The temple had been beautiful once. Its columns had held the sky with the confidence of things built to last, and the mosaics on its floor had told stories in gold and lapis that the faithful read with their feet each morning as they filed in for the dawn rite.
That had been a long time ago. The columns still held, but the sky above them had grown indifferent. The mosaics were worn to ghosts of colour, the gold trodden to grey. The roof had lost its argument with the seasons some decades back, and now the dawn light came in directly, which was, if nothing else, appropriate for a temple dedicated to the sun.
One man remained.
His name was Kastor, and he had been the high priest of Amaterra for longer than anyone else could be bothered to keep track of. Each morning he rose before the sun, lit the ceremonial braziers in the prescribed order, chanted the dawn invocation in a voice that had once filled the nave and now barely reached the altar, and swept the floor. The sweeping was not, strictly speaking, part of the liturgy, but he had added it decades ago on the grounds that a dirty temple was an insult to any self-respecting deity, and had performed it with such conviction that it had become, to his mind, sacred.
The deity in question watched him from the far end of the nave, her vast form curled in the apse like a cat in a sunbeam, if the cat were sixty feet long and made of fire and opinions.
“You missed a spot,” said Amaterra.
“I did not miss a spot.” Kastor did not look up. “I am following the prescribed pattern. East to west, seven passes, as laid down in the Rites of Illumination.”
“The Rites of Illumination say nothing about sweeping.”
“It is in the supplementary rubric. Section fourteen, subsection nine. I filed it myself.”
She watched him work, because there was nothing else to watch. His joints had filed formal complaints. His sense of duty had overruled them. The broom whispered across the mosaic in the same pattern it had whispered yesterday, and the day before, and every day for twenty-three years. She counted the strokes the way one counts the drips of a leaking roof.
“Kastor.”
“I am sweeping.”
“You have been sweeping for thirty minutes.”
“The prescribed pattern takes as long as the prescribed pattern takes.” He reached the western wall, turned, and began his return pass. “If you wished for a faster ceremony, you should have inspired shorter scriptures.”
She could have told him that the scriptures had not been her idea. She had told him, in fact, several times, and he had ignored her on each occasion with the practised serenity of a man who considered divine correction less authoritative than established rubric. Kastor’s faith was not in her. It was in the ritual. She had made her peace with this, in the way that one makes peace with weather.
It was enough. Barely, and fading, but enough.
She remembered when it had been more. Thousands of voices at dawn, a tide of faith that had reached her like warmth on stone. Then they changed, and the god they wanted wore their face, and the prayers shifted like a river changing course.
Kastor finished his seventh pass. He placed the broom against the wall in its designated spot, aligned it precisely with the mark he had carved into the stone for this purpose, and turned to face her.
“The dawn rite is complete,” he said, with the satisfaction of duty exactly performed.
“There were no congregants.”
“There is one congregant. There has been one congregant for twenty-three years. The rite does not specify a minimum.” He lowered himself onto the bench beside the altar carefully, negotiating a truce with his knees. “It specifies only that it be performed. I have performed it.”
She regarded him. He was frailer than last season. The hands that gripped the bench edge were thinner, the knuckles more prominent. He was running out, the way a candle runs out: slowly, then all at once.
“You are unwell,” she said.
“I am old. These are different complaints, though they file similar paperwork.” He looked up at her, and his eyes, at least, had not dimmed. “You are diminished.”
“Yes.”
“More than last year.”
“Yes.”
He was quiet for a moment. The dawn light fell through the broken roof and pooled on the mosaic between them, catching the remnants of her own face in the stone, worn nearly featureless.
“They pray to Hyperion now,” Kastor said. Not an accusation. An observation, delivered with the clinical detachment of a priest who had spent a lifetime studying the mechanics of devotion. “He looks like them. That is the trouble. You are a dragon. They are not. It was novel, once. Then it was intimidating. Now it is simply... unfamiliar.”
“I am their god.”
“You were their god.” He said it gently, which was worse.
