Zaria's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Zaria built the pits with her own hands, dirt floors and torchlight, and she called them the only honest place that exists. She wanted all the scattered underground halls under her reign. But she knew where only one hall stood. Her own. The rest were rumors. A fighter cannot unite what she cannot find. So she climbed up. The spiral stair rose from the dirt into cloud light, glowing green and blue and purple. Each step pulled her farther from the torches. At the top she found the gods who kept maps she needed. She hated the brightness. She did not look away from it. In a stone colosseum painted with dying stars, two goddesses waited. Zaria knew them by reputation. Naga Shira, snakes writhing in her hair, eyes green as poison. And Oracle Titanlock, gold mask, arms thick as pillars. Oracle had never let her mask touch the floor. Both had wrestled across every underground hall. Both knew the way to each. "I need the locations," Zaria said. "The other halls. Give them to me." Oracle did not move. "No one gives a map. You earn it." "Fight her," Naga Shira said. Her snakes hissed. "Beat Oracle, you get what she knows." Zaria watched Oracle's feet first. She always did. Oracle shifted her weight to the left heel before she lunged. Zaria read it and stepped wide. The gold-masked goddess crashed past her into stone. They locked. Oracle was stronger. She drove Zaria back against a carved wall of exploding planets. Zaria's spine hit rock. Air left her. Oracle reached for her head, for the hold that had pinned a hundred gods. Zaria dropped low. She hooked Oracle's left heel, the same heel she had watched. She wrenched it out. Oracle fell hard, mask scraping toward the floor. The mask hovered an inch from the dirt. Oracle's hand slammed down to save it. That was the opening. Zaria rolled her, pinned both shoulders, and held. One. Two. Three. Oracle's shoulders stayed down. Silence. Naga Shira's snakes went still. Oracle pulled free and stood. She stared at Zaria a long moment. "You read my heel." "I read everyone's." Oracle wiped dirt from her mask. Her voice came out cold and exact. "Then you earned it." She knelt and drew in the dust. Lines. Marks. The paths to seven underground halls, scratched into the colosseum floor by her own hand. Zaria crouched and memorized every stroke. Seven halls. Seven doors she could finally reach. But Oracle was not finished. "The map is old," she said. "Three of these halls answer to one god now. He took them by force. He will not open his door to you." Zaria stared at the three marks clustered tight together. One owner. Three halls. A rival she had never met, already ahead of her. She stood. She had her map. Now she had an enemy to go with it.