His head tilted to the side, and the change drew her eyes to the open neck of his shirt, where she could see the barest hint of a flicker across his chest like her own. Only his was not just skyfire. It flashed between a multitude of colors—the red of a firestorm, the black of a twister filled with debris, the brilliant white of a snowstorm. Again and again, she saw that flicker, the order varied and of no pattern that she could discern. She wondered if all the souls he had taken, all the others he had added to his own, fought for dominance inside him. It would explain the chaotic nature of his soul. It felt too complex, too big for her to fathom. And it was filled with broken pieces and gaping chasms that on another spirit she would have done her best to heal. But she was certain these were not the kind of wounds that could or should be mended.

“I do as the goddess wishes,” he finally answered, returning to their meal, tearing off another piece and holding it out toward her.

She hesitated and asked, “The goddess?”

He shoved the meat at her, and she took it, chewing as quickly as she could.

“Surely you, who have been granted her greatest gift, are a believer?” he asked, staring intently at her, a dangerous warning in his gaze. She tried not to let her eyes flick over to the scar that surrounded his eye. Intensity crackled in the air around him, and she had a feeling if she could see the storms over his heart, they would be flickering wildly.

“I believe,” she said, regardless of whether it was true. Honestly, she was not sure what she believed any longer. She had been raised to believe the goddess a superstition of the past, a myth, but everything else she knew to be true had been turned upside down. She was not sure of anything any longer. “I believe there is something bigger than us, something bigger than the petty things the world becomes so focused on. But do you mean … do you speak to the goddess?”

He sneered. “I do not need to. She gave me an ability that only gods have had before me. To pour out storms according to my will. The last time such a skill was needed, it was the Time of Tempests, and the goddess had been betrayed by the very followers she had blessed. Now, all these years later, the same is true again. Those who are goddess-blessed have forgotten their origins, forgotten where their powers came from. They have given in to greed and perversion and cruelty. It is time to set things right once more, to cleanse the world of those who shame the goddess, to rid the world of Stormlings once and for all. I am the weapon she sent to do it.”

“And what am I?” Aurora asked, her heart thundering.