Page 91 of Kazimir

Sariel felt it too.

His eyes flicked up.

Every light in Obsidian blew out at once.

Darkness hit for less than a second.

Then blinding radiance erupted from the center of the club.

It was not white. Not exactly. It held every gold a sunrise ever wished it could become and every silver a moon envied. It flooded the walls, the floors, the ceiling, drove down the corridor in a wave so intense Sariel recoiled on instinct. His hand loosened.

I dropped.

My knees struck the floor hard. Air tore back into my lungs in a ragged, humiliating gasp. I caught myself on one hand and threw the other over my eyes too late. Even through closed lids the brilliance burned crimson. The whole building seemed to ring with it. Not a sound. A presence. Music translated into force. Thunder taught to move like grace.

Somewhere on the main floor, metal clanged as weapons hit the ground. Voices cut off. Someone cried out once and then fell silent in awe or terror.

I looked despite the pain.

At the center of Obsidian, where moments ago battle had been ripping the club apart, a woman stood in radiant splendor.

Stood was too simple a word. She occupied the room the way dawn occupied a horizon: inevitable, transforming, merciless to what preferred darkness. Light poured from her, and yet did not flatten her shape. It loved her shape. Every line of her was impossible and perfectly true; beauty made sovereign rather than ornamental. Her hair moved like living flame and river water both. Her skin held the glow of stars seen through tears. Power draped her more richly than any fabric. The floor beneath her looked sanctified simply for being allowed to bear her weight.

I had never seen her before.

I knew her instantly.

The Goddess.

Even Sariel faltered.

His hand, the one that had held the unmaking light, lowered by a fraction. His face did not lose arrogance, but something entered it that had not been there before.

Fear.

She turned her gaze on him.

No shout preceded it. No flourish. She only looked.

The pressure of that attention went through the whole club. I felt it in my bones, in my scars, in the old hollow places where memory should have been. Around us the fighting had stopped as thoroughly as if reality itself had laid down a command and every creature living or dead had obeyed.

When she spoke, her voice was music and thunder bound into one impossible instrument.

“You overstep, Archangel,” she said.

Nothing in Sariel’s face could pretend otherwise.

I was still on my knees when Sariel found enough of his pride to answer her.

That, perhaps more than anything, told me how diseased arrogance could become when fed by unchallenged power.

He stepped back from me but did not retreat far. His wings drew up behind him, broad and brilliant and now faintly ragged at the edges under the Goddess’s light. The hand that had nearly unmade me curled at his side. His voice remained resonant, but strain threaded through it.

“She is fallen,” he said. “And further corrupted. She has mingled celestial essence with a creature outside divine order. She has bound herself to undeath. To permit it is to invite contamination into cosmic law.”

The Goddess’s expression changed little. It did not have to.

Her displeasure intensified the light around her until Obsidian’s shattered floorboards and blood-streaked walls shone as if every atom had been compelled to testify. Sariel’s warriors had gone still throughout the club, some shielded behind uplifted arms, others staring at her like men who had spent too long misunderstanding the hierarchy of heaven and earth.