Chapter Forty-One

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Endings take time.

—Kirythean proverb

Lore had never known her mother’s real name. The Sisters didn’t use them. By the time Lore was born, her mother had been living with the remains of the Buried Watch for months, completely assimilated into their ranks, though the others watched her with apprehension.

Lore knew why. She’d been told the story. After she arrived, her mother had approached Nyxara’s tomb, as every Sister must, and darkness had reached out. Darkness had caressed her middle, where Lore still slept, unaware of the world and the role she’d have in it.

So the first time Lore channeled Mortem, by accident—pulling a strand of it from the Buried Goddess’s tomb and sending it into the rock that made their underground cathedral, nearly causing a collapse—it hadn’t been a surprise. It’d been something they were waiting for.

The flashes of memory she retained from her first thirteen years were brief—she’d done her best to bury them—but they were filled with sidelong glances lit by the strange phosphorescence of the crystal on the walls, murmurs behind hands.

When the eclipse came, her mother had approached her with the crescent moon brand glowing orange, and that hadn’t been a surprise, either. She’d wept as she burned Lore’s palm, the sign that she would be the next one to enter the tomb. Lore remembered that it’d been a time of celebration for the other Sisters, how they’d congratulated her mother for her strength, for finally doing the right thing.

But that night, while Lore slept—a nudge in her side, her mother’s terrified eyes. She’d led Lore up the tunnels, up to where the light of the last day before the eclipse was already coloring the sky.

“Run,” her mother whispered.

And Lore had.

She’d run and run, and it’d all been in a circle. Because here she was again. Looking at her mother’s face and seeing something like terror, something like deep sorrow.

“I’ve missed you.” Oh, gods, the genuine note in her voice made it all so much worse. The Night Sister stood on the other side of the well, but her hands still stretched out, as if she could gather Lore into her embrace. “You’re so grown up. So beautiful.” She sighed, a hitch in her throat. “I wish it could be different. I thought maybe there was a chance She would change Her mind, that you wouldn’t be one of the chosen…” Her eyes closed, a crystalline tear falling down her cheek, catching the light. “But the goddess is unchanging. I should’ve sent you into the tomb before, let Her power consume you, burn itself out before you reached the age of ascension. Now death is the only way.”

Lore thrashed in the Presque Mort’s grip despite the sting in her side, the stark words finally enough to snap her out of her haze. “No,” she said, and it sounded like her mouth was full of cotton. “No no no no I don’t want to—”

“We can’t let it happen again, my love,” her mother murmured. “The Night Witch was one of Nyxara’s chosen, too; she was to become the goddess’s avatar. And She would’ve laid waste to the world. I’m so sorry. You have to die, and I’m so sorry.”

“But you’ll wait.” Anton’s voice was different, the thin veneer of sense stripped away. Strange, to hear it gone and realize this was what waited beneath. “The deal was that you get your avatar back after six villages are added to the army, and that I get to strike the killing blow. The paperwork to make Buried Watch once again part of the Church is filed, but I can rescind it at any time if the terms aren’t met.”

“Of course,” the Night Sister murmured. “A deal is a deal.”

“Precisely. I see why the Sisters made you the Night Priestess.” Anton’s eyes shone with unsound light. “I hope you do better by the title than the last one.”

Lore’s mother—the Night Priestess—simply inclined her head.

Three mothers, two betrayals, all for some greater good that Lore couldn’t bring herself to care about. She only cared about living. The greater good could hang.

“Please don’t let him kill me.” Lore knew she sounded pathetic. She was pathetic, limp between two Presque Mort, bleeding out and helpless to stop it. “I haven’t done anything, I didn’t choose it, please…”

“Oh, dear heart.” The Night Priestess’s hand came up, then fell, like if they’d been closer she would’ve cradled Lore’s cheek. “It’s the only thing we can do. The world wouldn’t survive you.”

“A deal is a deal,” Anton said, turning to face Lore. “Now let’s settle our accounts, and we can all be on our way.”

The Night Priestess’s lips flattened in distaste. She waved a hand. “Take what you’re owed, then.”

“I’m thankful for your cooperation,” Anton said, though there was a sneer in his voice. “Thankful that you understand there is only room for one god, this time.”

“There certainly isn’t room for six again,” the Night Priestess said softly. “Gods are not content to share power.”

“That’s the trouble with ascensions,” Anton agreed. “When humans become gods, they bring their natures with them.” The Priest Exalted bared his teeth, a triumphant rictus as he stepped toward Lore. One hand raised.

