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“We didn’t want this.” She tried to shove away, but Apollius held her tight. “None of us wanted this!”
“You will.” Both hands held the sides of her head, craning her neck so he could see her eyes. “Nyxara, I promise you, you will. I know things you don’t. I’m finding a way to save you.” He paused. “I only ever want to protect you, beloved.”
Protection. A cage, a leash, control by a more palatable name.
Rage, eclipsing everything, rising up in her until it crowded out rational thought, crowded out fear. She jerked backward, reaching for her own throat with her claws.
Golden light shackled around her wrists. It burned; she cried out.
“No, beloved,” Apollius murmured. “You won’t get away from it like that.” He smoothed back her hair. “I should’ve just brought you. Left the others. If I’d known, I would have. You and I could’ve been the only gods.”
“I never wanted to be a god.”
A thoughtful look drew his brows together. “I see,” he murmured. “That might make it easier. Maybe I could grant you this.”
But the way he said it didn’t make her think he’d changed his mind about letting her go. He’d only reconsidered the cage he wanted to keep her in.
He hauled her back toward the broken Fount, moving as a man would, not the liquid quickness power lent them. Nyxara tried to fight, twisting in his grip, but he dragged her along, up the mountain, across the rock. They passed knots of penitents, some of those who’d been there for years building their monasteries, their huts and cloisters. She screamed at them to help her. They pretended not to hear. The sacred grove was ash.
When they reached the Fount, Apollius finally let go of her. She stumbled, curled up on the stone. Her back pressed against the place where the carvings had broken from the lip of the Fount.
“Is their power back here, now?” Apollius snarled, gripping the golden lip of the Fount with white knuckles. “Now that they’ve left me? Or do I have to wait for their first deaths?”
No. From above and beneath and behind, rumbling the ground, a sound that could crack the sky. It doesn’t work that way. The power will trickle back here, eventually, but it will take eons. We cannot hold it all, not while broken.
Apollius reached out and struck at the surface of the water, making it ripple. “And when it finally comes back to You, will You tell me how to achieve what I want? Have I danced prettily enough? Gained the worship You truly wanted?”
Immortality is an impossibility, the Fount said. We told you this.
“I don’t accept it!”
Accept it or not, it is the truth. You have two deaths, one more than you did before.
And that’s when Nyxara decided to take one from him. She reached up, clawed hands gouging into his chest—
“Lore!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
If you sin, make it count.
—Ratharcan proverb
She didn’t know where she was. Who she was. Her head ached, her body hurting from things it hadn’t actually done, crying out against all the memories that had been poured into it.
“Lore!” That word again. Her name. Someone was pulling on her hand. “Lore, we have to go, the tomb is collapsing!”
Her limbs wouldn’t obey her directions, her vision was blurry. But the voice was right. Chunks of black stone rained from the ceiling, the reflective walls cracking. In front of her, a woman on a plinth, beautiful and still.
As Lore watched, the beautiful body rotted, moving through years of decomposition in moments. Her face sank in, the flesh decayed, became a skull, became dust. The bouquet of lilies in Her pale hands grew soggy and rotten, their matter mingling with the body’s.
Nyxara’s first death, finally.
Whoever was tugging on her hand swore in a voice that was becoming more familiar, pulling at the weave of her memories, putting them back to rights. Her body was hoisted into the air, hung over a broad shoulder.
The owner of the broad shoulder—Gabe, it was Gabe, not Hestraon but Gabe—muscled out of the door that he’d miraculously forced open. As soon as he did, the ceiling fell, shaking the cavern as the tomb shattered in on itself.
The shock wave sent them sprawling, Lore pitching forward out of Gabe’s grip. Something clattered, hitting the side of her head—bones. She’d tripped right into a skeleton, shattering it out of articulation, making it nothing more than a mass of yellowed ivory.
