AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Footnote
1 Part of Apollius’s letters from the early Church, never officially recognized as part of the Compendium, but kept in the records of the Priest Exalted.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
A lesson left unlearned is a lodestone. Somehow, you will always return.
—Kadmaran proverb
Once in the back tunnels of the Church, their group split, Malcolm and Alie headed in one direction while Gabe and Lore took the other. She remembered this path, the one that led to the stone garden and the catacombs entrance in the well. As they hurried down the corridor, the faint sounds of shouting echoed from behind the walls. It seemed Gabe’s distraction had been discovered.
“You know,” Lore said, slightly out of breath from keeping up with his longer stride, “the last time I used my power for a distraction is how I ended up in the Citadel.”
Gabe snorted. “You would’ve ended up here one way or another.”
The shouting intensified, some of it seeming to come from inside the back hallways, bouncing off the rock walls. “Hopefully you didn’t burn down the entire Church.”
“At this point,” Gabe growled, “I probably wouldn’t mourn too much if I did.”
They reached the door; Gabe pushed it open and tugged her out into the morning sunshine, far too cheery for the kind of day it’d been so far. The brown petals of limp flowers rustled as they rushed past, headed for the well with its statue and its descent into darkness.
Lore tried not to think of the last time she’d opened this well with Gabe, tried instead to concentrate on the burn in her muscles as they pushed the small statue of Apollius to the notch in the wall. But the memories were hard to ignore—Bastian’s not-kiss, the disappointment of thinking she’d been abandoned by Gabe, only for that disappointment to become devastation when he betrayed them to Anton—
“Lore.”
Lost in thought, she hadn’t noticed that she’d been staring into the pit of the now-uncovered well, her hands braced on the stone, her unbound hair hanging into the dark. She looked up, met Gabe’s eye.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly, and she knew it was for all the things she’d just been thinking of. Things he’d been thinking of, too.
She took a deep breath. Couldn’t make herself smile, but that was all right. “We were only doing what we thought was best. All of us.”
“And getting it mostly wrong,” he muttered.
“None of us know the future,” she replied, jumping up onto the lip of the well, taking the first few steps down into the shadows. “We just do the best we can with the past and the present and hope they give us a clue.”
Gabe followed her, the two of them picking their way carefully down the narrow spiral stairs cut into the side of the well. When he’d gotten far enough down the stairs that his head was level with the wall’s lip, he reached over and slowly edged the cover back over the opening, teeth bared in concentration as he tried to keep his balance. He didn’t close it all the way, leaving a sliver of light over his head so they could get out easily when they came back up. Risky, but there was nothing to be done about it. Hopefully the fire he’d started in the confessional would keep everyone too busy for a jaunt through the stone garden, especially now that its original purpose was moot.
The gray stars in her palms itched.
At the bottom of the stairs—taken very slowly as their vision adjusted, the last thing they needed was a broken leg—Gabe made another torch, lighting it with more ember-threads that he gathered from the air around them. It took a moment, in the cold and damp of the underground.
“Are you sure you should be using it that much?” Lore asked quietly.
“I’m sure I shouldn’t be, actually.” The strangely steady light illuminated his grimace. “But we’re in deep enough now that it hardly matters, does it?”
“She said that it won’t… it won’t be the same, for all of you.” Telling him about what she’d heard from Nyxara still felt strange, like he’d look at her as an abomination, the same way he had that time he learned of her origins. They’d both changed since then, but she could still see that horrified face in lurid detail. She pushed past the memory. “She said the elemental gods were too diminished. You’ll get Their power, feel Their influence, but They won’t speak in your head. Won’t try to take you over.”
Far from being relieved, Gabe’s face looked stricken, a swallow working down his throat. “And is She trying to take you over?” he asked quietly. “Like Anton warned?”
“No.” Lore shook her head. “No, She doesn’t want the same things Apollius does.”
But even as she said it, Lore wondered. Nyxara said She didn’t want to take Lore over, but something told her that the goddess would if She had to. There’d been a sense of… of relief, when She’d come forward in the room with the prophecy, when Lore surrendered to Her in order to read the symbols. As if She’d relished finally having a body again.
Lore shivered, but managed to make it look like it was from the chill.
Gabe nodded, his shoulders softening. He gestured forward with the torch. “Do you want to lead?”
“That’s probably best.” Lore took his proffered torch. “I can find my way around down here. I’ll know where Amelia is.”