It was the same tugging feeling she’d felt in her dreams, but without the buffer of sleep, it was agonizing. Her heart stilled, just so much meat, and felt like it was being pulled slowly from behind her ribs. Strands of dark Mortem leaked from her chest, seeping out slowly like blood from a million tiny wounds.

The mad priest knotted raw death in the air, gnarling the strands together. “Apollius,” he murmured, looking up at the sky as if he could find his god there. A rapturous tear slid down his cheek. “See what I do for You. How I manipulate the power of Your treasonous wife and turn it to Your glory.”

He still pulled power from her as he spoke to the empty sky, weaving it between his fingers. It coalesced above their heads, a writhing, intricate knot, pulsing like an organ as it took shape. Tendrils reached from the central mass, curling into the eclipse-shrouded sky, seeping outward as if they were looking for something.

Looking for another village. More people to kill, more corpses for Anton’s undead army. Using her to do it; Mortem channeled from her goddess-touched body, fashioned to do things no other channeler could do.

“You’ve given us Your sign,” Anton murmured to the sky. “Your promise that a new world awaits, one You will shape for Your faithful. Remember, Bleeding God, how I helped usher it in, here when two opposite powers can be held in concert.”

Opposite powers.

Even through the slow leak of her blood, the chill in her fingers and the cold creep of death, Lore could feel Spiritum, the comet-streak of life woven through her when her and Bastian’s hands were carved, then thrust together at the moment of totality.

She had them both. Mortem and Spiritum, life and death. Both of them lived in her, both of them could be channeled.

There wasn’t time to overthink it. Lore thrust out her hand and pulled.

Light flowed from Anton, a surge of it flashing across the garden to her waiting fingers, stolen from the corona around his living body. It didn’t come together like a thread, a pliant thing to be braided; this was lightning, this was all crackling energy, and Lore’s roar echoed Anton’s own as she pulled it into herself, her veins running hot and full, her heart thumping hard enough to bruise her lungs.

White-hot pain in her side, an encroaching burn. She knew it was healed without looking, the power of life rushing through her and healing everything.

Lore couldn’t hold on to it. It was too much, too bright. She relinquished her hold with a shout; the lightning-crackle left her hands, rebounded across the garden to Anton’s kneeling form. The old man breathed like a bellows, his hands clutched over his heart, his lips pulled back from his teeth.

“Little deathwitch,” Anton snarled. “You think you’re in the right?”

“I think,” Lore panted, forcing herself to stand, “that I’m not going to let you kill anyone else with my power.”

“That’s what you don’t understand, Lore,” her mother said, slender and sad and wreathed in flame-light. “It isn’t yours. It’s Hers. And the longer you live—the more powerful you grow—the more like Her you will become.”

“We can’t have another Godsfall.” Anton got up, slowly, looking every inch the frail old man. Except for his eyes. Those glittered with a sheen of madness, a fervor that made her recoil. The knife he’d used to stab August twisted in his grip. “We can’t let it happen again.”

“So you kill people instead?” Even healed, her side still ached; Lore pressed her fist against it. “You’re addled, Anton. There won’t be another Godsfall, because there are no more gods!”

“There is one, and you will cede your power to Him,” Anton replied, spittle flying from the corner of his scarred mouth. “The world brought to heel beneath Apollius’s merciful rule, through His blessed—”

A scream ripped the night, cutting off whatever Anton had been about to say. Torches toppled, rolling across the cobblestones; another torch swiped through the air. The living flowers growing on top of their stone counterparts were dry and brittle from a summer without rain; they licked into flame, surrounding the well in jumping tongues of fire.

And Bastian stepped through them.

His fine shirt was ripped, crusted with blood from the cut through his eyebrow. His teeth gleamed in the flickering light, bared and snarling.

Anton’s face split in a beatific, unsound smile, one that made Lore’s stomach twist uncomfortably. He had hidden all this… this worship, this devotion, keeping Bastian at arm’s length even as he worked to keep him safe from August. But now that everything was coming to a close, he looked on his nephew with the same light in his eyes that he’d cast toward the sky as he prayed.

“Bastian, my boy!” the Priest Exalted called. “I’m sorry you were hurt; I told them that you weren’t to be harmed, but when things get chaotic—”

“Your monks are all hurt far worse than I am.” Bastian held a short sword he must’ve taken from someone; he turned it so the bloodied edge caught the firelight.

