“The saints lied to you. I just saw it, in my mind. The empirium showed it to me.”
Corien froze, watching her in silence.
She approached him slowly. “During peace negotiations, near the end of the war, they told you they had discovered another world, lying beyond our own. An uninhabited world, where you could create a new homeland for yourselves. Humans, in Avitas. Angels, in this new world. Two races, separated and at peace. And they lied.”
She shook her head, laughing, and lightly touched her temples. “You thought you were traveling to a new home. Then you found yourselves in the Deep.”
“And bodiless.” The color was high in Corien’s pale cheeks.
“It was torment for you. I felt it, just now. I lived it. I felt my body being taken from me, as yours was from you.”
He rounded on her. “Vision from the empirium or no, you could not possibly understand what it is to have your body truly stripped from you. To lose your beauty and strength, all sense of touch and taste, and be forced to exist as a shell of yourself. And all the while knowing that your true home lies just on the other side of a veil you cannot move past.” He took her face in his hands. “Don’t you see, Rielle? What I do, I do to save my people. We were banished to a place that is not our home. We have been painted villains by the very people who wronged us.”
“And they would not have had to wrong you,” she replied, “if you hadn’t grown so jealous of our power that you tried to kill us.”
Corien’s expression turned to stone.
“Yes, I saw that too,” she whispered, smiling. “You were the one to start this war, centuries and centuries ago. You started the movement in the angelic cities that caught fire and spread. You thought it was unjust of God to have granted elemental power to beings so much lower than you and your own. You thought us a scourge, an insult to your own existence, a blight on your world. You craved our power for yourself. You’re a warmonger. A zealot. You turned your race against mine. If anyone is to blame for what’s happened to your people, it’s not the saints. It’s you, and you alone.”
She stepped away; his hands slipped from her face. “You led an insurgency, near the end. You tried to prevent the banishment, but the saints were too strong for you. They forced you through. Kalmaroth. That was your name.”
He flinched, as if the word were a struck fist. “Do not ever say that name again,” he said, very softly. “It is no longer mine.”