Warning: DOTA Dragon's Blood Book 1 spoilers.
"Do you love me?"
His shadow looms above her, haloed by the pale moon. His eyes are fathoms of nothingness, his voice a whisper on the wind.
She tries to speak, but all is broken within her. Blood, her own, clogs her throat, her nostrils, blinds her sight.
He glances away and turns, not waiting for an answer.
Her very essence quivers in dread, but she cannot move - her bones are in splinters, her powers siphoned.
Goddess… you have our boundless adoration!
We bask in your radiance,
For you are the light of our lives…
Age-old chants of unending devotion wither like the petals of a wilted rose. She no longer hears them; her thought yet struggles through the aether to find traces, pieces of herself - her followers, her devotees, her… children.
Filomena.
A name lost to the breaking waves of memory.
The Sage takes a few steps around her, hands clasped behind his back. "Selemene."
She shudders - for the first time in a thousand years, she trembles at the sound of his voice.
He stands before her again, his honeyed hair draping down his shoulders, watching as she struggles to breathe. His eyes are cold, his thin lips curving in a bleak smile.
For how long? For how long have you plotted, waited for this moment? Her eyes hold the question. She cannot speak but reaches him in thought, as in the early days of their courtship, many moons ago. Aeons ago.
"Forever, it seemed," comes the soft reply.
She coughs and he watches, still as a statue, while crimson sputterings trickle down her ashen cheek.
And is it all you've ever wanted?
He raises his chin. "All I ever wanted…" his eyes close; his smile fades. "After all this time, you still fail to understand." He tilts his head to one side. "Speak the word, Goddess."
I loved you once.
The empty rictus returns. "Once." A shadow, the remembrance of their last exchange.
Tears of agony drown her vision of him. She is dying; she knows it, and so does he. All her choices, all the trials, all her efforts, amounted to nothing.
"Speak the word, and be free," the Sage looks to the night skies, now free of the demon's taint. His eyes close as gusts of wind lift his hair and tug at his dark robes. On a whisper, he adds, "You know what I wish to hear."
She tries and fails, spluttering bloodied nothings, hating him more than chaos, more than the world that abandoned her.
You're my mother, not my Goddess…
The faint words ring like death bells in her awareness. Warm tears burst from the place within that lies empty and drained, where adoration and delight once fueled her strength. He is doing this. He weaves the memories back and thrusts them into her, and in a final, agonized hiss, her lips part to speak. A croak rustles in the void.
"Filo… mena…"
She feels no freedom; she feels nothing.
He bows his head into his chest, breathing a deep sigh, and then the earth shivers beneath her.
The Sage watches her, eyes ablaze as power imbues his drawn, sickly features. He raises a hand, wielding an unfettered rush of energy. "Very good," power crackles through him like lightning, and the moon is a red shadow. "There is a long road ahead," he says. "A story waiting to unfold."
The goddess of nothing gasps and wails for her shattered bones; her body hovers above the ground. Impaired, she is brought up to face him, her silver hair streaming in tendrils about her.
"This," he says, "is only the beginning."
He waves a hand and they're both gone, leaving the crumbling temple stones to their aging silence.