Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Her hair was her solar mantle.

It was the reservoir of her divinity... Every strand she burned was a piece of her sun that was gone forever, an ember of her soul that would never regrow in the freezing dark.

Over the decades that followed, the burning took its toll.

The wild, majestic lion’s mane that had once tumbled to her waist in thick molten waves began to thin, wither, and fray.

The brilliant, incandescent gold faded, dulling first into a pale lifeless straw, and then into the tarnished sickly yellow of old brass.

Large, irregular patches along her scalp remained bare and gray, showing the pale skin beneath.

Her golden eyes, which had once shone with the blinding glare of an active star, guttered down until they were nothing more than two dying embers buried deep within bruised hollow sockets.

Her memory followed the hair.

First, the faces of the fishermen dissolved into gray smears... She could no longer picture Borin’s crooked nose or the salt-cracks around his knuckles.

Then the old women vanished.

She remembered the warmth of the stones, but the wrinkled faces and the gentle hands that had patted her wrists were gone, swallowed by the fog in her mind and then came the morning she looked into the void and realized she couldn’t remember Sela’s face.

The girl who had died for her... The child whose blood she’d held in her palms.

Lilianel reached into her mind, frantically clawing through the dark corners of her memory, searching for the brown eyes, the oat-colored hair, the crooked tooth... and found only an empty silhouette of gray mist.

All she’d left of the girl was the phantom voice that whispered ”You came too late.”

...And the dark had twisted even that into a weapon.

A century later, or perhaps two, since time had long since stopped meaning anything, a terrifying silence descended over her thoughts.

She sat in the black, staring at her brass-colored fingernails, her brow furrowed in a dull vacant stupor.

’Who...’ she wondered, the thought drifting through her mind like dry smoke. ’Who’s sitting here...? Who was the one that brought the light...?’

She reached for the name but it wasn’t there.

The temple hymns were gone... The inscriptions on the white stone altars were gone and her title was gone.

She was just a cold thing chained in an empty box, a bundle of brittle bones and old brass hair waiting for the frost to finish freezing her marrow.

Panic flared in her chest, weak and sputtering like a dying candle.

’No... no, I had a name! What was it?! What did they call me?!’

She began to mumble Teo’s old prayers, the phrases she’d repeated to herself for centuries, her lips moving over the familiar worn syllables like a monk fingering wooden beads.

”...the harvest is thin... the river is cold... please, where are you...?”

She mumbled the words over and over, rocking back and forth, searching the boy’s gravelly cadence for the missing piece.

”...I told Marcus he was a fool... my sister saw you... she saw you on the stones...”

She dug deeper, pushing through the static in her mind until a faint golden cadence echoed from the deepest cellar of her memory:

”...she’ll come back... Lilianel came for my sister... Lilianel will come for us...”

Lilianel gasped, her eyes snapping wide in the dark.

”Lilianel,” she whispered, her cracked lips trembling as the name settled onto her tongue like a drop of sweet honey.

”Lilianel,” she repeated, a little louder with the syllables tasting of summer wheat and burning marigolds. ”Lilianel... I’m Lilianel... I’m the Goddess of the Golden Sun... My name is Lilianel!”

She said it a thousand times.

She said it until her tongue was thick, until the syllables were carved into the inside of her skull, anchoring her soul to the solitary identity she’d managed to drag back from the void.

Eventually, even the reciting slowed.

Years crawled past and decades melted into the pitch.

Lilianel sat motionless in the center of the pocket realm, her chin resting on her chest, her brass-colored hair hanging in thin greasy strands across her hollow cheeks.

Her breathing had slowed until she took a breath only once every hour, the chest rising and falling with the sluggish rhythm of a hibernating beast buried deep under a glacier.

Her thoughts had practically stopped as she was no longer screaming and she was no longer crying either.

She was simply enduring, a spark of divine fire encased in an iceberg, waiting for the universe to unravel then, deep within the frozen core of her divine marrow, something twitched.

Her solar mana was gone, siphoned away into the void long ago and what stirred was her foresight.

It was the smallest of her gifts, the little sight that let her glimpse a possible future, and it was the only one the pocket realm couldn’t drink, because it had no heat to steal.

...She hadn’t touched it once in all her years in the dark.

Looking for something warm while her people froze to death above her had felt like the worst betrayal of all, so she’d buried the gift, and every glimpse it had ever shown her, under the cold.

Now it flickered on its own.

Through the blackness, a single blinding flash of golden sunlight split her vision.

The light came from a sun in an entirely different sky, rich, warm and clean.

Beneath it lay a rolling expanse of green grass that smelled of mountain pine, cold spring water and wild clover.

Standing in the middle of that green paradise was a tall gateway of white stone crowned with alabaster spires, humming with power.

Lilianel’s breath caught in her throat.

She knew this light... She’d seen it so long ago, lying in the wheat with a stem of grass between her teeth and a silly smile on her face, back when the worst thing in her life was being bored.

And through the rushing roar of the glimpse, a name she’d buried under centuries of cold rose up into the center of her frozen chest and rang like a bronze bell.

...Silas Graves.

Dreams in the pocket realm were greasy sluggish things that tasted of stagnant bog water and left her retching on the unseen floor.

This glimpse ripped through the back of her skull like a spear of clean mountain quartz, and it was longer and clearer than any she’d ever had in the wheat.

