Kamakshi doesn't arrive with an army. She arrives out of gold light in a cave under Kanchipuram, five years old by the look of her and older than anyone can name, and picks up a bow a dead god left lying around. What she does with it isn't conquest. It's aim, the kind that changes a city instead of burning it down. But power that big doesn't stay easy to hold. By the time the city starts calling her Ugra, fierce, unpredictable, answering every prayer a little too exactly, even the priests aren't sure what they're praying to anymore. It takes a monk with dust on his sandals and no interest in a fight to teach a goddess the difference between fierce and unkind.