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The leak came from an abandoned storefront, similar to the decrepit building by the harbor where Lore had met the revenant nearly a week ago, when she raised Horse and got herself into this mess. Darkness rolled from the gaping, uneven doorway, seeped down the stairs and out into the street. It looked, somehow, like smoke and water at once—cohesive and flowing, yet with an insubstantial, eddying quality that made it hard to focus on. Small bones littered the edges of the strange black river, mice and other tiny creatures the Mortem had already eaten down to nothing.
Lore’s stomach dipped.
The Presque Mort all did an admirable job of trying to hide their fear, but it was palpable in their nervous stances, their widened eyes. None of them had seen a leak like this before.
Malcolm stepped up first, standing next to Anton. He took a deep breath and held out his hands, the candles inked on his palms facing the river of Mortem. “Put as much as you can in the rock, first, but not too much, or it will break. If there’s still some left, direct it there.” Malcolm inclined his head toward the center of the square, where a garden had been planted in the midst of the cobblestones, shaded by thick trees and wild with summer blooms. “Once that’s used up, go for the farmland. Don’t use the horses unless you have to.”
Lore looked behind her, where the terrified younger clergyman stood with all the placid horses. Why did it always come back to horses?
The rest of the Presque Mort fell into formation, making three lines on the left side of the leak. Gabe went to stand next to Malcolm and Anton, and Lore followed, the four of them forming the first line while the rest of the monks filed in behind. All of them raised their palms to the seeping pool of death magic, hands inked with symbols of the Bleeding God’s light.
And almost completely useless.
It took Lore a moment to even realize they were channeling. Tiny licks of Mortem drifted up from the stream like smoke, dissipating into the air, never getting strong enough to actually connect with anyone and become the long threads Lore dealt with. The larger mass didn’t shrink at all, despite the fact that every person behind her had necrotic, pale fingers, opaque eyes. One of them stumbled, tithing a heartbeat, but it didn’t make a difference. None of them could channel this volume of Mortem.
This felt wrong, in a way she couldn’t quite nail down. The bones littered on the cobblestones reminded her of mousetraps, of stepping into spring-loaded death with no idea an end was waiting.
Only Anton wasn’t holding his hands toward the mass, wasn’t looking at the river of Mortem at all. His one dark eye was fixed on Lore, narrow and unreadable, staring her down as death flowed before them.
He stared at her a moment longer. Then he turned to the leak, raised his hands.
The difference was night and day. Mortem rose from the dark river, coalesced in the air. It looked like the threads Lore could spin from death, but instead of going straight to Anton’s hands, they knitted together in the air, twisting into an intricate, spiking knot. She’d never seen anything like it before. Surely, tying Mortem up like that would make it harder to channel into plants or stone—
“Lore.”
Her name came like a wheeze of dying breath; she whipped her head around to Gabriel. He looked at her with a completely whited-out eye, no color at all where blue had been. His lips pulled back from his teeth, his cheeks sunken in, skin molded to the skull below. “You said you wanted to help,” he rasped, “so help.”
The air still smelled sour. Her feet still felt wobbly. Anton was still knitting Mortem into some unfathomable tangle, shaping it in a way Lore didn’t understand. But Gabe was right, and it was clear from the pathetic wisps of Mortem curling up from the leak that the Presque Mort wouldn’t be able to channel all of this away on their own.
So Lore raised her hands, closed her eyes. Held her breath, let the world go black-and-white, and called death into her.
Her vision grayed out, but something was different. She could see the knot Anton had made, pulsing in the air above the leak. Lore tried to avoid it as she reeled in threads of death, but she wasn’t sophisticated enough for that, hadn’t learned how to be careful.
As she pulled in Mortem, Anton’s knot unraveled, the dark threads curling free into the stagnant air.
She anticipated him shouting at her, doing something to stop her, trying to gather up that magic into its tangle again. But the Priest Exalted merely stepped aside, the corona of white light around him turning to face her.
Lore tried to stop, but the instinct was too strong now, and she was caught in its current like sand in the tide. The threads of Mortem that Anton had altered flowed to her hands, breached her skin, found her heart.
It felt different. Stronger, somehow, slithering through her veins in a torrent. And it didn’t come back out.
Panicking, Lore planted her feet and flexed her fingers, trying to hold up against the onslaught—
That’s when the screaming started.
Her body wouldn’t obey when Lore tried to close her hands, frozen like the corpse she undoubtedly resembled. Everything in her was cold, a deep, numbing wave coursing from her outstretched fingers and all the way down her spine, her heart stopped and stilled as if a giant fist had closed around it.
And still, the screaming. The screaming that, somehow, was her fault.
But it was hard to hear over the voice in her head.
This isn’t something you can escape. Haven’t you figured that out by now?
It echoed in every one of her bones, danced on every icy nerve. The voice was alien and familiar at once, and sounded strange, like two throats twined together and speaking as one, harmonizing with itself.
One of those voices sounded like Lore’s.
Every day, it grows stronger. Growing in you like rot as you come nearer to ascension. The voice felt like oil poured over the grooves of her brain, slipping into every empty surface. It reminded her of the voice that had told her to use her power, that day in the square with Horse, but stronger, more sure. You can’t flee from what you are, daughter of the dark. Death is the one thing that will always find you, and you are its heir. The seed of the apocalypse, end-times walking. You are the wildfire necessary for the forest to grow, the destruction that brings rebirth.
