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He nodded to them smoothly. “I appreciate your presence. I know that my request was an odd one, that usually those who own the land you work would be meeting with me instead. But I specifically wanted to meet with you, who do the actual labor, rather than those who profit from it.”
Sidelong looks from the farmers’ eyes, and the stiffening of shoulders from those who were a touch more well dressed than the others—landowners, Lore assumed. Even out here, society stratified itself.
Bastian turned away and faced the stone fields. Miles of wheat and grass and trees that should be green but weren’t, perfect statues producing nothing.
All because of Lore.
Her hand was still in Bastian’s, a fact she didn’t remember until his fingers closed lightly around hers, a bolstering pressure she couldn’t quite bring herself to return.
Down the road, the dust grew closer. Began to resolve into the shapes of horses and marching men.
“We just have to feel this out,” Bastian said quietly, meant only for her. He didn’t sound nervous, for all that it was an admittance he had no idea how to do this. “Like you did yesterday.”
“Bastian.” Lore tried not to make it obvious, but her gaze kept turning to the road, to what was clearly an approaching traveling party. “There’s someone coming—”
“Never mind that.” His voice was low and sure. “Focus on us.”
Her fingers spasmed, scars and calluses in reassuring harmony.
“I can feel them both—Mortem and Spiritum, inside and out.” The corner of his lip ticked up, a slight smile. “Can you?”
She could. Inside, a twined rope of black and gold, embroidering her bones. Outside, entropy, the stasis of dead matter in rock and withered root, all the things she’d killed.
But lower, beneath all that death—a spark of life in the farmlands, still. Spiritum, the thinnest thread. So frail she was afraid she’d snap it if she reached, but there.
Lore’s eyes drifted closed, and there was her forest, the trees tall and impenetrable, guarding a dangerous mind. In the blue sky beyond, smoke twisted, and the scent of charred bark filled her nose, her lungs.
“You can do this, Lore.” Bastian’s voice, still so quiet. “I’m here. We’re here together.”
That was something to cling to. Him, being here.
Bastian stepped behind her, his chest an inch away from her back. A moment, then he held his hands to either side, slow and deliberate. Feeling this out, just like he’d said. Following deep instinct.
Lore put her hands in his, her knuckles against his palms. A slow shiver worked all the way through her, knitting the two of them together, dropping them into a space that felt outside of time.
Slowly, the forest she’d grown around her mind thinned, leaves falling until there was open space, blue sky, endless horizon.
Allowing herself to feel the fullness of her power, on purpose rather than in a moment of panic, felt like finally working out a cramp in a muscle. She didn’t realize she’d stepped closer to Bastian until she felt his chest flush against her spine.
“Can you touch them both?” His breath swept against her ear. “Grasp them together?”
She could. Bastian behind her was a current of light, an ember blown to flame. He illuminated her darkness but didn’t obliterate it; he only deepened her shadows. She could reach out and tug at Mortem and Spiritum both, the light and the dark, make them hers, make them obey.
“I couldn’t do it without you.” There was something different about Bastian’s voice, the timbre slightly more resonant than it should be. The words didn’t really sound like him, either—he wasn’t one to perform his caring, preferring action to something spoken. “None of this works without you.”
Lore didn’t know what to do with that, with a raw vulnerability that she craved but couldn’t allow herself to touch. It sounded like something she’d heard before. All of this did, really—something that had happened before and would happen again. Lore was grounded in herself, in her body, but also outside of it. Both herself and someone else.
So she pulled away. Leaned almost imperceptibly forward, just enough to put some air between them. “Are you ready?”
The space she’d forced seemed to break Bastian out of a reverie. She felt him shake his head, just slightly, as if trying to dislodge something. “As ready as I’m going to be.”
He sounded like himself again. As if that moment had been as unexpected for him as it was for her.
Lore pulled in a breath, held it. Her lungs went still and aching, her heart slowed, her vision grayed out. Except graying out wasn’t the right way to phrase it, not anymore. Everything was colorless, except for Spiritum.
Before, the magic of life had appeared as a corona of white light, blazing around the edges of every living thing. But now that she held both powers on purpose, Spiritum was gold as sun rays, and she could see it even in dead things—that thin filament of life remaining in the trees, the grass. Death to life and back again, one eternally springing from the other.
“Gods,” Bastian breathed out behind her. “Gods dead and dying, it’s everywhere.”
