The Spark Divine

a m a l i a As soon as she is physically able, the girl makes her escape. She did not ask for this. To be bound to the Temple is to be bound to the chaos within, trapped and confined by the milling bodies, the whispered voices, the gentle ministrations of medics she does not know and does not care to befriend. The infirmary is a hellish place, full of nightmares and memories and the reeking smell of death. It is where her mother lived and died, where she lost the last tenuous piece of family she had, and Amalia loathes it with every fiber of her being. There are others far more wounded than her, and though it is terrible she is grateful, in a way. They take away attention from the no-longer-dead girl, giving her space to slip away. She needs to escape: she is suffocating, drowning beneath the weight of those cold stone walls and the memories they hold. The bakery is too far away; Antheneum is not secured; and so Amalia makes her way to the last place she remembers feeling secure. Clad in a nightgown she is barefoot, freezing despite the blanket pulled around her narrow shoulders, but in truth she does not mind. She has been cold ever since she woke up. While life may have returned to her, warmth certainly has not. She approaches the shrines in silence and hesitates, suddenly unsure. Who should she pray to, who should she thank for the curse of continuing to be alive? Vi, for blessing her with a life she squandered? Mort, who disdained of her enough to send her back? It does not matter: neither are here. The Old Ones are not listening. They never have. These thoughts are wrong- she knows this. She should be grateful, and in a way she is: she is grateful that her companions lived, that Rory is recovering, that Edy and the Attuned escaped relatively unscathed. She is grateful that those in the Temple let them in, despite the danger of opening the doors. She is grateful that they are safe, that her strongest attempts to martyr them all for a pointless cause have not ended in complete disaster. Because in the end it was a pointless cause. The world did not change. The Spark Bird did not come. Darkness won once more, and Amalia could not save anyone. She could not even die properly. A voice cuts into her reverie, and the once-dead girl starts. Dark eyes whip up to stare at the man, wild and uncertain, hard and cold. She had not seen Jigano since Long Night fell, but something in his face strikes a chord within, causes a jolt of bitter guilt to stab into her spine. He offers his arm and she shies away, despite her weakness and the trembling of her limbs. A shiver jolts through her body, and she sways but does not fall. "Yes," she answers blandly, too tired for any sort of grace, too trapped by her conflict to meet his eyes.