The words emerged barely louder than breath, scraped raw from a throat lined with dust and desperation. Elliot's eyes burned with the particular agony of wanting to weep when no moisture remained. The desert had leached every drop of water from his body over three days of relentless flight—three days without reaching a water-pit, without finding one of the blessed stones that wept precious liquid when the priests sang the old prayers in voices that carried across the dunes. Three days of his tongue swelling in his mouth, of his lips cracking and bleeding, of his body slowly consuming itself from the inside out.
"This is how I die." The declaration carried no drama, no anger. Just exhausted acceptance. The simple recognition that flesh had limits, and his had been exceeded.
Defeated, bone-weary beyond anything he'd ever known or imagined possible, he sagged backward. His spine met the shrine's rear wall just below the goddess's towering niche, his body sliding down the carved stone until he sat in an ungainly sprawl, legs splayed before him like a discarded puppet. His head lolled back against the rock.
Wetness soaked through his tunic immediately.
The sensation shocked through him like lightning—cold, impossible, utterly wrong in this parched land where moisture was worth more than gold. This wasn't the slight dampness of morning dew condensing on stone during the brief, cool hours before dawn. This wasn't the phantom moisture of his own sweat evaporating. This was true wetness, deep and pervasive and real. It spread across his back in a wave, his shoulders, seeping through the threadbare fabric of his tunic to touch his skin with what felt disturbingly like living fingers.
Water. Genuine water. The kind that flowed from the water-stones in the sacred pits, the kind that kept entire settlements clinging to survival, the kind that meant the absolute difference between life and death under the sun's merciless judgment.
His mind reeled. Water didn't seep from stone without ceremony, without prayer, without priests performing the old rituals.
He twisted violently to look, ignoring the way his cracked ribs screamed white-hot protest, ignoring the grinding sensation of bone against inflamed tissue.
The rose-red stone behind him rippled.
Rippled.
Like water disturbed by a stone's throw. Like quicksilver poured across a tilted surface. Like nothing stone had ever done or should ever be capable of doing. The carved surface—the intricate geometric patterns, the figures frozen in high relief, the smooth bands of color that told the story of geological ages—all of it moved in slow, hypnotic waves that defied every law of matter and nature. Light danced across those impossible undulations even in the chamber's gathered shadows, and the stone itself began to glow with faint luminescence. Not the warm rose-red of sunlit sandstone, but something fundamentally other—the color of moonlight on perfectly still water, the color of pearls clutched in a dead woman's hand, pale and cold and utterly foreign to this place of desert warmth and ancient rock.
The water-stone. The sacred stone. The rock that She had blessed, that She had transformed, that She had given the power to weep life-sustaining water in this waterless hell.
What is this? What—
Something struck the back of his skull with vicious precision.
Not a clumsy blow, not the wild swing of an enraged man. This was sharp, calculated, delivered with the practiced accuracy of someone who knew exactly how hard to hit a human skull to keep its owner conscious while inflicting maximum pain. Stars detonated across his vision—red and gold and white, entire spinning galaxies of agony erupting behind his eyes. His hands flew to his head on pure instinct, fingers probing desperately at the rapidly swelling knot beneath his matted, filthy hair. He could feel it rising under his touch, hot and tender, his pulse throbbing through it like a second heart.
But the world didn't fade to merciful black. His consciousness remained stubbornly, agonizingly present, sharp-edged and unwelcome.
Through the spinning haze of pain, understanding crystallized like salt precipitating from brine.
That blow wasn't meant to render him unconscious. It was meant to keep him awake. To keep him aware and present for whatever was coming next.
"How dare you, you worthless wretch!"
The voice hit him a heartbeat before the boot did—striking with the full force of righteous fury, the particular rage of someone who believed absolutely in their authority to inflict violence. The kick crashed into his ribs with a grown man's full weight behind it, lifting Elliot bodily off the polished floor, then slamming him back down against the stone hard enough to crack bone. The air exploded from his lungs in an involuntary, retching gasp. He couldn't draw breath to replace it. His diaphragm had seized, paralyzed by trauma.
Another kick followed before his nervous system could process the first. Then another. Each one punctuated by the militiaman's screaming rage, each one targeting the same spot on his ribs with cruel precision.
"You filthy, shit-eating dog!" The voice belonged to Watchman Kael—Elliot recognized it now through the haze of pain, recognized the particular cadence of authority mixed with contempt. "You slave-born scum! You dare put your defiling hands on sacred stone? You dare pollute this shrine with your presence?"
A boot caught him in the kidney. Elliot's body arched involuntarily, his mouth opening in a silent scream. No sound emerged—he still couldn't draw breath.
"Answer me, filth!" Another kick, this one to his thigh, striking the nerve cluster that turned his entire leg into dead weight. "What intelligence did you sell to the resistance? What did you tell them about the excavation site? How much Veridia gold did they pay for your betrayal?"
Elliot's hands scrabbled weakly at the floor, trying to find purchase, trying to push himself away. His fingers slipped in something wet—his own blood, he realized distantly, painting the rose-red stone darker. Or was it the water still seeping from the wall? Both?
"Please—" He finally managed to gasp the word, though it emerged as barely more than a wheeze. "I didn't—I don't—"
"Liar!"
The boot came down on his outstretched hand. Elliot felt bones crack—small ones in his fingers, the delicate architecture that allowed fine manipulation. The pain was exquisite, detailed, intimate. His vision whited out at the edges.
"You ran for three days, slave. Three days through hostile territory, without water, without food, directly toward this shrine." Kael's voice had dropped to something more dangerous than shouting—the cold, measured tone of someone conducting an interrogation. "That's not the action of a panicked fugitive. That's the action of someone with a destination. Someone with purpose."
The boot lifted from his hand. Elliot tried to curl his fingers inward, but several refused to obey.
"So I'll ask you one more time, and I suggest you answer truthfully." Kael's shadow fell across him, blocking what little light reached the floor. "Who are you working for? What were you told to find here? And what exactly did you do to the water-stone to make it react to your touch?"
Through the pain, through the fear, through the absolute certainty that he was about to die on this polished floor, Elliot's mind snagged on that last question.
Make it react to my touch?
He hadn't done anything. The stone had moved on its own. The water had seeped without prayer or ritual. The goddess—or whatever power dwelt in this place—had responded to his desperate plea.
Hadn't it?
"I—" He coughed, tasted blood. "I don't know what you're talking about. I just—I was running. I fell. I didn't—"
Kael's boot slammed into his face.