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“If Rune was a Carrier, then am I…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. It was absurd. Impossible.

“You are a Facet, my dear one,” Zariah confirmed with a smile as though she’d just set a crown upon me.

“No!” I shook my head, wrenching my arm from her grip. “I can’t. I won’t. I’m not.” I floated to my feet, backstroking away though I had nowhere to run.

“Is it so bad?” Zariah asked, swimming off the couch into an upright position. “To be part god?”

I froze. I was no god. Surely, they knew that. “Illio—” I tried, but Darvol answered before I could fully express the thought.

“Was a mistake. He was a danger to humanity and our kind, so was dealt with accordingly.”

“No one has made a Facet since,” Zariah said, tilting her head and making her ridiculously long hair ripple with a wave that traveled all the way down its length. “Until you.”

“Why?” The word was a whisper.

She smiled encouragingly. “The night of the last Imrati, when Balram emerged victorious, our sister disappeared.”

I fell back into a seat of bubbles that rose up to meet me with a wave of Darvol’s hand. “Revka?” I asked, again a whisper.

“Yes.” Zariah’s beautiful face contorted with grief. “She accompanied the victor to Centos to gift him the powerstone he’d won and never returned.”

“Why—”

“Didn’t we go after her?” Darvol snarled.

I recoiled but quickly ascertained he wasn’t angry at me. Even so, the fish schooling beside me scattered in a flurry of green scales when his gaze turned my way.

“We were prevented from crossing the border between worlds.” Zariah said as she put a comforting hand on his arm this time, and he settled back, dropping his shoulders. “Only one of us can cross through at a time. It has been so since…since before the Imrati was invented. The only place we may all manifest in human form simultaneously are the Synbari Isles.”

“The Islands of the gods?” I asked, my attention caught. That had been our destination. That was exactly where Rivven’s mother had sent us. Had she known what I was?

Zariah smiled. “It was our home for eons, the one place where our world intersected with the human realm and we could experience the senses fully.”

“You speak of it in past tense,” I said, noting the wistfulness of her gaze.

“Yes, the longer Revka has been absent, the further into disarray the Isles fall. The border between worlds is crumbling, threatening to unleash horrors barely imaginable. And I’m afraid the disease has spread beyond our lands.”

“Disease? Horrors?” I echoed. What horrors could be worse than the world crumbling? “Do you mean the storms? The earthquakes⁠—”

“It has become worse over the past month,” Darvol snapped, displacing an eel that had wound around his arm.

That was about the time of the Imrati. What had happened to trigger it? I recalled the way Balram’s staff now held both the Centosian and Astridonian stones. Could it be a result of his concentration of power? Or—it couldn’t have been about me, could it?

Or was there something more here? A puzzle piece of information that I just didn’t have. Something told me complaining would fall on deaf ears, and I wanted—no needed—to uncover all the truths that had been withheld from me.

“We need your help to locate our sister,” Zariah said. “We will not abandon her.”

“Assuming she is still alive,” Darvol seethed.

My heart raced as I considered the possibilities. “You think…how could Balram kill a god, let alone capture one?” He would certainly do so if he had the means and it was in his best interests.

“She cannot be, or all is lost,” Darvol admitted, but his eyes flamed again like tiny volcanoes spewing lava beneath the ocean.

This was about more than their missing sister. Visions of the black void that had spread through the Night Forest filled me with unease. Whatever was happening in Synbari had spread through the human kingdoms as well. And I couldn’t help but sense there was more. If Revka wasn’t found, the entire world was at stake.

“What we do know,” Zariah said, stepping between us, “is that Revka may well still be alive since she found a way to create a Facet to call for help from whatever fate has befallen her. We sensed you immediately but did not fully understand until recently what had occurred.”

“How did you find out if you’re stuck here?” I had to garner as much information as possible in hopes of figuring this out. This had to be why Rivven’s mother sent us. There had to be a way to fix this. Even so I asked the question somewhat timidly in the hopes Darvol wouldn’t throw another temper tantrum.