AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Lore nodded, as if that were an easy thing to do. As if she didn’t hold everything, always, and could never find a place to put it down.
Gabe’s hand came up to cup her cheek. So many things could happen while they were alone down here, but neither of them moved, though the space between them thrummed like a plucked string.
“He cares about you, too, you know,” Lore murmured, turning her face so her lips brushed his palm. “And I know you care about him.”
He didn’t deny it, his eye closing, opening again with a softer light. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “There’s too much there. Too much history.”
She didn’t argue with him, though it seemed a flimsy excuse, all things considered.
“What about you?” A swallow worked down Gabe’s throat. “Who do you care for?”
“Both of you.” She closed her eyes. “Can’t it be both?”
His breath came shaky.
The vague echoes of shouts filtered through the open entrance ahead of them. The thrumming moment shattered. “Sounds like your distraction is still going strong,” Lore said, turning around, breaking contact.
“Good.” Gabe spat the word like it was a sharpened arrow he’d been saving. “We have some time, then.”
Time. Time to go where Nyxara had wanted her to from the beginning, to follow the pull that led her here that night. When she saw her mother.
The thought terrified her. Lore never wanted to see where the remnants of the Buried Watch had made their home ever again. Not the glittering, mica-flecked walls, the stalactites gleaming in phosphorescent glow, the obsidian hulk of the tomb. Beautiful, in its own strange way, and terrible, and calling to her.
She didn’t want to do as the goddess asked. But it was inevitable, she knew that now. It was inevitable, if she wanted any of this to end.
Lore turned away from the well and its spiral stairs before she had the conscious thought to do so.
And with the first step she took, her mind surged, the goddess coming forward.
“Lore!” Gabe, calling behind her—she was running, her body acting without her directive, rushing deeper into the dark. “Lore, what are you doing?”
No answer but her pounding feet, rock slicing through the thin slippers that matched her peach-colored dress. Distantly, Lore longed for her old boots. She didn’t even know where they were anymore.
Also distantly, she thought about how she should be horrified. She was running deep into the catacombs, toward Nyxara’s tomb, and she knew that she wasn’t the one directing her movements right now. She could feel the goddess taking hold of things that Lore hadn’t given; it was daylight in the world above, but down here was endless night, and it all belonged to Her.
Cursing behind her. Gabe, following, running faster than a man of his bulk should be able to. Another crackling in the air as he lit his torch again, an unwavering flame that Lore didn’t need. She could see just fine.
Down they went, spiraling through the warren of the catacombs, so much more chaotic than the halls of the Citadel above. These passages seemed familiar, even after so many years. Smaller than she remembered, from when she ran as a child. When her mother told her to go with love in her eyes, and Lilia said so little with love that it had to be obeyed.
Then: open air, a gentle bluish glow. Lore had never asked what made the moss and mushrooms here emit light; it was an underground cathedral around an obsidian tomb, and things here didn’t need to make sense, they just were. Nyxara moved backward in her mind, let Lore take over again, let her have control of her own hands, her own feet.
But when Lore skidded to a stop, her legs barely tired and still feeling not quite like her own, it wasn’t to marvel at the awful magic of her childhood home.
It was to look at the bones.
The bones, and the open door of the tomb.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The pattern of the world is cycles, things beginning and ending and beginning again.
—Notes from Bran Morinac, Caldienan monk, part of the early Church on the Golden Mount, 165–100 BGF
She focused on the bones first. That felt more logical, more like something she could handle. They were scattered around the vast cavern, fully intact skeletons still in the positions where they’d fallen—some scrambling away from the tomb, others lying in peaceful repose. One trying to climb up the glittering wall.
And Lore knew, with some uncanny sense of the familial, that none of these skeletons were her mother. Lilia wasn’t here, killed by the sweep of Mortem that Lore had inadvertently called that day at the docks. Lilia was gone.
Lilia had left her.