“I know what I was.” The fire in her voice had nothing to do with flame. “I felt it change. They wanted something that looked like them. Spoke like them. Worried about their harvests and blessed their children. A shepherd, not a sovereign.”
She let the silence settle.
“I am a dragon, Kastor. I was never going to bless anyone’s children.”
“If I could not draw their faith as a dragon,” she said, slowly, testing the shape of a thought she had not yet allowed herself to think, “what would you counsel?”
Kastor looked at her for a long time. The braziers guttered. The dawn light crept across the floor.
“I would counsel,” he said, “that if the faithful will only worship what looks like them, then perhaps their god should oblige.”
Kastor did not rise the next morning. She found him on the bench where he had sat the evening before, his hands folded in his lap with precision. He had arranged himself for a final ceremony. The broom stood in its designated spot. The braziers had burned down to ash.
She waited for the dawn prayer that did not come. The silence was absolute, and it was hers.
Solday, 9th of Haligust, 1429
The cathedral had been Notre Dame for four hundred years. It took Aeloria a single afternoon to change its name.
The ceremony had been planned for months. Golden banners, reglazed windows, the solar disc on every surface that couldn’t argue back. The incense was myrrh and amber, which she had selected personally, because the clergy’s first suggestion had smelled like a damp vestry and she was not about to be consecrated in a damp vestry.
The nave was full. Nobles in their finery, officers in their dress armour, clergy in their vestments, and behind them, pressing against the doors, the citizens of Pharelle who had come to see their liberator crowned. She had given them Auriliene. She had given them victory. Today she would give them a queen, and they would give her something in return.
She stood at the altar in mortal form, her back straight, her expression composed, wearing the face of Jehanne of Arcadia as she had for months now. The Couronne Solaire waited on its cushion, gold wrought into rising flames. Beside it, on a second cushion, the cathedral's new charter, its name changed by royal decree: Notre Reine. Our Queen. She had written the decree herself. The scribes had not been consulted.
The priest of Invictus approached the altar.
He was old, though not in the way that a priest she once knew had been old. That priest, whose name escaped her now, had worn his age like a comfortable garment. This man wore his like armour. He had served the cathedral for thirty years, and he performed the rite gravely, and regardless of his reservations.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
She watched him. His voice filled the nave, practised and sure, and directed somewhere else entirely.
The rest of the cathedral was pointed at her. She could taste it: reverence, fear, calculation, ambition.
The priest’s was not. He performed the rite with absolute precision, every gesture correct, every word in its proper place. But the faith beneath it was directed upward, past her, past the new banners and the reglazed windows, toward something he considered greater. He believed in Invictus. He believed in the sun as a divine principle, not as a woman standing in armour at his altar.
He is the only honest man in this room, she thought. And that makes him the most annoying.
“Bring forward the Dauphin,” she said.
The room recalculated.
Charlain had been kept in comfortable confinement since Auriliene. Comfortable by Aeloria’s standards, which meant he had not been harmed, merely rendered irrelevant, a distinction she suspected he found worse. He had the expression of a man who had been expecting a throne and received a cell.
They brought him to the foot of the altar. He walked without assistance, which she noted. Pride. Even now, pride. She understood this better than anyone in the room.
“Kneel,” she said.
The room held its breath.
Charlain looked at her. She had won his war for him and kept the prize. His eyes said as much.
“Kneel,” she said again, “and acknowledge your queen.”
He knelt. The sound of his knees on the cathedral stone carried further than it should have, sharp in the held silence. His head bowed, though not before she caught the set of his jaw. Submission given as a weapon.
She could feel the room dividing, a fracture running through the congregation as cleanly as a crack in glass. A dragon does not concern itself with cracks.
The priest placed the crown on her head. His hands were steady and his voice did not waver, and his faith remained fixed on a point above and beyond her, immovable as stone.
The congregation knelt. The choir sang. The sun came through the new windows in gold and white and fell across her shoulders, and for a moment she felt it: the warmth of ten thousand prayers arriving at once, faith rising from the nave like heat from summer stone. The old feeling. The real one. Amaterra’s sustenance, returned to her after centuries of silence.
