Chapter 809: Lilianel, Goddess Of The Golden Sun

A concussive deafening roar tore through the central courtyard.

BOOOOM!

The massive multifaceted sun-crystal at the apex of the Dawnspire Gateway flared with blinding incandescent light.

The three runic rings on the marble platform spun with terrifying blurred velocity, and from the silver indentation on the pedestal, a huge shaft of pure radiant golden energy erupted skyward.

WHOOOOSH!

The beam blasted fifty, a hundred, a thousand yards straight up into the velvet black heavens like a pillar of liquid gold.

High above the mountain valley, the golden shaft struck the cloud layer.

Instead of scattering, the energy snaked through the clouds in thick crackling tendrils of brilliant golden lightning, branching out for miles across the sky in a vast web-like lattice of celestial power.

The heavy snow clouds hanging over Blessed Land were swallowed by the light, turning from murky gray into a breathtaking glowing sea of molten amber and spun gold that lit up the entire mountain range as bright as high noon and the falling snowflakes glittered like flecks of gold.

The whole valley below was washed in warm golden brilliance.

Down on the marble dais, Silas stood at the foot of the towering alabaster spires.

He slowly tilted his head upward, looking straight into the blinding roaring pillar of celestial light that reached into the infinite stars.

He blinked against the dazzling overwhelming radiance, the golden ring in his dark pupils burning with reflection.

Silas stared up into the impossible brilliance above him with his thoughts whispering in quiet breathtaking awe.

’It’s like I’m looking at the sun.’

...

Before there was a sun, there was only the dark.

...Nyxvaris was black from one end to the other.

Its people lived in it the way moles live under the earth, feeling their way along cold cave walls and huddling over tiny fires of dried moss that never lasted the night.

Nobody knew what color their own hands were, nobody had ever seen the faces of the people they loved... They knew each other by voice, by touch and by the sound of breathing in the dark.

In one of those caves, a woman knelt alone on the frozen stone.

Her moss fire had gone out hours ago.

She couldn’t feel her fingers anymore, and she’d stopped shivering, which frightened her more than the shivering ever had.

"Huuu... Huu... I’m scared."

She’d heard the old people say that was how the cold took you... First it stopped hurting, and then you went to sleep and didn’t wake up.

She didn’t know any gods, nobody in Nyxvaris did... Were there any gods in this land of Eternal darkness?

’Why... why do they keep on having children and subjecting us to this fate?’

The woman couldn’t do anything so she prayed to the only thing she could imagine.

"Please," she whispered into the black with her cracked lips barely moving. "Please... it’s so dark... It’s so cold... Something warm... something bright... anything at all... please come."

She meant it with her whole heart.

Every person in every cave across Nyxvaris had prayed some version of that prayer at some point in their life, alone and freezing in the dark but she prayed it at the exact moment the world couldn’t bear to stay dark a second longer.

...Something answered.

A tiny spark of gold kindled in the air in front of her, no bigger than a firefly.

It hung there trembling, then it swelled and blazed, and the woman threw her arm over her eyes as the cave filled with light for the first time since the world began.

FWOOOOOM!

When she finally lowered her arm, someone was floating in front of her.

It was a girl, petite and barefoot, with hair like strands of molten gold, wild and tangled like a lion’s mane, and eyes that shone like two small suns.

She was blinking around the cave in pure astonishment, as if she’d never seen anything before, because she hadn’t.

"Ah... What are you?"

The very first thing she ever saw was the woman’s face, wet with tears and lit up in gold.

The golden girl tilted her head then she reached out and took the woman’s frozen hands in her own.

Warmth poured out of her fingertips... The woman gasped as the feeling rushed back into her fingers, painful and wonderful, and she burst into helpless shaking sobs.

"Hehehehehe~"

The golden girl laughed and it was the first sound she ever made.

Then she let go, floated out of the mouth of the cave and kept rising, higher and higher, until she hung over Nyxvaris and the whole world turned gold beneath her.

