I realize, dimly, that with whatever power he holds, he’s directed its path.
When it crashes down, the impact reverberates through everything in the woods. The ground trembles. Embers scatter.
For one fragile second, everything stills.
Orán and I share a look.
I drag in a breath and start coughing the moment it hits my lungs. He drops beside me, one arm wrapping around my shoulders, the other pressing against my chest. My lungs clear faster under his touch.
“Thank you.”
He nods and gets to his feet, while also helping me to mine.
Relief barely has time to register before the sky ignites once again. There is sound first—that of a god’s fury—of matter parting way as another star spears through all that holds gravity. Every atom of it is alight with the kind of heat that ends whatever it touches.
Its devastating path cuts through the forest, using it as fuel and tinder, making it clear we have only seconds to spare before it makes landfall and buries us where we stand.
And I understand, understand like I never have before.
The living ball of fire can’t be stopped or contained.
That this fate is unchangeable, even for Orán.
This is how and where it will end for us.
Then there is only pain. I burn in a way I never have before, with my name meeting my ears one last time as Orán fights against this act of God.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The Power to Change Fate
Orán
The instant the god’s full, unfiltered power comes for us, I spin and curl my body over Eridessa, while at the same time pulling her into my arms. I create a barrier around us. Though by the slowing of the rise and fall of her chest, and her feeble, hitched breaths, I believe I may have acted too late.
Her life. Her body. Her soul’s hold on this world is weakening.
The god’s essence burns hotter and brighter than any force on this plane. He rages against his fall from grace, his unmaking.
It tears through the night like a maelstrom of defiance, spilling itself into the world with no restraint, no mercy. I feel him everywhere—threaded through the firestorm, embedded in the ground beneath my feet, screaming through the air itself. This is not merely destruction. It is his temper and wrath made manifest.
And I recognize this power.
The Great Dagda.
As he was before his fall—a god of excess, of abundance and brutality, of unchecked dominion—he remains so in his unmaking.
The land becomes his final proclamation, his refusal to be forgotten.
Against the stripping of worship. Against the slow erosion of belief. Against the long centuries of irrelevance that reduced him from a god to a myth, then from myth to footnote. And now, finally, to this.
A star torn from the sky. Burning himself into the bones of the world rather than surrendering to the afterlife that waits for beings like him.
I have seen gods die before, and they do not all go this way.
Some dissolve. Some fracture. Some scatter themselves across time and space, becoming echoes and relics and half-remembered miracles. But Dagda. Dagda chooses annihilation over submission. He chooses to take everything with him.
The forest feeds his fall.
