The oracle drove the date of my death home in red, and the god of the underworld came up to the living world to keep it. Yet the hand sent to take me keeps turning into the hand that holds me. A hundred days left, and a forbidden love that begins already knowing how it ends.
Aigilos, a temple city where the oracle settles the day you die. Sephine, a priestess trained to read the sacred script, reads her own name and the line driven in beneath it: she is to be given up as a living sacrifice in one hundred days. Thanael, god of the underworld, comes up to collect her, but before a priestess who can read every branch of an oracle he begins, for the first time, to doubt the duty set upon him. Through the days that remain, the two grow something in secret, out of the temple's sight. Whether the appointed ruin can be overturned, or whether she must go down loving him by that same hand, the number that falls by one each morning presses for an answer.
- The night Thanael, who has only ever spoken her name as an entry in a register, lays his own funeral robe over her shoulders and stumbles, for the first time, over words that are not an order.
- The moment Sephine reads the second sentence hidden between the strokes of the red script, and the true condition of the hundred days, unknown even to a god, comes to light.
- With one day left, the moment the two of them realize at once that the hand come to take her and the hand that holds her are the same hand, and they count the last stars together.
The night Thanael, who has only ever spoken her name as an entry in a register, lays his own funeral robe over her shoulders and stumbles, for the first time, over words that are not an order.
