Page 53 of Joy Guardian
Ciana cupped her chin as she stared at the Source, looking lost in thought for a moment.
“If she lived for over six hundred years, she couldn’t have been a human then, could she?”
Shock seized my breath at that assumption.
“Why would you think the First Priestess was a human?”
“Well, I don’t know, Kurai. You tell me. Why would your ancient saint write in my language?” She waved the bookmark in front of me. “And sign it with a name that’s pretty common in my world.” She pointed at the signature under the quote.
“Not all of her writings are in that language, and most we haven’t translated yet. She wrote in our language too.”
“That still doesn’t explainthis.” She dropped her hand with the bookmark.
The restlessness I sensed in her bothered me. It buzzed through my tendrils, disturbing her usually quiet, cheerful disposition.
“Well, all worlds along the River of Mists used to be connected in our distant past. It is possible that a human language made it into our world at some point in our ancient history,” I tried to ease her confusion.
She remained doubtful. “Maybe it wasn’t the First Priestess who wrote all these things? You said the belief is that she wrote in both languages. But maybe it was two different people? What if the First Priestess and the woman named Melanie were not the same person?”
That idea was blasphemy, but I couldn’t hold it against an outsider who only just started learning about our history and our beliefs.
“Or maybe I’m overthinking it.” She sighed. “After everything that happened, it’s not easy to focus properly.”
I stroked her arm down to her hand holding the bookmark. “However these words arrived to our world, they brought comfort to many of our people over the years. We all need to remember that no matter how brutal a storm is, it’ll end, and peace will reign again.”
A shudder ran down her body, probably at the memory of the storms that had nearly killed her. She leaned into me, and I wrapped her into a hug.
“Can I keep this?” She lifted the bookmark in her hand.
“Of course you can. Every visitor to the temple gets one.”
“Thanks.” Folding the paper, she tucked it into the wrap around her chest. “What’s going to happen with us now, Kurai? Because I don’t think I can stay here when the other Joy Guardians return, can I?”
No matter how much I’d grown to think of Ciana as mine, no matter how close we had become, by law, she belonged to the queen. Even if I pleaded with the Master Guardian, I doubted he would allow Ciana to stay. Master Arter had always been fond of me and lenient to my requests. But keeping Ciana at the temple would be going against the queen’s orders, which would jeopardize all of us.
I stroked along her braids draped over her back. Sooner or later, I would have to part from her, no matter how much it’d pain me. The thought sliced through my heart with sorrow, making it hard to breathe.
“You don’t want to return tosarai, Ciana?”
Two weeks ago, she decided she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life as the Joy Vessel, but things had changed since. She’d learned how dangerous my world could be. She’d come way tooclose to death in the desert—a brutal lesson about how precious and fragile life was.
“Is that really the only place where a human can survive in Alveari?” she asked.
“The queen’ssaraiis probably the safest place for a human,” I admitted reluctantly, but Ciana deserved the truth, even if every word I said felt like a brick in the impenetrable wall rising between us. “No storm would ever touch you there.”
“You wouldn’t be able to touch me there, either, would you?”
She lifted her face to mine. Her eyes glistened with tears like morning dew gathering in the petals of flowers. Her sadness flew to me like a moth.
I cradled her cheek in my hand. “No, my sweet. I’ll never be able to enter Kalmena as a free man again.”
“Is that what you want for me? For us? Do you want me to go back?”
“It’s not about what I want—” I tried to reason, but she wouldn’t let me.
“But that’s what I’m asking you. Just answer the question. Do you want me to leave?” Determination buzzed through her, vibrating anxiously through my tendrils. “Tell me the truth, Kurai. Give me that much.”
The truth would destroy us both. I couldn’t act on it. But oh, how I wanted to.