The Presque Mort scattered around the garden seemed uneasy; hands fell to the harnesses around their chests. They glanced at their Priest, waiting for instruction, ready for violence if it was called for.

“It’s good that you’re here,” Anton continued, oblivious to the low, dangerous tone in Bastian’s voice. “Things have gone a bit off schedule with the girl. But now that you’ve arrived, we can move forward. Perhaps you can convince her to see reason.”

Bastian’s eyes swung to Lore, panic flashing bare and jagged across his features. “Are you hurt?”

“She’s fine,” Anton said dismissively, waving his hand. “Better, even; she channeled Spiritum and used it to heal herself.” A sharp laugh echoed over the stone roses, the hiss of flames. “If her magic has been heightened to such a level, imagine yours!”

Across the well, the Night Priestess stood still as a carved icon. Her expression wavered in the growing flames, but she didn’t look at Bastian with fear. It was closer to resignation, as if his appearance here marked a sea change, diverted the flow of her plan. She turned her eyes to Lore. There was no pity to be found in her face.

Slowly, she made her way closer, close enough for her whisper to be heard. “You care for him,” her mother whispered. “Don’t you?”

Lore didn’t answer.

“If you care for him,” she murmured, hazel eyes sheened in tears, “if you care for anyone in this world, you will let this happen. Please don’t make it harder than it has to be, Lore. You don’t understand what hell you could bring on the world.”

“I’m sorry for keeping you in the dark.” Anton moved toward Bastian the way one would approach an altar, Lore and the Night Priestess cast completely from his mind. Bastian stood still. The fire gilded him, made him look cast in gold rather than flesh.

“There was much I didn’t understand, not until recently,” Anton continued. “And I know you were fond of the girl—for that, I’m sorry, but you must understand it’s a weakness, an echo that cannot be allowed to continue for all our sakes. You must overcome it, must be ready to sacrifice old feelings and remake the world in Apollius’s image.” A tear broke from the line of his lashes and spilled down his cheek. “In your—”

“You won’t be sacrificing anyone.”

Gabe.

He appeared behind the Priest Exalted, flame-wreathed, his dagger in his hand. The blade pressed against Anton’s throat, and his hand didn’t shake as he took the Priest’s wrist, twisted it to make him drop the knife still caked in August’s blood. Gabe looked worse for wear than Bastian, his eye patch lost, bruises forming on nearly every inch of visible skin.

“Ah, Gabriel,” Anton sighed. “Your loyalties are ever-shifting. I suppose I should expect that.” A snarl lifted his mouth. “Part of you knows, I think. What you could become if this is allowed to continue. An abomination. Recurring sin.”

Gabe’s throat worked as he swallowed, as he shoved the blade close enough to pucker skin. “Be quiet,” he said, the ghost of something broken in it. “Please, Father, be quiet.”

“I’m not your father, boy,” Anton hissed.

A flinch, Gabe’s one blue eye fluttering closed, then open again.

“Lore.” Her mother’s hand was cold on her arm. “Lore, please, before this comes to a point we can’t return from.”

The sky was lightening, slowly. The moon edging away from the sun.

The knot of Mortem that Anton had been molding was still rotating in the air, a mass of death and darkness held in stasis. Annihilation, waiting for its target.

Anton’s bright eyes tracked to Lore and the Night Priestess. “I’m still owed a village,” he said, almost irritated, as if he didn’t have a knife to his throat.

Lore reached up, eyes fixed on the Priest Exalted’s, and called her Mortem back in.

It felt the same as before—the deadened limbs, the grayscale vision, the lurch of her heart in her chest. But as she unraveled the knot of Mortem and let it funnel back into herself, she realized what was different. What made this something more.

This death was hers, spooled from her own bones, the meat that made her up. Its power was hers. She wasn’t just channeling it, she was absorbing it: sewing it between her vertebrae, braiding it into her veins.

The knot unspooled in the space of two heartbeats, tangled threads that slid into her fingers, settled alongside the current of light that was Spiritum. Both she could sense, both she could use.

The more powerful you grow, the more like Her you become.

Her mother let loose a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a sob. “This is what I saw, in the reflections of the tomb.” She whispered it almost to herself, broken-voiced. “It’s what the goddess dreamed, but I thought I could prevent it. I thought you would choose the world over yourself.”

“I’m far too selfish for that,” Lore whispered.

The Presque Mort did nothing as their leader’s carefully wrought twists of power unraveled, watching with wary eyes. It seemed like they were all looking to Bastian, not Anton, as if the Sun Prince held their loyalty.

