Nearly two days later she walked the halls and marched into the Sanctum, head held high, utterly determined to finish her morning Divination’s.

She had been sleeping more poorly and every time she made a move to toss away an article of Eris clothing or move his shoes off the floor at the edge of the bed, she found that she simply shifted his things instead of discarding them.

The struggle was infuriating and finally she pressed herself into returning for Divinations. She knew the Calm of prayer would help her. She just had to try harder.

Her ribs throbbed, and there were bruises on her body that she didn’t care to acknowledge. Her nose and face were puffy, but relatively unfazed considering how viscous the fight had been.

Hours after her confrontation with David there had been a buzz of conversation. Most of it she had ignored, but she knew that there were people who were very angry with her for maiming and embarrassing their would be leader Brother David. His ear and scalp wounds would be seen to by one of their healers. And If David had received help quick enough it was likely that he still had an ear to use. But it was clear that his injuries had let him indisposed to the morning Divinations.

Or was it his hurt pride that held him bound?

She didn’t care. She put David from her mind.

Ann glanced around the Sanctum, clocking all of the bowed heads, and the tense whispers that touched the air. Many Brothers and Sisters looked at her, then glanced away before she could catch their eyes.

She cared not what they were thinking, or what they felt about her. She also made no moves to step further into the room, until she had placed her Aurora around her back.

She had taken to wearing her Aurora at her back as she traversed the Halls for fear of getting caught unawares in a surprise blitz.

It was utterly terrifying to spend every waking hour in these quiet battles, peering over her shoulder to see the dagger like gazes that chased her through the halls ever since she had been officially elevated by the Counsel. And by Hovel.

She knew she was partly paranoid, but she also knew that she was being hunted.

The cruel whispers, and the sudden icy probes and jabs of the other Mana users constantly checking to see if her Aurora was up. Checking to see if she was protecting herself with her Will. She shuddered to think of the humiliation she would suffer if she let her guard down for one second and relaxed her Aurora out in the open.

She knew the attacks would come swiftly. They would come in multiples. Wards. Ann knew that to be burned by the Ward of another Alchemists was as humiliating as a spit to the face...and as painful as a blade to the soul. And she had no doubt that many of her fellow Children of the Sun, burned with the desire to inflict both on her, or anyone they felt was not their equal.

Taking a moment to settle herself, Ann descended from the stairway.

Aurora in place, Ann neared the central Mats at the head of a group of nameless Alchmists and slowly dropped, painfully to her knees. Stifling a moan, she folded her robe above her head. The cool fabric of her cowl blocking out the light and then she closed her eyes and let her mind wander. She didn’t feel comfortable enough to bow onto her hands and knees so she sat up right, and bowed her head.

I give you my Strength

I give you my peace

I give you my Life

I give you Strength

I give you peace

I give you Life

Scion of Darkness. Father of the Sun. I give you my Will.

Hours passed. She chanted in silent prayer, and meditation. She tried hard to find that calm center that had always been there in the Divinations waiting on her. But just as with every time she closed her eyes...or tried to sleep lately, all she felt was the deathlike grip of horror.

She began to tremble. And the words in her hear became twisted with loss and desperation. She needed...absolution. She no longer had anything to give. But she did have need.

Scion, Father, Brother. Eternity Giver.

Grant me your strength. I have none left to offer.

Grant me Peace...I am lost in chaos. Free me.

Grant me new life.

Free me, from Erick

Please GOD....

It was a selfish, blasphemous thing she was doing and Ann knew it.

To ask the Scion for more than they had already granted and promised to humanity was wrong of her.

They had already promised their Children a glorious destiny, a destiny free of death, and full of glory above the creatures of the world. A destiny to wield Mana and press their power upon the world. They were to be immortal!!

And yet she didn’t want these things. She didn’t desire them, and she never had. She saw no merit in eternity, even though she had always believed in the promise. But following a Dogma....and having true Faith were two very different things. Everything about what she had wanted had been an emulation of what Eric desired in life. An imitation, but she had nothing to imitate now.

