This amulet has always been Misery’s. Mother found it on her last tour, loose in the broken rock of an ancient, airless moon. The crew had discovered a new holy site—another holy mural! A whole seraph untouched, ripe for the armies of the Faithful!—and this sliver of unknown holystone, soil-shade and unremarkable, would have slipped past radar in the excitement. But Amaranth, acting on unknown instinct, dug in the scree until she found the thing, looped on a string. “I was guided,” she used to say. “The Forge showed me.” By her accounting she was pregnant with Misery by then, but it would take a month before she knew for sure. Mother should have turned over all finds to the duchex who commissioned the trip, but she secretly kept the amulet for her unborn child. It was Misery’s even before Misery was Misery.

On a final descent she catches the amulet between her fingers, holding it hostage against the gibbous backdrop of the ceiling lights. She imagines that its edges are glowing. When she shuts her eyes, an image of the Tear of Assan haunts her, the pale shadow of her mother’s amulet. Her amulet. Misery tightens her grip on the stone until its edge cuts into her palm.

Mother.

Misery clings to the good memories she has of Amaranth Nomaki. The shining bits holding up the roof and floors of her childhood. Her mother, brown and crow-eyed and wiry, fastidious in her presentation. Putting scented oils in her hair and fastening bits of metal and glass to it, no matter her state of mind. Amaranth could be stone when she was lucid. When she wasn’t, she was a storm, blowing through logic and mundane reality with ease. Refusing their strictures. Misery would hide in the folds of her robes, too young to talk, blowing raspberries at her angry brother while Mother stood between them with her fists on her hips. After she learned words, Misery endlessly clambered over Mother’s shoulders and asked for stories.

And oh, the stories Mother had. Stories for days, stories for the long ropy journeys between gate portals, stories to fill the spongy imagination of a preternaturally bored child. Stories about stonehunting, stories about the assholes she’d met, stories about the close shaves she’d had. Stories about far-flung wonders, like the cave in Delphin IV that was all holy opal, glittering like a sodium flame. The absurd geometries of Carmine Angus, built on ruins not made for humans to walk upon, six and a half stories in each fluted stone cubby, odd curves that the eye kept sliding off. And that sacred site they’d found, a singular and holy revelation: the mural of an archangel leading battle, the seraph cloistered in its stone hollow. The vacuum-sealed sanctity that pervaded every atom of the place.