Her fingers tightened on the arm of the throne. There. There it is.
The moment passed. The warmth remained, but thinner than she remembered, diluted by fear and spectacle and the devotion of people who had decided it was easier to kneel than to run.
It was not enough. But she was a dragon, and a dragon does not let go of something once she has held it.
Ninsday, 15th of Bloomil, 1431
Two years. That was all they gave her.
The pyre had been built before Notre Reine. Not a coincidence. Charlain had always been theatrical in his grievances. The golden banners still hung from its fa?ade. Her sun still shone in its windows. Nobody had bothered to take them down, which was either an oversight or an insult. With Charlain, it was difficult to rule out both.
The charges were whatever Charlain and Burgundy Hall had decided would sound best read aloud. The clergy, who had crowned her two years ago with steady hands and full voices, now stood behind the Dauphin, serenely convinced they had always harboured doubts.
She stood in chains at the foot of the pyre. The crowd that had knelt for her coronation now pressed against the barriers to watch her burn. Some faces she recognised. Most she did not. It occurred to her that mortals looked rather alike from a distance.
The priest who had placed the crown on her head now read the sentence. His voice was steady. His faith was still pointed at Invictus, immovable as it had been at the coronation, and she found herself, absurdly, respecting him for it. He believed in the rite, and the rite demanded a sentence, and so he read it.
Charlain stood beside the pyre. He had dressed for the occasion. Petty. His crown did not sit comfortably.
“You are sentenced,” the priest concluded, “to death by fire, for crimes against the crown and the faith.”
She looked at Charlain. He met her gaze.
“You could still kneel,” he said. “Renounce the crown. Confess to sorcery. The Church may show mercy.”
She turned to the crowd.
“I have been your liberator,” she said. “I have been your queen. I offer you one final chance. Release me, and I will forgive this. Refuse, and what follows is yours to bear.”
The crowd murmured. Charlain’s hand went to his reclaimed crown.
“Light the pyre,” he said.
They lit the pyre.
The flames rose around her, bright and eager and entirely insufficient. She felt them the way one feels a warm breeze: pleasant, if somewhat presumptuous. The crowd waited for screaming. The clergy waited for justice. Charlain waited for the sight of his rival turning to ash.
None of them got what they wanted.
The chains melted first. Then the mortal form, the face of Jehanne of Arcadia, the disguise that had won a kingdom and lost it in two years, fell away like paper in a furnace. What rose from the pyre was not a woman.
Wings unfurled against the sky, vast enough to throw the cathedral into shadow. Scales caught the firelight and threw it back in colours the crowd had no names for. The Pendulum caught her fire and threw it back, and for a moment the square blazed with a light that had nothing to do with Agony.
The screaming started, but it was not hers.
She looked down at Charlain. He had not run. Pride, even now.
“You could have had a queen,” she said, and her voice was no longer a woman’s voice. “Terrible and beautiful as the dawn. Instead you will have some dark lord, craven and petty.”
Charlain said nothing. There is a limited range of responses available to a man standing beneath a dragon.
? Historically, the most common response has been running. The second most common has been prayer. A distant third is negotiation, though no successful examples have been recorded.
She spread her wings wider, and the shadow deepened across the square.
“Gallia knows me as queen. You cannot take true sovereignty away. I will outlive all of you. And I will return to reclaim what is mine.”
She rose from the pyre, and the wind of her departure scattered the flames across the square. The crowd broke. The clergy fled. Charlain stood his ground, which she would have admired if she had bothered to look back.
They did not rename the cathedral. Notre Reine it had been, and Notre Reine it remained, not as a reminder of her glory but as a reminder of her threat. A warning, carved in stone and glass, that the Sun Queen was still out there, watching, waiting.
Of course, stories change. Within a generation, the warning became a legend. Within two, the legend became a curiosity. Within three, nobody could quite remember whether the name referred to a queen or a saint, and the tour guides made up something plausible for the visitors.
