“Draw your sword, mortal. This is your contract. Immense power when alive as one of the Godstouched, and godhood once dead. With both, you will choose who you become. With both, comes the risk of monstrosity. Do you accept?”
The air throbbed, spat blood, burned. “I do.” Kadra withdrew the blade he kept on his baldric and, at the god’s bidding, thrust it into the center of the fleshy circle. It sank in. The room shuddered.
“Finally.” Wrath’s smile widened, teeth engorging.
Hands burst from the hole gouged by Kadra’s sword. He stiffened as they gripped his feet, abnormally long limbs winding up his torso to immobilize him. The cavernous space enclosing them grew infinitely high, Wrath engorging until he stood fifty feet tall, black robes trailing in his path.
Madness. This was why so few survived seeing the Elsar.
“No fear, Tetrarch?” Wrath’s enormous form boomed.
“No.” Fear was knowing that the woman he loved, to whom he had barely spoken of love, could be dead under the city walls of his former hometown.
“I chose well.” The god neared him. A claw the size of an arm tapped his forehead. A previously unknown tightness eased in his chest.
Wrath looked pleased. “Well, Time will tell what this makes of you. They told me that you’d come. A most useful sibling, though this world persists in calling them male.” His fangs snapped together with a laugh. “This should be quite interesting. I’ll see you soon, Tetrarch.”
The cave of flesh receded into Delran Tower’s tile and glass.
He stood alone at its center. The floor-to-ceiling windows circling the ballroom told him he hadn’t undergone any physical changes. But the Elsar didn’t lie. He drew a grindstone from his satchel and sat at the empty banquet table.
Ten hours. He began sharpening his sword, counting down the seconds with each slice of metal against the grindstone. Ten hours, and he would go to her.
And if he found her corpse, if it was too late to pull her from the docks by the river to the afterlife as she had done for him, it wouldn’t be Wrath he pledged himself to but Ruin.
She was running out of air.
Sarai stuck her nose through the scant gap between the chunk of the city walls crushing her legs and the right half of her torso. She drew in a shaky breath, blood flooding her throat along with the precious air she drew in. Her lungs couldn’t expand to full capacity.Don’t think about that. Don’t panic.
It could have been worse. Another slab of wall had wedged between the ground and the mass pressing on her. It kept most of the weight off, or this would have been a repeat of Sidran Tower. She could hold on.Someone will find me soon.
She had clung to that hope for the past ten hours, ignoring the vise of fear and stone suffocating her. The sky wheeled above, pitch-black. Still, she held fast. She had been in a corner of the market when everything went to shit. Rescue would take a while. Screaming would only waste precious air.
Noceo. Between Arsamea, Edessa, and now him, she had learned that being torn apart didn’t make one stronger. It warped her reflection of herself until she no longer understood it.
The worst part was that Noceo hadn’t been wrong.
She wanted power.
She wanted enough of it to set the corrupt, the hateful, and their acolytes ablaze. To force Noceo to his knees and make him scream as he had her. Her vengeance wouldn’t be for the north or south, but for the hapless creature he had proven her to be.
Then, there was Kadra. Her heart felt ravaged. She couldn’t think. Could only lie there as her body fulfilled the last of Noceo’s commands. Remembering everything.
Memory returned to her, slipping softly into place.
Stones Guildmaster Albanus. She almost smiled as his apoplectic figure bloomed in her head after her infamous destruction of his beloved six-thousand-aurei vase. She’d glanced at the window throughout, noting the eavesdropping Guildspeople passing by in the hope that she wouldn’t give in to Albanus’s bribes. Then—
Sunlight. Noceo watching her outside.
“Try a different corner.”
“Interesting, it didn’t take.”
“You never saw me today. And you won’t notice me again unless I give you permission.I’ll see you soon, Death-Summoner.”
Noceo trailing behind her one evening at Sidran Tower to ask whether she remembered him. Noceo by the gates of Aoran Tower telling her she had surprised him at her Hearing, asking to be let in, for her to ruin Kadra with him.
He’d been careful not to say much on each occasion, evidently suspecting that she had enough resistance to his magic to remember him as with their longer conversation at the Stones Guild. He hadn’t been ready to reveal himself then.
