They slipped out of the living room without ceremony.
Lapis had attached herself to Alice on the sofa and was already demanding a full account of how the harem had come to be, which meant neither of them would pay attention to their absence for a while.
Ashen pulled the bedroom door shut behind them, and the noise from the living room vanished. The master bedroom was quiet. Evening light slipped through the curtains in long, muted bands.
"Are you ready?" Ashen asked.
Seraphine turned to face him. "Yes."
He studied her for a moment. She held his gaze without wavering, but he still looked worried.
"Sera." He crossed to her and cupped her face in both hands, tilting it up. "This is not like the training sessions. It will pull at things you do not want pulled at. There will be a point where you will not even realize what is happening until it is already happening." His thumb brushed her cheek. "You might come out of it hating what you felt in there. You might come out angry, ashamed, and more."
He paused.
"But whatever you come back as, I am here. I will pull you out every time until you can pull yourself out."
"So don't be afraid."
Seraphine looked at him for a long moment until the slight tension between her brows softened.
"Then I am not worried."
She rose onto her toes and warmly kissed the corner of his mouth, then let herself be guided to the bed.
He settled her first, arranging the pillows behind her, then climbed in beside her. She turned onto her side and he folded around her from behind, his arms crossing her waist, her legs tangling with his, her back against his chest. She could feel his breathing through her shoulder blades.
His lips brushed her temple.
"Sweet dreams."
He pressed two fingers together and tapped them lightly against her forearm.
Seraphine's eyes closed, and the room disappeared.
***
***
***
Paradise was loud in the mornings.
The bells of the Covenant's central spire rang the hour, and by the time the final note faded, the streets below the Saintess's tower were already alive. Vendors were setting up stalls, pilgrims were arriving through the eastern gate, and healers were moving between the district clinics with their supply carts rattling over the cobblestones.
Seraphine stood at her window and watched it all with a private warmth she kept to herself, because a Saintess was supposed to look serene, not delighted.
She had always loved mornings in Paradise. The city was never more itself than when it was waking up.
Her attendant knocked and entered with the day's schedule. A healing session at the eastern clinic, a mediation docket afterward, and an address to the new Covenant initiates at noon. The usual weight of a usual day.
"Will you take breakfast before the clinic, Your Holiness?"
"Please." She turned from the window with a smile. "And tell Sister Voss I will need her at the initiates' address. She is better at the inspiring speeches than I am."
"She will be pleased to hear that."
"She will be insufferable about it for a week, but yes."
The attendant hid a smile and withdrew.
Seraphine sat down to breakfast and watched the city move beneath her. She felt, with uncomplicated certainty, that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
The eastern clinic was full by the time she arrived.
She worked through the cases methodically, moving from bed to bed.
A construction worker with a crushed hand cried out when the bones realigned, and she held his other hand until the shock passed and his breathing steadied.
A child with a fever that had lingered too long, her mother standing in the doorway, rigid with worry; Seraphine caught the woman's eye over the child's head and gave her a small, deliberate nod before the scan was even finished, because waiting was the worst part and there was no reason to make her wait another second longer.
By the end of the session, her power reserves were low and her feet ached.
She sat in the staff room with a cup of tea and let herself rest. One of the younger healers was complaining about a patient who had been rude to her. Another was laughing about something that had happened during the night shift. The ordinary texture of people doing hard work together.
Seraphine listened, said nothing, and felt content.
Though she could feel something changing in her as the days she lived as the Saintess continued to accumulate.
The change was not dramatic.
That was what made it difficult to name at first.
It began gradually, and once the gradual had gone on long enough, the all at once seemed inevitable in hindsight.
The first thing she noticed, weeks into what the dream painted as her tenure, was that the city had stopped being beautiful to her.
It wasn't ugly either. Just neutral.
The morning bells rang, and the sound passed through her without settling anywhere. The vendors' stalls became arrangements of objects. The pilgrims moving through the eastern gate became bodies in motion, performing a function.
She noticed, and she called it fatigue. She had been working hard after all.
Then she saw that the child with the fever, when she thought back on the session, had not especially moved her. She had been thorough and careful. She had done the work well. But the urgency she usually felt, accompanied by the sharp pull of protectiveness whenever a child was involved, was absent from the memory.
She tried to convince herself she had simply been focused on the technical side.
Then a woman brought her a bunch of roadside flowers, the cheap kind that grew along the edges of the road, and told her that her mother had recovered fully and that she wanted Seraphine to have them.
…Seraphine looked at the flowers and felt nothing.
But as a Saintess, she can't display 'nothing'.
So, she thanked the woman with a warm smile. She said the right words, and she sent her away reassured.
Then she stood in the corridor holding the flowers and tried to find the feeling that should have been there, the small, ordinary pleasure of being given something freely, and found only calm.
She put the flowers in a vase and went back to work.
The mediations grew easier as the weeks passed.
Two merchants arguing over a contract boundary; she listened to both, identified the rational resolution, and delivered it.
They left satisfied. By then, she could no longer remember which one had been the more sympathetic case, because the idea of sympathy had started to lose shape.
A couple in conflict; she heard them out, worked through the points of friction, and gave them a practical path forward. They wept and thanked her. Their tears seemed to indicate strong emotion. She observed that with mild intellectual interest.
The initiates' addresses were the strangest.
She stood before the young women beginning their service and delivered the speech she had given dozens of times before, the words about purpose and sacrifice and the calling of care.
The words were true; she checked them against her understanding, and they remained true. But they came out of her mouth without the warmth that had once traveled beside them.
She watched the initiates' faces. Some of them were moved. She understood that this was the desired outcome.
…Unfortunately, she felt nothing about having achieved it.
One of them stayed behind after the others had filed out, a girl of perhaps seventeen who was clearly working up to something.
At last she said, "Your Holiness, I was frightened about this. That I had made the wrong choice. But when you spoke, I felt certain. I wanted you to know."
Seraphine held the girl's gaze and thought: she needs reassurance.
"You are exactly where you are supposed to be," she said, which was the most honest answer she could give.
The girl left radiant.
Seraphine stood alone in the hall and searched for any remnant of what she would once have felt, and found only the faint warmth of a dying fire; still there, technically, already almost gone.
The day came when she understood that she was no longer experiencing emotion in any meaningful sense.
She was not unhappy, nor did she appear numb. Not the numbness of grief at least.
She was simply unaffected. The world offered her information, and she processed it without friction. Pain required attention; she gave it attention. Joy passed through her like weather; she noted it and moved on. Love, wherever she searched for it, existed only as an abstract concept. She knew she had felt it, understood its shape, but… she could not find its heat.
She stood at her window in the early morning, watching the city wake up, and felt nothing for it at all.
And finally, she understood, with the clarity granted by her now undistracted mind, that this was the purest form of her path she had ever reached.
Every action she took from here would be genuinely selfless.
Every healing would be given without agenda, without any contamination of personal feeling.
Every mediation would be conducted without bias, without the drag of preference.
She would become the most effective Saintess the Covenant had ever produced.
She watched the morning light move across the rooftops and found it neither beautiful nor plain.
Then she was back at the beginning.