She did not perform the calling.
That was the thing she had been turning over since she left Elion in the anteroom — the expectation, the assumption she had carried without examining it, that reaching across the boundary between the human and the divine would require something ceremonial. A ritual. Components. The kind of elaborate preparation that announced itself as significant before it began.
She had gone to bed thinking about it and woken up knowing that was wrong.
Her power had never worked that way. It had never required performance or preparation or the right arrangement of elements in the right order. It had worked the way her instincts worked — directly, without ceremony, finding its target through some mechanism she could not fully explain and had stopped trying to. She had screamed in a valley and an army had stopped existing. She had not prepared for that. She had not arranged anything. She had simply been pushed past a point and the thing inside her had responded.
