They began to carve her name into stone.
Not as Talia. Not as consort. Not even as priestess.
But as She-Who-Bore-the-God.
The Aberrants, those who had been twisted by the dream of the unborn deity, now walked barefoot across razors to etch her likeness into the sanctum walls. Her image bled golden ichor. Her voice became rite. Her breath carried weight.
They called her Saint-Mother.
And she was no longer merely human.
It began slowly.
Her blood thickened, growing translucent, humming with quiet echoes. Her heartbeat synchronized with no clock, but the breath of the divine child she had borne. Her shadow grew delayed, trailing behind her like memory.
When she stepped, ground turned to scripture.
When she whispered, the sky blinked.
Lucien watched in silence. Even he—wielder of edicts, destroyer of gods—could feel the unraveling of her mortal constraints.
She was ascending, but not by cultivation.
By function.
By necessity.
The child slept in the temple's core, wrapped in paradox and prayer. His dreams soaked through the walls. From them, visions bloomed: cities of light, forests that sang, oceans of still time.
And Talia walked among these dreamscapes, untouched, queen of concept.
One morning, Kaelira fell to her knees.
"Your presence crushes me," she said.
Talia turned.
"I am not heavier."
"Not in flesh," Kaelira whispered. "In meaning."
Her limbs began to shift.
Fingers elongated, not grotesquely—but with elegance, grace made alien. Her eyes turned mirrorlike, reflecting not faces, but souls. Wings of glass and smoke sprouted from her back—not for flight, but for proclamation.
When she opened her mouth to speak, the words came after the thought, then before it, then never at all—yet all understood.
She had become narrative.
A living myth.
Lucien approached her beneath the Halo Tree—a monument grown from the child's afterbirth.
"Talia," he said softly.
She turned. Her face was no longer just hers—it shimmered between past versions of herself: the girl, the fighter, the vessel, the mother.
"I fear I will vanish," she whispered.
Lucien touched her hand. "No. You're not vanishing. You're becoming."
She leaned into him, and for a moment—just one—she was only Talia.
Then the bells tolled.
Not from temple.
From reality itself.
A sign: the world had registered a new divinity.
And far beyond, in sanctums where even light dared not tread, the Elder Gods stirred.
One of them opened a thousand eyes.
"She is ascending," it said.
"We must prepare."