causing her ribs to ache.
No. No. She needed the wyrm to sleep. To be at peace.
She kept singing.
One must fall so one may rise,
Ash to air and soul to skies â
But her voice broke on soul.
A great pulse beat through her midsection, like something inside her had cracked open and was pouring forth. The Heat transcended the pain, her Tune bridging her to the Underserpent.
She fell forward, catching herself just before her head struck the platform. The bell clattered across the stone and rang once before falling still. Her lips parted and a thin string of blood slipped from her mouth.
She rolled and fell back against the stones.
The song should have ended there, but it didnât. Instead, it rose, from somewhere deep below her ribs. A second note, impossible. One she was not singing.
It was the serpent, joining her song.
The sound of it moved through the stone. It resonated with her scales and blood and the place beneath her skin where the Heat pulsed like another person living inside her. Neither lust nor yearning, it was something wild, something so utterly Kelthi that she was nearly distracted from her pain by the intensity of her shame.
Her vision blurred. Her mouth still moved, but the serpentâs voice moved with her, matching the notes and deepening them. The air shimmered. She tried to lift her gaze and couldnât.
But she remembered, suddenly, lines of the morning offering:
Where the wyrm dreams, listen.
Where the wyrm coils, breathe.
What stirs, let pass.
What rises, guide.
She breathed. Her back arched, chest rising from the stone, the white robe soaked with sweat. Her ears had come unbound. She could feel them straining upward, twitching with the sound. Her antlers ached behind her scalp, the skin at her crown hot and tight. She kicked out, her hooves scraping stone, one knocking the bowl aside, the sound of it lost under the song. The Heat surged, no longer gentle, no longer soft. It crashed through her, and her Tuning with it. The Underserpentâs movements became fluid, calm, a creature stretching comfortably before waking.
The wyrm lifted its head.
One eye opened, silver and silted and full of impossible age. It fixed on her. She saw her reflection, not as she was, but as she would be.
The Underserpent felt her pain.
It reached for it, and shared in it.
The serpentâs thoughts werenât her own. They were memory and sensation and instinct braided together: sharp cold, a silvery light, the loneliness of centuries. Then her pain again, mirrored back in the Tuning of the Underserpent.
The water stirred.
Suddenly she understood nothing except the pain in her chest. She could no longer tell where her song ended and the Underserpentâs began.
The voice deepened. The chamber flared with clear light, as if some film had lifted from the air.
Hands dragged her backward. âEnough!â Seliâs voice, close, too close.
Lain tried to cry out but her mouth was dry. Her scales burned, worse where Seliâs fingers dug into her shoulders. Her fingers curled like claws against the floor.
âNo,â she croaked. She reached for the platform, for the Underserpent, her hooves kicking at the stone, sliding in the damp.
But the spell was broken.
Seliâs grip was iron. The bell was gone. The path behind them swarmed with hooded Sisters, murmuring, blocking her view.
The Underserpentâs eye was still open, still watching.
Then it blinked, and vanished beneath the surface.
Everything went black.