She had no reason to clamor to the dogma of the Bane or the Brother Hood anymore.

Her faith had never been a part of it. And even as she prayed for selfish things, she understood that these selfish prayers were all she wanted fulfilled.

If she could be freed by her GOD, if her God could just, do this for her...she knew her faith would be justified and worthy. Her faith could be something worth following now that she had no one to emulate.

She wanted this proof , so that she could be convinced that she had a reason to live for an eternity.

Because all this God and all the Brother Hood had proven to her time and again was that Pain was her only reward. She did not want a GOD who promised an Eternity of suffering.

She pressed her lids tightly together and quickly opened them again when all of her senses were assaulted.

She gaged as Eric’s headless body was suddenly before her. A memory, a vison that haunted her restless mind. It seemed almost like a rebuke from GOD itself, and just like that she was cruelly put back into the horrible moment beneath the bowels.

She saw the shredded vestiges of his heart slashed by talons, sitting on the white floor of a cave, the coppery smell of piss and feces rotting in the air, around the mangled glossy pulp of shredded human intestines, torn robes, dismembered limbs and shattered bones.

“Where’s his head? His Head is gone!”

Ann heard herself whispering in bewilderment as her hands hovered over the carcass. She didn’t know what to do.

Insane cackles littered the air, they crawled across her senses alighting unknown depths of terror as she saw the Bane standing over her. A monstrous mountain of fur and fangs...and there on her Gods shoulder there was a singular eyeball sitting, glaring down at her. The singular eyeball, sat tangled in wisps of white bloody fur. A long thick vein hung from the organ and the pupil was black and dull, and dead.

His eyeball...His silken hair stuck in the Banes gnashing fangs.

Suddenly she didn’t have to guess where his head had gone....

Ann came out of Meditation as if struck by a rod, her eyes full of panic alighted on the image of the Scions eye, the symbolic image threaded into the base of the Mat she was kneeling on.

Stifling a scream, sweat dripping from her chin, Ann bolted to her feet, spun and fled the Sanctum. She cared not for the multitude of eyes that glared at her as she exited. She was trying hard not to curse the Selfish GOD who had taken something prescious from her, and would not release her from the pain of its absence. She was so devout. She was so strong. She was their CHILD.

Fuming, sweating, disgusted and hot in more than one way, Ann started to tear at the bodice of her robes.

There were parts in the fabric about the neck of the Robes that could be folded and rearranged so that the space about her cleavage could breathe, through a gossamer thin sheath of material, built across the breasts. She clawed at her clothing in an impatient flurry, barely breathing easier as the stifling heat was released about her breast and shoulders.

Wanting nothing more than the cool touch of water on her skin Ann rounded a corner and had to stifle a scream of surprise as she barreled head long into a long lean, hard body. Stumbling to an undignified halt, she huffed up at the person whom she had collided with, her mouth set with fury and damnnations....but these things wilted as she glanced into the face of Brother Memphis.

Ann quailed her initial instinct to step back, no matter how her legs screamed to do just that, as the Alchemist’s before her reached out and clasped her right forearm, in large powerful hands. Brother Memphis was one of the few men in the Brotherhood who genuinely terrified her.

It wasn’t his power that scared her, but he was formidable to look at. He was a house of a man, with lean graceful, arms, legs, and chest. 

With course brown facial hair, and a nearly clean shaven crown that curled across his cheek in what Ann was sure he believed was fashionable but to her was needlessly flamboyant. He was a bull of a man, with wily green eyes, so dark, they could have been mistaken for brown in the dull florescent light of their home.

And it was those eyes that terrified her in the moment. And his face.

Memphis and Eric could have been siblings for how similar they appeared, even side by side. It seemed that the old wives tale was true everyone had a twin out in the world unrelated by blood. Her stomach spiraled as she alighted on the face that she hadn’t wanted to see.