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Lore didn’t fall to her knees. She lowered herself slowly, reverently, like she’d seen penitents do in the South Sanctuary, when the flow of a Ward crowd caught her and it was easier to follow the surge into the Church’s holy hush than try to break free. She’d seen the common citizens of Auverraine, the desperate ones, painstakingly take to creaking knees up at the altar, as if something might change in the space between standing and the floor. As if the act might make a god take notice, and care.
That wasn’t what Lore wanted. But her body followed that pattern anyway, some instinctual human piece of her wanting something larger and kinder to look down, to make a change, even though she’d learned firsthand that such a thing didn’t exist.
“Shit.” Gabe skidded to a stop behind her, his one eye wide. “Shit on the Citadel Wall.” His gaze skittered back and forth to each individual skeleton, as if he expected them to start moving at any moment. She supposed it wasn’t a silly fear; something about being this close to the tomb had held the bones in their proper places even as death ate away everything else. “Lore, I don’t understand, what happened?”
“Me.” The day of the explosion, when she pulled in all the Mortem left in Nyxara’s dead body, to knit it with Spiritum and stop the death above. Here, though, there had been no life to weave it with, no thoughtful braiding of the two. Nothing but a rush of death, magic in flash flood. How it hadn’t collapsed the entire cavern and left a trail of destruction in its wake on the surface, Lore didn’t know.
Because of Me, Nyxara answered. The goddess did not sound sorry; she was all business. When you called all the Mortem, the tomb opened, and it rushed out like a leak. I needed you to take it all, to make the connection between us stronger. I directed the power to travel to you through dead matter, but that initial rush—that, I did not temper. I didn’t have the time.
Twenty skeletons. Twenty members of the Buried Watch, still down here, still keeping as much of their holy charge as they could even as the world above forgot them, reviled them. Making sure the goddess didn’t rise again.
But She had.
Gabe didn’t ask for any further explanation. He hung back at the mouth of the cavern, his torch clutched in his hand like it could be a weapon. She watched him back away from her, just a step, but it was enough. Even imbued with the power of Hestraon, he was afraid of her.
Come. Nyxara, making her stand on staggering legs, urging her forward. Her feet, taking a step though she didn’t send the order to the muscles, the bones. Time is short, Lore, and there are things you must know. If you want to save Bastian, all the rest, come to Me now.
This time, when she walked, it was under her own direction. Lore strode forward and into the obsidian tomb.
The heavy door slammed shut behind her just as Gabe started to shout.
Lore wasn’t listening to him, though. All her attention was captured by the body on the black stone before her.
She was beautiful. Lore had expected Nyxara’s body to be overlarge and turned to rock, like the bodies of the elemental gods found all over the continent, a goddess made a monolith. But She was around Lore’s size, though a bit thinner and taller, Her hair a lustrous black and long enough to spill over the sides of Her plinth. Her skin was moon-pale, Her eyes closed, Her delicate hands folded across Her chest, around a bouquet of white lilies that showed no sign of decay. Eternal and undying, everything Lore had been told a god should be.
The atmosphere in the tomb hummed. Lore thought of those other people marked with a moon on their hand, sent here in each eclipse, and how they’d come out less than they’d been when they entered. She could feel the tomb trying, tugging at the fabric of herself, wanting to render her into threads it could absorb. To wring out her power and spin it away.
Too late for that. Too late for her.
I tried, with them. Tried to find someone who could hold it all. Still, Nyxara didn’t sound sorry, not for any of it. But they were always sent back here, to the prison Apollius made for Me, a place to guard Me from My first death. This tomb wound My power out of them, every time, became the holding place for everything I was. But it can’t take Me from you. I stayed for so long in the void, waiting and not knowing what for. It was you, all along.
“Why?” The word tasted like ash.
The goddess was silent for a moment, thinking. I’m not sure, She said finally. But I think it is because we are so similar, Lore. The girl I was, the woman you are. Both looking for somewhere to belong, and never quite finding it.
All this was too much, a truth too heavy for Lore’s heart to carry. She stared at the goddess on the plinth—a woman, just a woman—until Her features blurred. Until they almost looked like her own.
Nyxara’s chest on the stone slab slowly rose and fell. Still alive, somehow, down through the centuries. Buried, but living.
You know what to do, Nyxara said in her mind, and Her voice sounded like Lore’s own, too, like their throats had fused together and harmonized.
She had to be done running, now. Had to know truths that could only pass to her like this. Lore lifted her hand and placed it delicately on the goddess’s brow.
It pulled at her, as if Nyxara were a cliffside and Lore was a river, tugging her over by sheer force of gravity. Lore opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out.
She drained
to her last
drop
and something new bloomed behind her eyes.
Something like her dreams.
the girl
She sat on the beach and tipped her head back, basking in the sun. It was somehow both brighter and gentler than it was back home on the mainland, a purer light that illuminated more than it should but miraculously didn’t burn. The white sand of the beach sparkled as if someone had crushed pearls and sprinkled them here; the blue tide washed up to cover her feet and then moved away, warm as bathwater. The sea was the same color as the sky above, the two of them melting at the horizon line.