“Bitch,” Anton spat. “One way or another, Apollius will prevail. You only—”

“Shut up.” But Gabe’s voice was shaky. He looked around at the other Presque Mort; their passivity seemed to unsettle him as much as it did Lore. Gabe’s one eye went to Bastian; the empty socket of the other made a pit of shadow. “He’s a mad old man, Bastian.” His tone was pleading. “Strip him of his title, and he can’t hurt anyone.”

Bastian didn’t answer him. Instead, he turned to face Lore and her mother, and held out his hand.

“If you touch her,” he said evenly, dark eyes trained on the Night Priestess, “I will go into the catacombs and haul all of you out myself.”

“Lore,” the Night Priestess said, a last-ditch effort. “Please.”

Lore looked up at her mother. Then she walked forward and took her place next to Bastian, kicking Anton’s dagger away as she went, sending it skittering into the fire.

The Night Priestess loosed a shaking breath.

Lore tore her gaze from her mother, looked around them at the Presque Mort, ringed in flame. “Why aren’t they doing anything? What are they waiting for?”

“I don’t know,” Bastian said. “I don’t care.” He took a step toward his uncle.

Gabe hauled the Priest Exalted back, away from the approaching prince. “Bastian.” Warring emotions twisted his face, fear and sorrow and anger. “We talked about this.”

“You talked about this.” Bastian was doing something strange with his hands. They flexed back and forth, fingers curling, as if he was trying to wind in an invisible rope. Gold light glimmered in the space around him.

“He’s confused,” Gabe said, backing up another step. Anton hung limp, eyes cast upward, as if in prayer. “He’s just a man; take his position, give it to someone else, but don’t kill him!”

“I’m the fucking Sainted King.” It wasn’t a scream. It was barely more than a whisper. Still, it reverberated against the hiss of the fire, and when Bastian tilted up his head, the flames seemed to make a halo around his head. “I will kill whoever I please.”

“Then you’re no better,” Gabe snarled. Fire leapt behind him, as if his anger stoked it higher. “No better than him, no better than your father.”

Beyond Gabe’s shoulder, Lore could still see the silhouette of her mother, shimmering against the flames. “Listen,” she murmured, stepping between him and Bastian, “everything that’s happened tonight has been pointless violence, we don’t have to—”

“Not pointless,” Anton murmured. “Not unless you count stopping an apocalypse as pointless. Her power will keep growing, Bastian, especially now that she can channel Spiritum, too. It will infect her mind; Nyxara will infect her mind. Give the girl death now, or watch her beg for it later, when the world falls down around her as Apollius makes it His.” A low, wheezing laugh hissed through Anton’s teeth, his eyes arcing heavenward again. “The cycle has begun, and you are all caught in its weave, forced into a caring that has ruined you before and will ruin you again.”

Tension ran through Lore’s shoulders, echoed in Bastian’s; the tip of Gabe’s knife wavered.

“It’s been prophesied, but none wanted to believe it,” Anton rasped. “None except I. Hear me, Apollius! Hear how I warn them of the coming age, of what happens when new gods rise and try to stand against Your will!”

Gabe stumbled, trying to keep a grip on the mad old man who’d been a kind of father, the only kind he could keep. His eye darted to Bastian, pleading.

The Sun Prince—no, the Sainted King—watched on, implacable. His hands kept flexing, back and forth, working up more golden light. “You’re going to give us another solution, old man,” Bastian murmured. “Don’t make me cut it out of you.”

Gabe looked away, but his dagger didn’t waver.

“There is one.” Lore stepped forward, shaky; her wound was healed, but still sore. Her hair had fallen down, hung around her face in gold-brown strands made darker by blood. “I learned to guard my mind from Mortem before. Gabe taught me. It can’t be that much different now. I can keep myself from sensing power, from growing stronger. Keep myself…”

She trailed off, not sure how to finish. Not sure if she needed to. It was a whole thought on its own.

Anton laughed again. “You always were willing to do anything to save your own skin.”

“You don’t know me,” Lore said.

His one eye narrowed, glittering with the same cutting light as Gabe’s blade. “Are you so sure?”

“What do you need to do?” Something had changed in Bastian’s manner, in his carriage. Gone was the languid prince; he’d fully stepped into being the King. It was the other side he’d shown her that night in the alley, the night she told him her history. A King had always been waiting. A brutal one.

