Suspended in that eerie consciousness, Kahina felt her perspective shifting again.

In a temple with high walls, threads of the strange light that had spread through the land hovered in the air like hardened sunshine. A group of women gathered the threads. Kahina could see that their eyes had drunk the light and now glowed silver. One by one, the threads were set into an instrument no larger than a child’s head. One woman, curious, strummed the instrument. Time shuddered to a halt, and for a terrible moment, the slivers of power within the earth creaked, that calligraphy of light flashing in warning. The woman flattened her hand, killing the sound instantly.

But the damage was done.

Across the world, Kahina saw fires erupting, newborn cities crumbling, people crushed beneath them. Kahina could no longer see her own body, but she felt her soul shuddering in horror. That instrument was not to be played.

In the visions, Time spun forward.

Kahina saw the women’s descendants spread across the world. She could always recognize them by the unearthly hue to their eyes, which was just uncanny enough to draw attention, but not enough to arouse suspicion. The strange instrument passed between them, smuggled through portals that pinched time and space, whirling through the ages while empires fought their wars and hungry gods demanded blood and hungrier priests demanded sacrifice, and all the while, the sun fell and the moon rose, and the instrument lay wondrously silent.

Abruptly, the visions released her.

Kahina fell, and it was a fall that seemed to pass through lifetimes. She felt the scrape of ancient ziggurats against her cheeks, tasted cold coins on her tongue, felt the pelt of extinct animals ripple beneath her feet. Abruptly, she found herself on the ground and staring up at her mother. The vastness that once stretched her soul had fled, and she had never felt so small or cold.

“I know,” said her mother, not unkindly.

When Kahina could trust herself to speak—and it took longer than she thought, for it seemed the Arabic she knew kept slipping off her tongue—she croaked: “What was that?”

“A vision granted to the Blessed, so that we might understand our sacred duty,” said her mother. “We have other names, I am told, for our family scattered long ago. We are the Lost Muses, the Norns, the Daughters of Bathala, the Silent Apsaras. That instrument you saw holds many names in many tongues, but its function is always the same … when played, it disrupts the divine.”

“The divine,” repeated Kahina.

It felt too small a word given what she had seen.

“My mother spoke of a place built from the ruins of a land whose sacred group misused its power. Played outside the confines of that stained temple, the instrument will unleash a destruction that levels the world,” said Kahina’s mother. “Played within the temple, it is said to join together all those slivers of divinity you glimpsed. Some say that it can be raised into a tower, which one may scale like a building and claim godhood for themselves. It is not for us to know. Our duty is laid out in one command…”