65. Epilogue
There’s a stillness about this place, like even the wind’s afraid to stir the tidal lake of Athandon. To reach across the water and brush the steep, gray volcano that lords from the lake’s epicenter.
Mount Ether.
Dead animals litter the shore—horses, krah, a number of dune cats. Having sipped the water that holds a malignant truth, they didn’t make it far before their bodies changed from the inside out.
Turned to stone.
The volcano excretes toxic minerals that spike the lake—a natural form of taxidermy that most creatures don’t see coming; too desperate for a drink to heed the eerie warning signs.
Breathing thick, putrid air that smells of sulfur, I pace back and forth while I wait for the stepping stones to appear.
The only safe way across to Mount Ether.
The still water reflects the world like a mirror despite the slow, silent drop of the water level. There are no ripples. No gentle laps at the shore.
Nobody knows where the water goes when it lowers. There’s no outlet. Like the ground breathes it all the way in, then flushes it out again once every sun cycle. Sometimes it happens fast, other times slow—a risky journey for only the truly desperate and devoted.
I’m far from devoted.
The stones begin to surface—seven hundred and twenty-two of them poking above the glossy, noxious water. I don’t bother waiting for them to peak before knotting the stirrups high on Eyzar’s saddle, lifting the struggling hoof-strung goat off the back of him, and smacking him on the ass.
“Go home!”
With a toss of his head, he turns and gallops across the slate planes, perhaps sensing my agitation. I hate sending him off on his own, but from here, the road is too dangerous.
I heft the goat upon my shoulders to the tune of Eyzar’s retreat and the bleating drone of the goat as I leap from the powdery gray shore onto the first rock.
The crystal-clear water allows a perfect view of fallen men, women, and creatures of all casts scattered across the lake’s floor like stone statues, reaching for daylight with stretched fingers and vacant, stony stares. Those who came seeking Maars but didn’t make it all the way across the path in time.
Victims of the tidal rise.
I shiver despite the warm, fat goat around my shoulders, every fitted struggle threatening to throw me off balance as I leap from stone to stone, its bleating cries grating me.
I jump onto the far shore and charge up stairs shrouded in mist. My thighs burn by the time I step onto the volcano’s crown, battered by the sound of my deep breaths and the distant tap, tap, tap. A sound that pitches into my spine.
Makes my guts cramp.
I follow it, finding Maars hunched at the base of one of the stone monoliths protruding from the mountain’s crown, a dark, twisted shadow tucked within a gray hooded cloak that’s frayed at the hem. A wiggling thread of black scripture is bound around his arm, squealing every time he bangs more of its length into the slate with a smack of his iron hammer.
Pausing mid-swing, Maars tips his face to the sky and draws a long breath through flared nostrils.
His head whips in my direction, exposing the face hidden within the cavern of his hood: smooth, unlike the skin on his hands. His eye sockets are empty bar a scoop of skin, though it doesn’t stop you from feeling seen. As though he’s hunting the beat in your heart like the animal he’s become.
“Maars.”
“Rhordyn, Rhordyn, far from home. Nice of the beast to finally roam.”
I grunt, then flip the goat off my shoulders and release the binds around its hooves. It tips onto its side and scrambles up, then runs—wild eyed—straight toward the awaiting predator.
Maars releases a skin-scuttling snarl, leaving his squirming ribbon of scripture half hanging from the wall as he drops his hammer and leaps upon the goat.
He bares his serrated maw, then rips into the soft flesh of the animal’s throat. A plume of blood spills across its snowy fur. Maars holds—pinning the creature down until it gives a final, sputtering jerk, its mouth dropping open, tongue flopped out the side.
Maars pulls back, panting, producing a ravaged smile that’s all bloody, pin-teethed horror, using his iron-tipped fingernails to cleave open the animal’s chest cavity. He plows his hand into the hole until he’s elbow deep, fishing around.
Fucking hell.
“I see your table manners have improved.”
His responding laugh is manic and curdled as he rips the heart free, holding the steaming organ in his clawed hand. He bites into the round flesh, ripping off a chunk he gnaws in greedy, ravenous chews, blood dribbling down his chin and arm. “Yum like a plum,” he says around a mouthful of masticated gore.
