It had to be admitted, though, that the Everburning Well was no fallen sparrow. It was an actual hole in the earth, maybe a dozen feet across, and the light gushing forth from it, light so bright that to stare directly into the depth for any length of time would blind the observer, could not be denied. Even the surrounding stone bent to the brute fact of the Well, having sagged and crumbled in a circular crater, as though the earth itself were trying to funnel all that came near into that astounding brightness. Adare had heard tales of Intarra’s devout hurling themselves in, hoping to unite with her prophet. There were the other stories, too, of men and women shoved into the blazing depths as punishment for their heresies.

Even from just inside the round wall ringing the site, with the Well still a good thirty paces off, Adare had to squint, half raising a hand to block the heat radiating from the column of light. Then, realizing how such a gesture might look to the assembled mob, she lowered the hand and straightened her back, her neck, forcing herself to stare directly into the brilliance. Driving rain streaked through the light, a thousand falling stars. The stabbing lightning over the water looked wan, weak, beside that inexorable radiance.

According to the tales, the light had burned day and night for over a thousand years, fueled by the piety of Intarra’s first prophet. There were variations to the myth, but all agreed on the basic facts. When a virgin named Maayala appeared in the city—then the capital of an independent Kresh—Odam the Blind had her seized for peddling a new faith. The Kreshkan kings, Odam very much among them, worshipped Achiet—their name for the lord of war—while Maayala insisted on the primacy of the Lady of Light, arguing on the streets and in private homes that all light, that of the hearth, of the stars, of the sun, was one, and that one given by Intarra. She claimed that Intarra’s light animated all human souls, giving blood its heat, bodies their warmth. According to Maayala, mortals need not fear death, since the dissolution of the body frees the fragment of the divine hidden within, allowing it to join with the greater lights of earth and the heavens. Maayala absolved the Kreshkans of their martial duty, claiming that everyone, even the weak, even the crippled, so long as their skin remained warm to the touch, carried the divine spark inside. No fighting was necessary. No heroic feats in battle.

Odam declared the woman a liar, a heretic, and an impostor. He had her dragged to the courtyard of his fortress, tied to a stake, and, in mockery of her unflagging worship of light, he had her burned.

“If the Lady of Light loves her,” he famously said, “the Lady of Light can take her.”

And take her Intarra did.