“For my sister to pay for the pain she has caused.”
“And what would you do to achieve that?”
“Anything,” she says.
“Would you die for it?”I ask.
“Yes,” she whispers.“There is nothing left for me.She took everything I had.”
I wipe my hand over Interitus’s face, mopping the blood up.“Oh, Thalia, you thought the fates forgot you, but they gave you the greatest gift of all…”
Her frown deepens so I continue.
“You did not seenothing.What you saw was no fate.”
She grits her teeth at me.“Yes, exact—” She falters, her eyes widening, then she gasps, sudden, cracking.Her world view shifting.Architecti follows a moment later.
“Undifferentiated potential?It’s not… That’s not possible.”Interitus is babbling, but she’s processing, the cogs aligning.
“You are what you’ve been trying to create, you are all fates at once.The fates didn’t forget you, they couldn’t show you your destiny because you are greater than the system.You are what comes next,” I say.
She stares at me, her mouth parting.
“But in isolation and without Architecti’s power for possibility, you become the embodiment of entropy.All you are capable of is destruction and not the creation of your potential, a new system.
I turn to Architecti.“And you.Those tears you cried, not in sorrow, but through the weight of burden, of carrying so much free will.Too much possibility without direction and you chose your own destruction.Do you see?You need each other.Together you can create something new.But not as you are, and not alone.”
“Big words and bigger ideas from a thing.A contract,” Architecti snaps, her mask of pleasantry long gone.
I shake my head.She’s just trying to hurt me.“I know what I am.What I was created for.That doesn’t mean it’s all I can be.”
Architecti screams.She lunges forward, smashing into me and sending me tumbling backwards.I stagger and land on the parapet, my body half hanging off the ledge.I glance over the lip.The campus is crawling with vampires and wraiths.There are an impossible number of lifeless bodies on the ground.“Oh gods.”
I have to end this now.
Movement catches the corner of my eye.I twist and see a body hanging by campus threads off the parapet several feet away.I squint and realise… “Midnight, get to safety,” I hiss.
She lifts her head.Moans.Then kicks and scrambles up, gripping her ribs.
“What the fuck are you doing?”I shake my head at her.But she glares back and shakes hers harder.
“Get to safety,” I growl.
“Not.Leaving.You,” she spits out.
Fucking woman.
I have to handle this before she gets here.I do not need the angels having leverage over me.
The sisters grapple, still locked in the rapidly deteriorating mesh.Interitus gets an arm free and grips Architecti’s neck.
Architecti stamps her foot on Interitus’s and the pair go stumbling, only to crash into the same sculpture I fell on earlier.
I reach inside myself and pull at the entwined threads of their souls, and I pour power into them.My runes flare to life and we’re surrounded by light.Cocooned in our potential.The three of us always destined to end this together.
I throw a bright white lasso of magic around them and drag them towards me.Closer and closer.
Both of them are bloodied and bruised, Architecti has blood spilling from her mouth, Interitus’s nose is broken and her eye swelling purple.