“I’m glad you approve.”
He turns his attention on me, ripping into the organ again, stuffing his cheeks full of steaming, wet flesh. “Questions, questions don’t ask themselves,” he says through a bulging bite.
My nerves rattle.
I clear my throat and cast my stare on the stone beside me, its toothed tip high in the sky. Chest tight, I study the chiseled depths of countless prophecies—half filled with a thick, black substance.
Though some are not.
In some, the blackness has whittled away, leaving plain, gutless scriptures. Not many, but some. A handful.
Hope.
Crouching, I find the writings that are carved into my heart just as much as they’re carved into this fucking stone and jab my finger at Orlaith’s morbid life map. “This,” I growl. “Has this changed?”
Another bite. More unsightly chewing while my patience frays.
He swallows a gulp so large I can see the mound of it working down his lanky throat as he tips his head to the side. “The more you know, the more you woe. Be happy you’re not chained to the truth as I, Rhordyn. Ignorance is a gift.”
“Has. It. Changed?” I snarl past the monstrous-size fangs punching through my gums.
Maars goes as still as one of the many statues littering the lakeside. “No.”
The word is a nail hammered deep into my soul.
“And no matter how much you distance yourself or try to wrestle fate in your favor, her you will not savor. The world will keep trying to kill her until you’re forced to seal the bond, cradling borrowed months before the final lines draw their fangs. Matters will be taken out of your hands.”
I’m certain he just shoved his iron-tipped fingers into my chest and tore out my heart. Like it’s mine he’s now sinking his teeth into—feasting on.
I fall to my knees, suddenly starved for air, my vision stirring like the mist that muddies the mountain.
“You know, those words called to me like they wanted to be free,” he says through the sloshy sounds of his chewing.
Hasn’t. Fucking. Changed.
I slam my hands against the stone to steady myself while my beast rages inside, tipping his head to gnaw at my ribs with his back molars. I close my eyes and heave through rumbling breaths as I work to regain my composure.
“I went down to the bowl with my fishing pole, and the wee thing just flicked out of the water and wrapped around my arm like an eel. It never wiggled in pain as I chiseled it into the rock. Never screamed. It just slipped into its stony grave like it was too tired to misbehave. Only once before have one of my scriptures acted that way, and you know how that came to play. Decay and dismay.”
I look over my swelling shoulder into the hollow sockets of his soulless eyes. See a fresh wave of hunger igniting his blood-splashed features.
“With you diving into my bowl after your sister, then being spat out like a trout on the shore bearing Kvath’s prized sword, Endagh Ath Mahn,” he says, boasting that haunting smile again.
The Sword of End.
I swallow, forcing the slur of bile back down into my gut as I bunch my hands into fists, knuckles grating against stone.
Maars tips his head to the other side, clicking his tongue. “Wonder, wonder, I often do. How did you end up with such a … spectacular weapon?”
I say nothing, content on letting silence hang while I growl through thick breaths, trying to keep my skin from splitting.
Joints from popping.
Maars makes a low humming sound. “It caused quite a shake, you know.” He points to the darkening sky with his chisel. “I felt it from below. In my bones. A rattle I’ve felt again … recently.”
My brows collide. “The sword is useless to me now. I am bound. I am no threat to any of them.” Besides—they spawned a perfect defense right in my path.
The markings around Maars’s throat flicker as he opens his mouth, though all that comes out is a bloody, hacked splat. Snarling, he reaches into the cowl of his hood and massages his neck. “We are equals,” he sneers. “If you are ever in need of an end, you have a friend. Perhaps, one day, you will crave it as I do, and we can do each other a great deed of service.”
I ignore his rambles, looking at her prophecy again, hissing breaths through clenched teeth. Though I delight in the idea of putting the beast to rest and ending the plague of this fucking place, his fallen misery is not my priority.
She is.
“Tell me which one of you threaded our fates together,” I demand through a rusty growl.
“Who do you think?” Maars laughs—a wild, twisted sound that consists only of the sharpest notes, bloodied spittle flinging from the wide gaps between his sharpened teeth. “Jakar does like his punishments, and fall in line the others do. Puppets, puppets burn them all,” he hisses with bitterness.