It showed an expansive, wind-swept valley framed by jagged peaks capped with pristine blinding white snow that sparkled beneath a sky so impossibly blue it made her chest ache and sitting dead center in that mountain basin was a big five-story Keep of dark stone, its courtyards alive with noise, with shouting, with the rhythmic clatter of armor, and with wild ringing laughter that echoed off the granite walls like music.

In the center of that courtyard, beneath a sun that baked the stone flags until they were dry and warm, she saw herself.

She was lying on her stomach in a wide patch of brilliant golden sunlight, her chin propped on her crossed forearms, kicking her bare heels into the air like an idle cat in the garden.

Her hair was back in its full lion’s mane splendor, tumbling across her back in thick molten waves of blinding gold that drank the daylight and sitting on the stone beside her was a man.

He had broad shoulders, dark hair ruffled by the mountain breeze, and striking dark blue eyes ringed by a brilliant band of pure gold that caught the sun.

He was leaning down, laughing with a deep rich baritone at some cheeky remark she’d just thrown into the air, and his broad calloused hand was resting casually on her head, fingers gently ruffling her thick golden hair.

She was looking up at him and in that vision, her face held no grief... There were no memories of cold stakes through young ribs and no sound of dying grandfathers.

She was with him, and she was beautifully happy.

When the tear snapped shut and the blackness rushed back in, Lilianel didn’t scream.

She curled her fingers into two tight, trembling balls, pressing her fists against her sternum as if she could physically trap the residual warmth behind her ribs.

...She held onto that memory like a drowning sailor gripping a fraying hemp rope in a winter gale.

She rationed it with terrifying agonizing discipline but she knew how memory worked in the dark.

She’d already watched Sela’s face dissolve into gray mist, years ago as she’d watched the rivermen’s voices turn to meaningless noise...

If she looked at the mountain fortress too often, her rotting mind would wear the edges down, smudge the blue of the sky, and turn his face into another hollow phantom that mocked her from the shadows so she locked it in the deepest vault of her soul, allowing herself to look upon it only when the unseen chains began to siphon the very last drops of heat from her heart.

And in the silence between the cold, she whispered his name.

”Silas Graves,” she’d murmur into the pitch, her vocal cords scraping together like dry reeds.

She said it once when she woke from her sluggish stupors.

She said it once before she let her chin drop to her chest... She said it over and over, testing the vowels against her teeth, just to make sure the air could still carry sound, just to prove her mouth still remembered how to form syllables that weren’t a prayer for bread.

Yet, on the worst nights, when the void felt thicker than wet peat, a cold sickening terror would wrap around her throat.

’Did I make him up...?’ she’d wonder, her eyes wide and wild in the black. ’Did I invent the green grass because I forgot what wheat looks like? Did I draw those dark blue eyes because I wanted someone to look at me without begging for rain...?’

His face remained.

No matter how many years bled into the silence, no matter how much the cold ate away at her memories, the curve of his jaw, the gold ring in his pupils, and the warmth of his broad palm never faded by a single line and deep within her broken chest, she hated herself a little for that.

She’d forgotten Sela’s smile... She’d forgotten the faces of the old women on their warm stones... The mortals who had loved her, who had bled for her, who had died whispering her name into the snow... she’d let them dissolve into the fog.

Yet this stranger, a man from a world she’d never walked, a man who’d never once knelt before a sun altar or spoken a single hymn, stood completely pristine in her mind, untouched by the rot of the dark.

When the silence became too heavy to bear, she began to daydream.

It started innocently enough, in the long empty stretches between her heartbeats... When the dark refused to offer a single sound, she began to talk to him.

She didn’t know anything about him... She didn’t know his voice, his kingdom, or the weapons he carried, so she simply built him out of the empty air.

’He has to be tall,’ she decided with a dry smirk touching her cracked lips as she remembered the angle of the vision. ’In the sunlight, I had to tilt my head all the way back just to see his chin. If I stood on my toes, my nose would barely brush the collar of his shirt. Yes... tall. Broad-shouldered like the smiths from the western hills, but without the soot.’

She leaned her back against the unseen wall of the void, hugging her knees to her chest.

’He must love the sun,’ she murmured to the dark. ’A man with eyes like that wouldn’t hide in a cellar. He probably spends his days riding through those green valleys, letting the light bake his neck until he smells of dry grass and pine resin... I wonder how we’ll meet?’

The possibilities became an endless colorful tapestry she spun against the blackness.

Maybe the walls of the pocket realm would simply give way, and she’d tumble out of the sky, falling fifty leagues through the blue air like a golden meteor, landing directly on top of him and flattening him into the soft clover with an undignified squawk.

She could see his startled face, covered in grass stains, blinking up at her while she sat on his chest and shook her wild mane out of his eyes.

Or maybe he’d be crossing an endless scorching desert of red dunes, his water skin dry, his horse collapsing beneath the heat, crawling across the sand with parched lips and then she’d sweep down from the dunes, open her hands, summon a cool golden pavilion of woven light to shield him from the glare, and offer him water from a celestial spring.

He’d look up into her shining golden eyes, completely thunderstruck by her divine beauty, and fall hopelessly, madly in love with her on the spot.

’No...’ she whispered, her brass-colored eyelashes fluttering against her pale cheeks. ’That’s too slow.’

Her favorite daydream, the one she returned to when the frost bit deepest into her marrow, was now different.