The Hawk opened her mouth to speak but only choked out a cough, her eyelids heavy. Dark circles, much like the Sun Warden’s near the lake, had formed below her eyes. Mucus dribbled in a continuous stream from her nose, now spiderwebbed with burst capillaries.

A cry echoed outside and Anji felt her stomach drop, but it was only a solitary bird circling the dark tower at the mountain’s peak.

“What is this place?” Anji said. She didn’t much care about it, but she wanted to shift the subject from her education, and by extension her parents. From the life soon to be cut short.

The Hawk’s bloodshot eyes flicked to the tower. “The towers were precursors to the Inheritance cathedrals, all abandoned before the One Path even started gaining power. You said you’d lived on the streets…”

Anji nodded.

“So you likely got food from the Order,” the Hawk went on. “Did you attend service?”

The services and the food they provided were the only things Anji had looked forward to for nearly a year on the street. She’d counted the days until the morning the cathedral doors would swing open to a crowd of waiting urchins. The Order of Inheritance was favored among all the poorest denizens across the continent of Makona. Theirs was a religion of generosity, of kindness and service. Above all, the acolytes of the Inheritance counseled gratitude to the Nine Gods who, according to the thin volumes they’d handed out freely on street corners, had birthed all creation out of a dance that had lasted a million years. After the dance, the Gods had apparently departed creation and left the creatures of the world to their own devices, never to intervene again.

“They wouldn’t let us eat without staying for the sermon. I was cold and lonely and—” she stopped herself. She didn’t need to explain herself to this woman. But the Hawk nodded as though what she’d said had made perfect sense.

“My father used to take me,” the Hawk said, her voice slurring, stopping and starting a little at a time. Her eyes seemed to lose focus, but the corner of her mouth twitched up before she rolled her gaze back to Anji. “Did you notice where in the city the cathedral was built?”

Anji thought back to her days scrounging in Mudtown’s reeking streets, the crowded buildings, the milling, stinking press of bodies, and the giant black spire of rock that towered above it all. Higher even than the belltower in Laurelside Square, which she used to climb with her mother to watch carrier pigeons roost.

“It was built on a hill…?” she said, more a question than a statement, but the Hawk nodded.

“They build on the highest points they can,” said the Hawk, pointing vaguely at the tower above, “to shorten the distance their gratitude travels, ‘so it may permeate the skies.’” She scoffed. “Load of nonsense.”