That was the day the sun was born, and the day Lilianel learned the only rule she ever lived by... When someone called for her with their whole heart, she came.

For three thousand years after that, Nyxvaris knew only her.

Every morning began with a breath that tasted of crushed marigolds and dry grass.

Lilianel would stir high above the cloud banks, shaking out a wild mane of heavy golden hair that tumbled around her shoulders like molten wire, catching the first pale rays of dawn and throwing them in shimmering sheets across the eastern sea.

She was petite, but her limbs held the lithe, spring-loaded strength of a lioness, her golden eyes wide and bright with a fierce restless flame that never dimmed, even while she slept.

Below her, as the great glowing disk crested the purple horizon, a murmur would rise from the waking world.

It came as thousands of quiet domestic whispers rising with the smoke from whitewashed chimneys and stone huts.

"Praise Lilianel, who brings the daylight," the baker would murmur as he raked red coals into the brick oven.

"Watch my nets, Golden Mother," the rivermen would mumble, dipping their bare calloused feet into the gray shallows.

"Warm my knees today, Lady, the damp is in the joints again," the old women would sigh, hobbling out to sit on the flat river stones beside their garden gates.

Lilianel would grin, drop her chin to her chest, and dive straight off the cloud banks.

She rode the dawn light down like a wild bird, plummeting toward the green earth with the wind roaring in her ears, her wild mane trailing behind her like a comet’s tail.

She’d skim the rolling hills, dragging her bare toes across the tops of the dew-drenched wheat fields, laughing as the stalks bowed in long golden waves beneath her passage.

SWOOSH!

The rivermen would squint into the blinding glare on the water, holding up rough hands to shield their faces from the blinding reflection.

"Too bright, Lady! You’re blinding the perch!" an old fisherman would shout with a toothless grin, waving a salt-crusted hat.

Lilianel would circle back over the river bend, hovering two feet above the rushing current, kicking a spray of warm sparkling droplets right into his wooden skiff.

"Then fish with your eyes shut, old man!" she’d call back, her voice bright and melodic, ringing with pure brass and laughter. "A good fisherman smells the fins, he doesn’t need to stare at my skirts!"

She’d bound over the riverbank and drop down onto the flat gray stones outside the village cottages, pressing both of her warm palms flat against the cold slate until the rock drank in her radiance.

Within three heartbeats, the stone would hum with comfortable deep heat that radiated into the wool of the old women’s skirts, easing the ache in their brittle hips.

The grandmothers would pat her bare wrists with papery fingers, smiling up at her sun-streaked face.

"Bless you, little flame," they would murmur.

"Sit still, grandmother, let the heat soak in," Lilianel would tell them, winking as she leaped back into the air.

That was the covenant.

...It had been the covenant since the night she was born out of a prayer in a frozen cave.

Whenever someone called her name with their whole heart, with real hunger or honest need, she came.

She came herself, every single time, barefoot, cheeks flushed, smelling of summer wheat and bringing the daylight right to their doorstep.

Yet, after three thousand years of the exact same morning, the heat began to sit heavily behind her ribs.

It was always the same sunrise... The exact same angle over the eastern shoals... The exact same prayers for good grain, for clear water, for aching bones, for quiet deaths, and for good marriages...

"Mmm..."

Lilianel loved them.

She truly loved every single mortal soul whose breath drifted up toward her sky but being a deity was a collar made of gold, and some days it pinched.

There were days when she didn’t want to climb the high skyway.

There were afternoons when she’d slip away from her celestial chariot, dim her light until she looked like nothing more than a sun-tanned village girl with untidy hair, and sneak off into the deep rolling wheat fields behind the abbey.

She’d curl up in the middle of a golden patch where the stalks grew six feet tall, tucking her knees to her chest like a stray barn cat, letting the sun she commanded bake her bare shoulders while the crickets chirped around her ears.

