Page 96

“You must not think of yourself as one of them.”

And there it was. The truth I’d continued to deny. I was not human. I was a shadow hand. An illusion, and the gods were here confirming it and telling me to stop pretending.

I swallowed, pushing back the pain this realization brought me and bracing myself to ask the questions burning in my mind. “The story of Illio,” I hedged, recalling Rune’s favorite tale, the one which had initiated the idea of a shadow hand, “was that true?”

Zariah glanced at Darvol, something unspoken passing between them. I waited with my bottom lip caught between my teeth.

“In essence, yes,” she answered finally. She leaned back, releasing my hands, yet I remained caught in her orbit. “Illio was not human, however, as most believe. He was a Facet.”

“What’s a…Facet?” I asked as I leaned forward.

This time Darvol answered, manifesting a seat of bubbles with the wave of a hand. “It is a way for our kind to procreate.”

That was unexpected.

“We tear off a bit of our ether and, with it, create a new version of ourselves, if you will,” Zariah explained.

My gaze bobbed between the two beings. “So…another god?”

“Yes and no.” Zariah’s answer was accompanied by a sigh of frustration. “It is not simple to create a Facet. When we do so, we take from ourselves, and the new being is only as powerful as the energy we instill. It is not a comfortable thing to do, so it hardly ever happens.”

I nodded as though I understood, even though wrapping my head around the concept proved difficult. “Then why did you create Illio?”

“He was my Facet,” Darvol boomed as though challenging me to accuse him of a transgression. “I wished to view the lives of the humans without notice.”

“Our Facets appear more human than we do, even when we try to blend, as you can see,” Zariah offered.

“So…you took human form?” I asked, leaning away from Darvol slightly. Illio had not been a good or kind person according to the stories. He was the reason the gods supposedly separated the magic amongst us.

“No.” The force of his answer shook the very foundation of the seabed beneath us.

I clung to the edges of the stone sofa to keep from being shoved off by one of the resulting waves. I didn’t dare ask him to clarify.

Zariah set a hand on my arm, sending a wave of calm into me that rippled with gold fibers as it passed through the ether in the water. “We can see through the eyes of our Facets, but they are separate from us,” she explained more gently. “There’s a connection—an ethereal cord between us, but the new being is just that. A being. They have their own feelings and motivations.”

“My Facet,” Darvol said, looking for all the world as though he’d just bitten off a spoiled bite of food, “decided to block our connection and attempted to rule among the humans instead of simply living among them. I inadvertently gave him too much of myself. He became too powerful.”

“When Illio created what you refer to as the…shadow hand,” Zariah continued, squeezing my arm gently, “he actually made the mistake of creating his own offspring as it were, and we knew we had to intervene.”

My head spun with the information. “Wait, so a shadow hand is really a Facet of a…Facet? But that can’t be. Leuruna isn’t a god, she’s a human. Isn’t she?” My voice grew shriller the more I spoke.

“Yes, she is human,” Zariah soothed. “But she was also a Carrier.”

I squeezed my eyes shut in frustration. None of this made sense. “What’s a Carrier?” I bit out.

The gods exchanged another look.

“Think of it as an incubator,” Darvol said, waving a hand in dismissal.

I bristled at him for acting as though I was searching for unimportant information when I was trying my best not to completely shut down over everything that was happening.

Not noticing my ire, he went on. “We told you a Facet was a form of procreation. We need a being to act as a safe place for the ether to manifest into its full form.”

“You impregnate a human?” The horror must have shown because Zariah squeezed me hard enough to cut through the buzzing in my head.

“Not impregnate,” she said. “The human doesn’t even know they’re a Carrier. In fact, it’s often a boon for them magically since they have access to our ether.”

The weight of what they were telling me finally hit, and I sank into the seat beneath me, breathing rapid and shallow, as it clicked into place. Zariah waited patiently as I pieced it all together.