? The current tour guide explanation involves a shepherdess and a miracle. It is, in its way, more believable than the truth.
The dragon in the mountains remembered. But then, dragons always do.
Nerday, 1st of Snawd, 1570
The Wizard appeared in the cave without invitation, which was either very brave or very stupid. With mortals, it was often difficult to tell the difference.
He was tall, dark-haired, dark coat, gold at the cuffs. He carried no staff, no wand, no visible weapon. He stood in the entrance of a dragon’s lair with his hands clasped behind his back, as though he had arrived for an appointment.
Aeloria watched him from the dark. She had not moved from this cave in nearly two centuries. The mountain air was thin and cold and entirely devoid of worship, which suited her mood.
The Wizard waited. He understood she would speak when she chose to.
She chose to let him wait a little longer. It was petty, and she was entirely comfortable with that.
“You are Prospero,” she said, eventually. “Scholar to Glorianna of Albion.”
“I am.” He inclined his head. “I am here on my own account.”
“You know what I am,” she said.
“A dragon.” The way one might say ‘a chair.’ A fact, unadorned. “Formerly Amaterra. Formerly the Sun Queen. Formerly Jehanne of Arcadia. Currently in exile, and, if I may be candid, currently in need of a better strategy.”
The fire in her chest stirred.
“You may not be candid,” she said. “You may explain why you are in my cave before I decide whether to let you leave it.”
He did not move. He did not blink. He simply inclined his head, the smallest of concessions, and began.
“I have studied your reign as the Sun Queen. You attempted to manufacture worship through sovereignty.” He paused. “It was impressive. It was also doomed.”
“You are remarkably confident for a man standing in a dragon’s mouth.”
“I am confident because I am correct. You built from the top down. A crown compels loyalty, not faith. You assumed obedience and worship were the same thing.”
The fire climbed higher.
“And you have a better approach,” she said.
“The Church.” He let the word settle. “Not a new one. The existing one. Invictus.”
She regarded him with the slow amusement of a creature who had been alive long enough to see most ideas attempted at least twice.
“You know,” she said, “her father redesigned a Church once. It was quite... enlightening.”
Prospero did not take the bait. “I intend to be rather more subtle than that.”
“I should hope so. He made quite a mess of it.”
“I want to redesign it from the inside. Doctrine, structure, theology. Faith is not a gift from the faithful. It is a mechanism. A system. It can be engineered.” His voice carried a certainty beyond argument. “Glorianna understood this instinctively. She built loyalty that sustained itself without her presence, through institutions, through ritual, through the careful cultivation of belief. She did not need to be divine. She merely needed to be the centre around which divinity was arranged.”
“And you propose to do this for me.”
“I propose to do it better.” He met her gaze, and in the dark of the cave, his eyes were steady and certain. “You tried to be the god. That was the mistake. The god is a position, not a person. Build the machinery of faith correctly, and it does not matter who sits at its centre. The worship flows regardless.”
The silence that followed was the longest yet.
“And what,” she said, very quietly, “do you want in return?”
“I want what any scholar wants,” he said. “To build something that outlasts me.”
“And in return, you would restore what I have lost.”
“I would build you a Church.” He smiled. “The solar legacy is still there, buried in the architecture of the faith. Hymns that predate Invictus. Rites that remember the sun as sovereign, not shepherd. The bones of Amaterra’s worship, waiting to be reassembled.”
“Where,” she said, very quietly, “did you learn that name?”
“I am a scholar,” Prospero said. “It is what I do.”
A dragon and a Wizard, each convinced they were the one holding the leash.
“You will need a new name,” she said. Names mattered to dragons. They were the first thing you hoarded and the last thing you lost. “Prospero is Glorianna’s.”
“I have one in mind.” He inclined his head again, that same minimal concession. “Valère.”
“It means ‘to be strong.’”
“It means ‘to be worthy.’” The correction was gentle and absolute.
She regarded him. This man was offering to make the world remember her name. Not out of worship. Out of ambition so vast it matched her own.
This one, she thought. This one will do.