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He’d said Nyxara would know how to give Her power back, and Lore’s acquiescence gave Her enough control to do it. Something flooded Lore’s mouth. Water, seeping from her pores to coat her tongue, her teeth. It was cool, tasted sweet, reminded her somehow of a pool at night, still and quiet and reflecting the moon.
Nyxara’s drink of the Fount. Lore had said she would give it up, and she was Nyxara, now, in every way that mattered. She looked down at her hands.
Slowly, the skin of her fingers turned to stone, creeping down to her gray palms, beneath the gold-and-silver band of her engagement ring. So this was what happened to the others. They renounced Their power, really renounced it, denied every part of Themselves that had ever secretly thrilled to plucking the strings of the world. Their swallow of the Fount had poured out of Them, and taken their human pieces with it.
Mortem crept in. Lore felt it all around her, in the rocks and wood and glass of the North Sanctuary and the larger Church it was part of, the walls it made around the Citadel, keeping nobles and commoners forever separate. Those blessed and those cursed. The holy and the damned.
It stretched for her stone fingers, those strands of death. It curled around them like a lover. And the death within her rose to meet it, her life slowly alchemizing, light to dark and dead.
“Quickly.” Apollius cradled her head, acted like she was something so precious, now. A replacement for the goddess who’d spurned Him. Something new to own. “Give it to Me, Lore. Then I’ll have all of it, not just the dregs that make it back to the broken Fount. I’ll stop the stone and make your living flesh undying.”
She knew how to give power up. It felt like all she knew.
Lore didn’t fight when His lips came down on hers, let Him hold her as if there could ever be anything between them. Because there was something between her and the body He’d taken, between her and the man she knew was still in there, somewhere.
Lore kept the swallow of the Fount in her mouth, didn’t let Him drink it out, not yet. She expected His frustration when she pulled back, water still pooling in the bottom of her jaw as stone crept up her wrists. It should choke her, that water, but it didn’t, as if her whole body had become a chalice just for its use.
But Apollius just looked down at her with something like awe. It took Him off guard enough for Bastian to surge forward, just a bit, his eyes tired and resigned and with that same tiny ember of hope.
She’d been able to channel Mortem before Nyxara was in her head. The eclipse ritual had given her the ability to channel Spiritum. Surely she could hold on to those, even if she managed to get rid of Nyxara? Just for a moment. Just long enough for this to work, just long enough to linger in death’s antechamber.
“I love you,” Lore said around all that sweet, crystalline water. “This is us. This is mine.”
And Lore swallowed.
At the same time, she yanked on the threads of Mortem she’d gathered in her hand.
The Church crumbled around them.
Every stone in the Church flew apart, those heavy beams falling from the ceiling, the diamond chandelier breaking with an oddly beautiful tinkling sound. Jax bellowed from where he’d been waiting, pelting for the doors, getting out right before a beam fell in front of the entrance and blocked the way. Another beam fell between Lore and Apollius, knocking them in opposite directions.
Flying shrapnel struck Lore in the temple, and her world went black, but she didn’t lose consciousness. She’d learned how to hold on to it in an iron-knuckled grip, and Nyxara’s power, the drink of the Fount that Lore had briefly given up before taking it back again, made it easy to do what she had the day of the explosion on the docks.
Sidestep out of time. Drop into that place where life and death were stars she could watch burn out.
Or relight.
But she had to wait. Wait until both of their sparks were almost extinguished, until almost all the gleaming white light of Spiritum had evanesced into the black cloud of Mortem. Until a second death she could bring them back from—both herself, and Bastian, while hopefully leaving Nyxara and Apollius behind.
If she could time it right. If she could kill them both long enough for the sparks of the gods to blink out, then bring them back as only themselves. If she could hold on to power that tightly.
She could see him. Bastian, Apollius. One body, outlined in so much light it was hard to look at, even like this. Starbursts streaked from him, a comet, life leaving and death taking over. Apollius was able to heal Himself, but this much onslaught at once was too much for Him to handle, too many places for death to creep into the mortal body He’d taken. He tried, she could see it, strands of Spiritum reeled back into the whole, but there was always another one arcing out, always another fatal wound.
Her own change from Spiritum to Mortem was happening much more quickly. Vaguely, she felt the fall and crush of rock, hitting her body, beating out life piece by sharp-edged piece. But it was distant; there was no pain, not here. The shore of time, soft and liquid-like. The place before eternity.
This was what Nyxara wanted. What Bastian wanted. A death, Her second, Apollius’s second, Bastian’s only. But Lore held life and death both, Lore could thread that needle. Could free Nyxara and Apollius from their second, bodiless lives, and knit both her body and Bastian’s back together around the space the gods left.
She had to believe she could do it.
But she had to be careful. Had to stay here, in the moment when one thing became another, had to ignore the currents tugging at her and willing her to move on.
Her light faded, faded. Became a flickering thing, a candle wick in the seconds after being blown out, bright threads of Spiritum stretching far-flung into the darkness. And Bastian’s was close, too, both of them barely hanging on, death a creeping spiderweb growing ever closer.
And then here was the moment. The split second when lives blinked into death, when a body was both. Lore paused it, there on the shore, this last heartbeat when her head emptied of everything but herself, but she could still hold the dregs of her power. She was dead, and so was Bastian, and the gods had no life to cling to.
Nyxara was gone. There was a blankness at the back of Lore’s thoughts, as if She’d made a burrow in her mind that would always be empty. But there was no trace of the goddess. She had faded away. Dead and gone, surely, finally.
I hope… but Lore didn’t know how to finish that. She didn’t know what she hoped for the Buried Goddess, whose two lives had each been cruel. Maybe the hope itself was enough.
