The silence of Father Chi'orat's temple followed Lysse even after she left the altar chamber. She passed through towering bronze doors etched with his sigil and past countless moss-covered columns and piles of rotting corpses. The air was stagnant and thick with the smell of decay, and only the splash of her feet through bloody puddles broke the quiet.
On most nights, the temple would have echoed with the screams of new sacrifices, but tonight, oh, tonight, the faithful hunted on the surface.
The halls narrowed as she descended. Blood-crusted brick gave way to bare stone, slick with nothing but damp. The torchlight dwindled until she walked blind in complete darkness. In time, the silence unraveled into the steady flowing of water and the hisses of rats in the walls.
At last, the temple's final archway spat her out into the sewage arteries of Ryzayah, the city above. The air reeked of filth and stagnant waste, but not of death, and it was hot and wet enough to sting the eyes. Rats scattered at Lysse's approach, squealing in terror as they splashed through the muck.
She moved forward, her knife still warm in her shrunken, boyish hand. The tunnels pressed low above her, thick with slime, while the trickle of freezing cold wastewater gurgled around her ankles.
She passed through a crooked maze of pipes, her climb and crawl made easier by her new, small form, until she found a rusted ladder that rose toward the surface.
Its rungs were slick, but she climbed easily, and with a final shove, the damp cover above her gave way with a shriek of metal.
Lysse pulled herself up into an unlit alley in Ryzayah's merchants' district. Up ahead, orange lanterns swung above crowded streets where people trudged between stalls draped with silks and piles of overripe fruit. The smell of charred meat and spices filled the air, accompanied by the sounds of haggling traders and of the laughter of drunken guards as they stumbled from taverns.
Lysse straightened the illusion of her tunic and stretched her shortened arms as far as they could go. Her lips twitched into a smile that likely didn't seem quite natural on a young boy's face.
"Two more before sunrise," she murmured, shaking her head. If it really were all about numbers, she'd do twenty. But hers was the desire to make art.