The Vigil Ends

Coalspire had not seen true snow in nineteen years, and Reyna Ashcombe had stopped expecting it. She climbed the switchback stairs with the same rhythm she always kept — left foot, right foot, the lantern swinging a half-beat behind her hip — and did not look at the sky, because the sky in Coalspire had nothing left to say to her.

The god was dying. He had been dying for four decades, chained to the mountain by priests who no longer existed, tended by a widow no one remembered marrying. She reached the shrine as the wind changed, and for the first time since she was a girl, the chains sang.

She set down the lantern. She did not run. Running had never once helped anyone in Coalspire, and she was not about to test the theory on the last night of a god's life.

"You're early," she said to the dark, and the dark, for once, answered her.