“You are very brave,” she said. She looked first at Agnes, then at Leo, as if silently commanding them to respect what they were about to witness.

Leo gave a serious nod and Agnes straightened her shoulders.

Wyllin’s mouth twitched, then she gripped the moonstone and bent over it with closed eyes. Leela thought she saw her lips move as if speaking to the stone, and when Wyllin looked up, her pale irises had turned brilliant blue like a light had been switched on inside her. Leela felt the same disorienting sensation she had experienced when she put the High Priestess’s circlet on, as if she was being pulled very quickly through a narrow tunnel.

The courtyard they were in blurred and disappeared, and then Leela was in the Sky Gardens, but they were bright and cheery, with vibrant flowers and verdant trees growing overhead, not the dead, withered bramble she was used to. The vines that surrounded the moonstone were sea green and rose-gold and no fruit grew among them. The air was cool, but not cold, and the columns glowed pleasantly blue, the paths like ribbons of pure white. There was nothing eerie about the place at all.

“I want to go back,” a young woman was saying. “Just one last time, before we leave. I want to see him again, to say goodbye.”

Leela’s shock at seeing the young High Priestess registered somewhere, but her mouth was moving, words unbidden coming out, and she knew she was Wyllin in this memory, as she had been the High Priestess in the circlet before.

“There are so many already down on the planet,” Wyllin said. “To replenish it before we leave.”

“Exactly,” the High Priestess said, though in Wyllin’s mind she was Elysse, and only Elysse. She was not the High Priestess yet, though Leela knew (because Wyllin did) that she had already been chosen to succeed Luille, the current High Priestess. “No one will notice a few more additions.”

The fragment of Leela’s mind registered with shock that she was seeing a memory from over nine hundred years ago.

Elysse’s face turned pleading, making sad eyes that Wyllin knew would win her the argument. They always did.

“You are certain it is just to say goodbye?” Wyllin asked. “You could stay with him, if you wished, as others have done before. Remember Ebereen, who stayed behind on the planet of roses and ice?”

“I am not a planet-keeper,” Elysse insisted, though Wyllin felt skeptical.

“But you care for this male,” she said.

“I do,” Elysse admitted. She looked forlorn as she stared through the large, clear pool, down to the planet below. “But I care for my City more. And I have been chosen. I must accept the role Mother Sun has assigned for me.”

Wyllin put her hand on Elysse’s arm. “It is such a weight for one so young,” she said. “Mother Sun must see greatness in you.”