Sisters of the Forsaken Stars (Our Lady of Endless Worlds, #2)

by Lina Rather

to faith and back again, because for most faith was a constant journey, a choice to be committed to.

Although she was a faithful woman, she did not believe that people were simply fallen leaves to be swept along by the stream of fate. Sister Faustina would scoff and say there were many coincidences in this universe. She missed Gemma. They had shared a similar understanding of the world, balanced on a thin edge between fate and coincidence, human agency and a divine plan.

“I would like to be a person who answers a call when no one else is listening.”

In her years of ministry, she had always found these quiet moments to be worth more than most prayers. The small pause, the space of a few breaths between a choice and making it, between one step and the next. A moment to stop and steel yourself or falter if you needed.

“I cannot guess the mind of God.”

“But I don’t believe that the measure of a person is simply the number of good acts against bad. A person can hold both inside them. The Reverend Mother . . . none of us knows what to call her now. But know this—if I were the architect of Heaven, you are one of the first I would see through the gates.”

Faith was such a private thing, no matter how much structure the Church believed it could impose.

No—she knew what she had expected. This was a relic; she had expected to touch it and feel holiness reaching back, despite everything she knew. Some scripts were just bound up deep in humans, she supposed. If a thing looks holy, is wrapped in the presentation of godliness, you expect to find a god inside.

felt constructed. Like the story of a saint that had never existed, written by combining the common tropes of hagiography with the correct structure, a very good story without any history beneath it. Yes, that is what Terret felt like now. A well-crafted myth.

And in some things, my dear Mother, we have only one shot in life no matter how much we want to believe otherwise. My window is closed. That future is dead. And yes, I would like vengeance. Not for my baby. For me. For who I should have been.”

Suddenly she was tilted and spilt out of her body, watching this whole scene as history, as another twisted story rewritten to prove a moral that real life would never be clean enough to fit inside. She felt cold sweat slick her palms.

This was what scared her most, perhaps. To be bound to someone not by purpose or similar devotion or sworn sisterhood, but only a love that could not be bounded by rules or regulations and could be broken at any time.

darkness. A lighthouse to show me the way no matter how stormy the sea. But that’s not it, is it? It’s more like . . . a rope to lead you out of a dark cave. Sometimes you hang on tight. Sometimes you might drop it and have to scramble to find the lead again. Sometimes it feels like a line in the dark isn’t enough. But it’s always there.”

There was much to come, she knew. Another long darkness where the universe held its breath. And yet there was wonder still, even here, in a spray of rocks and ice in a sky that was anything but empty.