She’d chew on a sweet stem of grass, watch the little beetles scurry over the dry dirt, and let her thoughts wander into quiet forbidden spaces.

’Is this all there’s...?’ she’d wonder, turning a yellow beetle over with the tip of her fingernail. ’Three thousand years of lighting their ovens... Three thousand years of watching them grow old and crumble into the soil, while I sit in the sky, exactly the same. I want... I don’t know what I want... something new and something that isn’t a prayer for rain... Something that belongs to me, just for me, without a temple or a hymn attached to it.’

And sometimes, when she drifted off in the wheat, she glimpsed him.

...Lilianel had always been able to glimpse the future.

It was a small gift next to holding up a sun, and most days it showed her boring things, like a dry summer three years away or a bridge that would wash out in the spring floods.

The glimpses were only possibilities as half of them never came to pass, and she’d learned long ago not to trust them but one glimpse kept coming back.

It was never more than a few heartbeats long.

A green valley under a sun that wasn’t hers... snow on the mountains. A big stone Keep full of noise and laughter and a man with dark hair and dark blue eyes ringed with gold, laughing down at her while his hand rested on top of her head.

That was all she ever saw.

A flash of his face, the weight of his hand and a name that drifted through the glimpse like a bell ringing in another room.

’...Silas Graves.’

She didn’t know who he was.

She didn’t know where that valley was, or if it was real, or if it would ever happen at all but every time it came, a warmth spread through her chest that had nothing to do with her sun, and she’d wake up in the wheat with a silly smile on her face and her cheeks burning.

’Who are you...?’ She’d wonder, chewing on her stem of grass and staring up at her own sky. ’And why do you get to pat my head like that? Nobody pats my head... I’m a goddess, you know...’

She’d tell herself it was nonsense then she’d spend the rest of the afternoon hoping it would come again.

She’d sigh, roll over onto her stomach, and let the afternoon heat lull her into a light, drowsy sleep, unaware that far across the border of her golden skies, eyes that had never seen a sunrise were watching the horizon.

Beyond the mountains at the edge of Nyxvaris lay a neighboring realm, a drowned lightless waste that had never known a sun.

No flower bloomed in its black soil... no golden wheat bowed to a warm breeze.

The air was a perpetual freezing twilight, lit only by pale ghost-fungus and the cold phosphorescence of rotting bogs.

Its rulers were the royal vampires, ancient bloodless aristocrats with skin like old candle wax and eyes like stagnant wine.

...They lived in towering spires of needle-thin slate, wrapping themselves in velvet dyed with the ink of blind swamp eels, drinking the thin salty blood of miserable serfs who crawled through the dark like worms.

...They hated Nyxvaris.

They hated it with an ancient rotting envy that curdled in their dead bellies every time the dawn broke across the crags.

They couldn’t bear the glare that spilled over the high passes... Even from fifty leagues away, the reflection of Lilianel’s midday glory made their cold skin blister and peel into weeping gray scabs.

For centuries they’d sat in their needle spires, listening to the mortal songs of the sun realm drifting on the southern gales, their pale lips pulling back over yellowed fangs in quiet unyielding rage.

They couldn’t conquer Nyxvaris by force.

They knew that with terrifying certainty... If an army of their blood-knights marched across the border into the golden plains, Lilianel would simply descend from the clouds, open her arms, and bathe the valley in high-noon daylight.

Their legions would turn to grease and smoking cinders before their iron boots ever crossed the second furrow.

...To kill the sun, they couldn’t fight her in her daylight... They had to make her walk into the dark on her own.

[Bonus Chapter]

The Chapters I updated today are 5, and I’ll keep up this update rate until the end of the month to prepare for the new month’s mass release as well as cook up our Halloween Special, Heh, if you planned to give Supergifts... Please hold it off until our Special or even the new month so we can start it off with a bang! Thanks for all the support!