I turn, looking at the monster nesting by my slain sacrifice.
“You can’t coax a serpent with a warm, fresh meal, then expect it not to appeal.” He brings the half-eaten heart to his nose and draws a deep sniff. “Do you think it was a mere accident that you were there that night? That you nearly put your talon through her chest to make it right?”
My nails dig into the feverish flesh of my palms. “Explain.”
“Shan’t. Can’t.” He flicks a bloody hand toward the sky. “Just that every thread is specifically woven because he feeds off the suffering of weeds. It’s why your father’s fall was such a loss. He balanced Jakar’s insanity, but that balance has turned to calamity. Gone.”
So fucking gone.
I feel it in my bones, making them creak and groan from the skewed pressure. Felt it kneeling on my chest like a mountain the moment I was born.
“Take the Bahari High Master, for example—a sample,” Maars continues.
I still.
Listen.
“Calah’s son supports the stones almost as much as the Shulák do; will never know that the Blight he’s wielded into a shield around his city took his mate at the tender age of less than two. Nobody is safe in this place of chafed hate and lost faith. Jakar plays the world in ghastly tunes for his own sick enjoyment, but you already know that,” he says, plucking a vein from the heart and slurping it like a mouse’s tail as he waggles absent brows. “It’s written all over your skin. His win.”
I look away, down toward the crater lake.
“Why her?”
He makes that humming sound again. Guts squirming, I watch him pluck another vein free, wrapping it around his finger before sucking it off the tip. “You believe you are the catalyst. I can neither confirm nor deny. I have fished for the answer, but all I could pull up was the poor, decapitated head of a once frolicking scripture. Like somebody reached into my bowl and slaughtered the poor soul.”
My heart plummets so fast it feels like the world’s tipping.
Further proof to support my swelling theory. But it’s just that—a theory. It’s certainly not one I’ll ever voice, stashed away in an obsidian vault tucked inside my chest, right next to her precious, glowing seed.
Stuffed away with other things I’ll never think of again.
“Let me give you one more truth I managed to tuck away for this very special day,” he says, and I whip my gaze at him, eyes narrowing. “Since you finally graced me with your presence again.”
“What’s the catch?”
He sets the fleshy remnants of the heart back in the goat’s gaping chest cavity and slurps the blood off his fingers. “In return, you will bear in mind that of which I yearn. Should you ever want to … spend the swords blow and leave the world behind.”
I frown, wondering when he got so desperate to die.
My insides curdle as he tips his head, his cowl shrugging back to reveal his bald scalp. He threads his entire knobbly hand into his wide-open mouth, then reaches down his throat until he’s almost elbow deep. He pulls, making choked sounds, and his bloody hand re-emerges, clenched around a long, fleshy ribbon of wiggling, black scripture.
He yanks the squealing prophecy free, then tosses it on the ground by my feet where it hisses slithered words:
It withers into a mangled ball while Maars coughs and sputters, wiping a dribble of black blood from his milky lips.
I replay the words in my head, frowning.
Hinging.
“Did you catch the last line?”
“You weren’t listening?” I can feel his disapproving leer even though he has no eyes. “The poor thing perished without cherish. You should have been paying closer attention.”
Blocking him out, I chew on the echo of hissed words—tasting them. Trying to release the deeper notes.
Wield the unmade … I’m sure that’s what it said at the end.
Spinning, I crouch and place my hand on her prophecy. Trace it with the tip of my finger as I mutter the words in my head for the millionth time:
“You want my advice, concise?”
“No.”
I’ve never wanted his silence more in my entire life.
“Stop fighting it,” he offers anyway. “Happiness tastes much sweeter when it’s short lived. Let her drink you, roots will sink through. Take your precious little time and enjoy it like a rhyme—sublime. Then gone. You can’t save her without forsaking the world, bound man.” He points to the darkening sky, a single star hatching red. The first that pocks into existence every night. “Nobody can.”
I steal a glance at the ruddy star, then at the withered prophecy on the ground, back to the one on the stone. I push to a stand and stalk toward the stairs, taking them two at a time.
We’ll see about that.