The first time Sanaki saw Ashera's temple -- really saw it, not just from a distance from her balcony, where the whole tower was clouded in a comforting blue-grey haze of distance -- she was afraid.
Her foot lightly scratched at the inlayed marble on the bridge that arched towards it, discretely enough to not arouse the attention of always attentive Sephiran. She was acutely aware of where the stone that her predecessors had laid - warm, slightly brownish, from the quarries near Grann - ended and where the almost blue-tinged cold green sheen of ancient stone begin. She wasn't even sure whether it was stone, her handlers for the day didn't let her close enough to touch, and Sanaki didn't want it enough to order them closer. It was a hot day, a day of life and color and cloying sweat and one of many meaningless processions which made the whole ordeal worse.
The whole dark tower in contrast smelled of endings - where the bridge suddenly seemingly stopped, and the closed archway marked it like a tombstone. a stark veil between the two worlds, her earthly one and the domain of the goddess. Feelings warred beneath her collarbone that was a dangerous mix of jealousy and fear. Sanaki squished them beneath her mental heel before she could observe which one won.
She didn't remember much else of that procession, but the smell of death at that seemingly disarming archway lingered for years.
--
The second time she stood beneath the Tower's shadow, Sephiran was with her.
More accurately, because her mentor was a stickler for describing truth, he had guided her there under the pretenses of a field trip. He loved his field trips, and in her heart of hearts so did she. If only for the chance to see imperfect life and texture and crudeness and flavor both in taste and vision, the kind the Senators hated to have around them. For all they talked about earthly pleasures (and hurriedly, purity), it struck her that their longing would be easily solved by a stroll around the docks. Sephiran was in agreement with a rare soft cackle when she told him that thought once, so long ago.
This, however, was no field trip.
She knew then by his careful and light wording, and she knew now by his still, thin form that hesitated in that same archway as before. He hesitated like one of the birds in the cages that the hawkers displayed in the street-shops; not out of fear but out of a wary sense of a presence larger than them that surrounded the cold steel-grey stone.
If this presence was the goddess ... she wanted nothing of Her, she realized with a jolt.
It was an uncomfortable thought, one she hurriedly stamped out again with the heel of her mind as he laid a hand on the archway like a lover in a fairy-tale would. His former hesitation was not only that wariness, that respect-of-might-with-no-feeling, but something ... more. Something familiar, and aching, like he was loathe to be away from that archway to nothing.
Such perverse warmth and loyalty to something so foreign and, and - dead struck her as fundamentally unwholesome.
--
The third time was when the world had died, save for the ghost that walked the land with her.
This of everything, seemed fitting as her one legacy on top of legacies.