Lilith Shadowflame's Arc

Chapter 15 of 21

By dawn the throne hall was full and the mountain path was still bringing more. Lilith stood at her dais and counted. Twenty at the altar. Forty behind them, pressed shoulder to shoulder. Another line waited outside the doors, kneeling in the wet grass. The succubus lay quiet on the bed where they had left her. Damien stood at Lilith's right, mark bright, breath steady. She could hear the far-back rows shifting. People who waited too long walked away. She had seen it in the villages when she was still hunting for a name. "They won't hold," Damien said. He kept his voice low. "The back ones are already looking at the trees." Lilith knew it. The throne hall had been carved for her, not for a crowd. The altar sat between the doors and her dais, and the doors were the choke point. She needed a room that swallowed people instead of spitting them out. She needed it before the coronation, and the coronation was today. She stepped down from the dais. She laid her palm on Damien's chest, over the mark, and drew. Heat climbed her arm. His jaw set. He did not pull away. "Walk with me," she said. They crossed the altar together. She lifted the offering bowl in one hand as she passed, cup and pomegranates and small dark cakes, and carried it out the doors. The kneelers on the grass raised their faces. Lilith kept walking, past them, to the flat shelf of rock below the temple where the mountain leveled out. She set the bowl down. She drew again from Damien's mark, deeper this time, and pushed the power into the ground. Obsidian split up out of the stone. It rose in ribs, then arches, then a high pointed front with tall narrow windows. Purple glass filled the windows as the stone climbed. The doors formed last, black and gold, wide enough for ten to walk through together. A vast gothic hall stood where the shelf had been, big enough for every worshipper on the mountain and the ones still climbing. Damien was pale. He stayed on his feet. "Move the altar," Lilith said. "Inside. Center aisle." He raised his hand. The obsidian altar tore free of the throne hall floor behind them and slid across the grass on its own weight. It settled in the new hall's center. Above it, Lilith called a column of purple fire that fell like water from the vaulted ceiling and did not touch the stone below. The waiting crowd stood up on their own. No one had to tell them to come inside. Lilith walked up the aisle with Damien behind her. Her throne hall was empty now. Her coronation had a room. She had spent more of him to build it, and every worshipper on the mountain was already walking through the doors toward her. But she grabbed Damien as they approached, whispered to him, "Stay strong and be ready, as I am giving you immortality, my one secret." She drew him close and bit his neck, drinking from him and giving him immortality in one fast movement. Her last gift she held onto for one she didn’t even know existed until him.