Lore glanced at Gabe. He was trying so hard to keep his emotions off his face, trying and failing. Pain lived in the furrows of his brow, the fierce curve of his mouth around his bared teeth. But there was hope, sparking to life when their gazes met. Hope that he could yet save the wretched man he held so close, the man who’d only sought to use him.

“I can teach her,” Gabe said. “Teach her to guard her mind even more fully. Make sure nothing like the villages happens ever again.”

He’d done it once already, she suddenly realized. That night she woke him up, made him sit with her and concentrate, soothing the darkness until sleep could come peacefully, without those strange dreams. There’d been no death that night.

But Anton shook his head, mindless of the blade still against his neck. Gabe tried to move it; he didn’t in time, and a thin line of crimson creased the old man’s skin. “It won’t last,” he rasped. “These roles are fixed. To let the girl live is to invite oblivion, for the world, but for yourselves most of all.”

“Spare us your religious bullshit,” Bastian hissed.

Another braying laugh from the Priest Exalted. “Oh, nephew, that’s the one thing you can’t be spared. You’ll learn.”

“Lore.”

The Night Priestess’s voice was quiet; still, it echoed. Her face was emotionless, though something like resignation lurked at the corner of her mouth, in the shine of her eyes. “Things have progressed more than we thought,” she said softly. “I see that now. I can’t make you choose death.”

“Damn right,” Bastian snarled, shouldering in front of Lore.

“I was too weak before,” the Night Priestess continued, ignoring Bastian. “And for that, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for letting me live?” Lore’s voice came out ragged. “Sorry for saving me?”

Her mother lowered her chin, her long, pale hair almost covering her face. “But you can be strong now,” she said, as if Lore hadn’t spoken at all. “You can make the right choice.”

“You’re asking her to die, and you think you’re in the right?” Gabe nearly spat it.

But the Night Priestess didn’t respond. She looked only at Lore, only at her daughter.

“It all springs from this choice,” she murmured. “You are the seed of the apocalypse.”

And it was true. Lore didn’t know how, not yet, didn’t understand the intricacies. But she felt the truth.

But it was also true what she’d told her mother. Lore was selfish. If it came down to her or the world, Lore chose herself.

The Night Priestess sighed. Nodded, knowing Lore’s answer though she didn’t speak. Then, in a quick movement that the flickering flames bisected into strange jerks, she climbed up onto the lip of the well and descended the spinning stairs into the dark.

Bastian moved forward, as if he’d follow and extract some kind of revenge, but Lore put her hand on his chest. “No,” she murmured, and had nothing else to add. “No.”

He listened.

“You’ve chosen your path, the three of you,” Anton murmured. “Woe betide us when the rest follow.”

Bastian looked at Gabe. Flicked his hand. “The old man will live, Gabe.”

Shoulders slumped in relief, Gabe finally took his dagger from Anton’s throat. He stepped back, letting the Priest Exalted stand on his own.

Bastian’s hand moved, twisting in a graceful motion that looked near impossible. Golden swirls carved through the air, coalescing around his fingers, threads spun from the sun itself.

Then Bastian thrust his handful of gold toward Anton.

The strands attached to the ground around the Priest Exalted, and it erupted. Thick green vines grew rapidly through the stone, thorn-studded, the ends opening in blood-red rose blooms identical to the ones burning near the path. They wound around his legs, his middle. They entered his mouth before he could so much as scream. His eye rolled as the empty socket of the other was filled with green, then red, a rose unfurling in the scarred orbital, petals brushing his flame-ravaged brow.

It was over in an instant. Anton Arceneaux was encased in roses and blood, one more statue in the garden.

And Bastian had done it so easily, as if it was second nature.

Gabe made a small, hoarse noise, stumbling back. “You said you wouldn’t kill him.” His voice went ragged at the end. “You said you wouldn’t!”

“I said he would live.” Bastian stepped forward to the remains of his uncle and wrenched the bloody crown from his hand. The Priest had held on to it all this time. “And he does.”

The smallest rise and fall of Anton’s chest. The thinnest whistle of breath. Bastian was right; in all those roses, Anton was still alive.

Gods, it was worse.

Gabe’s eyes went from his Priest to his King, shock curdling to hatred, hot and vitriolic. “You’re no better,” he said again, an echo. The flames of the burning roses in the garden seemed to bend toward him, as if drawn to his rage. “Is this how it’s going to be, then? You as a magic tyrant, worse than August could ever be?”

Bastian didn’t answer. Instead, he placed the crown on his head. It crossed the bloodied line on his brow. “Long live the Sainted King.”