---
And now here she was again, arriving not as a memory, not as a soft story, but as an injured unknown woman carried into the heart of an ancient god-house by its heir.
"What was her origin?" he had asked.
Elena had shaken her head immediately.
"Unknown."
"To them or to you?"
"To all of us," Elena had said. "Either your father did not know, or he refused to say. Your grandfather asked. Others asked. He answered none of it."
Sekhmet remembered hearing the next lines with an almost detached clarity, the sort that happened when the mind could not afford emotion and therefore sharpened itself instead.
"Your grandfather," Elena had said, "was the leader of Dawn House at the time. A proud man. A very powerful man. He demanded explanations. Your father gave him none. He brought home an unknown woman, protected her, named her carrying his child, and refused every question attached to her."
"And that cost him," Sekhmet had said.
Elena had nodded.
