Page 75 of The Endless One

That wasn’t how it worked. Was it? He’d always been a god who managed his own abilities, but he would try.

Cupping the cool water in his hands felt like blasphemy. Touching another god’s magic should have made his skin crawl. Instead, his reflection looked back at him in the shimmering pool cupped in his hands, and he drank as she’d said.

The magic soothed his throat when he hadn’t even realized it was raw and ragged. It flowed through his veins, and he knew something had changed inside of him as well.

“Come,” he said, his tone eager as he reached out a wet hand for her to take. “We go to the living realm.”

Just like that, they both opened their eyes. Elric looked down at his hand on her shoulder, his fingers now dripping as though even here the water had followed them.

“The chicken,” he said. “Bring us the chicken.”

“The dead one?” Sybil asked.

But she didn’t ask any more questions when he glared at her. Instead, she rushed to get the carcass and handed it to him.

“I have always been a deathless god,” he muttered, staring down at the dead husk in his hands. “But I have no control over death itself. I can guide people into the land of the dead. I can force a soul to remain, but only with a deal. I have never been able to deny death after it happens, and certainly not with an innocent soul.”

But even as he said the words, the chicken’s wounds were healing. He’d never been able to heal mortal wounds. Not once. But here they were, knitting before his eyes, and suddenly, the beast blinked its eyes open.

“Truly a death god now,” Jessamine whispered, and then she placed her hand over his on the chicken.

He could feel her magic traveling through the gaps between his fingers. The aged chicken then became young again. Its feathers smoothed, grew stronger and more vibrant. Within moments, it struggled in his grip and he was forced to release it into the kitchen.

The sound of its squawking was the only thing he could hear for a few moments before he suddenly burst into laughter. The two women stared at him like he had lost his mind, and maybe he had. But…

“Life and death,” he finally croaked through the tears of mirth. “Ajax has no idea how terrifying he made us.”

Jessamine hated how difficult it was to wrap her mind around the fact that she was, actually, a goddess. Standing out here on the ramparts where she had gotten married, staring down at the glassy sea so far down, she struggled to comprehend how she had come this far.

She’d died here. Died multiple times afterward, and yet, she was still standing. A stronger, more capable version of herself. And still, she would need every last ounce of her own grit and mettle to get through this last part.

Because she knew there wasn’t a future that she wanted at the end of this story. Sybil would get her house by the sea. Agnes would return to running the Pleasure District with her nephew and whoever he wanted to remain with them. Elissa would go back to her birds, and perhaps even become strong enough to bring her dear love back to her normal existence.

Everyone else would get what they wanted. They started this story with a desire for the end to be their biggest dream, and Jessamine had shared that hope with them. She would be queen. She would sit on the same throne her mother had protected, and she would make Inverholm even better than it was before.

A wind brushed through her tangled hair, sending tendrils across her face. It dug underneath the loose-fitting shirt she’d stolen from Elric, coiling along the nervous sweat at the base of her spine. Soon enough, the waves would roll again. The sea would turn into a churning chasm that dashed anything foolish enough to get trapped within its grasp against jagged rocks that she could just barely see from the height where she stood.

“Contemplating death?” Elric’s voice came from behind her shoulder. “Or is it perhaps life you think of?”

She swallowed. “I suppose they are one and the same to someone like me.”

“Death is an end.”

“It was only the beginning of my tale.” She looked over her shoulder at him, seeing the dark god who stood behind her and who had guided her through so much hardship. “I cannot seem to reconcile where I came from and what I am now. Life, death, mortal, goddess. It’s all rather hard to think about.”

“I’d imagine it is.” He walked up behind her, wrapping an arm around her waist. “But there is so much more you can do now.”

“Like what?”

He hummed low, the air fanning across her collarbone that was revealed by the low-cut shirt she wore. “Do you remember the first moment you brought me back to life?”

“Hard to forget, Elric.” Already goose bumps rose on her skin at the memory of it. That had been one of the most terrifying and electrifying moments of her entire life.

He had been real, actually right in front of her, and she hadn’t known what to do with that. A god reborn. The first god in two hundred years to walk the same land that she walked upon, and he wanted to worship her body like no one else ever had, and she…

Already her breath came a little faster. Her mind flicked back to the cave where they had first explored each other’s bodies, growling like animals as they tried to tear through each other’s flesh.

“You’ve experienced very little as a goddess,” he murmured. “Sometimes I wonder if you can really appreciate your new self if you don’t… push a little.”