Khyrisse pushed the door open with her lantern, tentatively. This room looked like a paved road leading over a river to a city. Whatever this Hotel was, it defied all Khyrisse knew about the Insides of Objects, and it was starting to hurt her head. On the bridge was the silhouette of a black man, and she quickened her pace, then stopped dead in her tracks as he turned, for it was not Ebreth. “M-Marlukin?” she gasped.
“¯,” the god replied, and Khyrisse came close to fainting with the rightness of it, the melodious three-layered sound that no mortal could reproduce, something it seemed like she hadn’t heard in a lifetime: her divine Name. “You’ve come.”
“What--what are you doing here?” gasped Khyrisse, blood roaring in her ears.
“Waiting for you, of course.” Marlukin’s voice was as resonant and unsmiling as she remembered it. “You passed your final Test, Khyrisse. You are ready to Ascend.”
Cayuga Ontario
