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A faint line drew between Nyxara’s brows. The words twisted around her mind like serpents, like shackles.
Another crack. She looked to the Fount. Faint hairline fractures slithered between two of the small carvings. The sun and the moon.
Another rumble through the ground, a gentle earthquake. It never resolved into anything larger, but something about the atmosphere—broke, became a little less stable, knocked slightly off its axis.
Apollius sat down, hard, his hands falling away from her, staring into nothing. “I know,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if it was in despair or exultation. “I know.”
And Nyxara’s vision spangled.
The water of the Fount spun her out into composite parts, sliced her to trailing ribbons. She had no sense of her body, no sense of anything, all her awareness flung far and made diffuse.
The world was reduced, too, simmered to its most basic components, surrounding her in a miasma of matter and magic. Shreds of power, of worlds that had come before this one, worlds that might come after. The soul of the earth, gathered here, boiling and mutating and renewing itself all the time.
Here, reduced, all her previous ideas about herself were sloughed away, replaced by a shining certainty with no room for such rudimentary emotions as shame, jealousy, hope. The sad girl who clung to anything that gave her warmth, even if it burned. The woman who wasn’t afraid of the dark. The person who loved a man obsessed with finding a way out of death, when she herself thought, sometimes, how nice it sounded. How peaceful and quiet.
Something that represented all those things flowed past her in the miasmic sea the Fount had made of the world. Something that felt like maybe it could be hers.
She didn’t think. She reached out and grabbed that thread of magic, of power, and she didn’t let go, and it didn’t struggle.
The thread twisted into her, gathering up the far-flung pieces she’d become. Her being reconstituted around it, the Fount allowing her to take part of Itself and lay claim.
Do you have a question, too? Not a voice, not anything she could understand. Something speaking into her mind, reordering itself into language so it could communicate. Is that why you grip such a thing and try to make it yours? You want power, like him?
“Yes,” Nyxara replied, feeling as if she spoke, though in this state she wasn’t sure she even had a mouth. Power was what she wanted, wasn’t it? To be unassailable. Sovereign, and her own.
At least you are honest, the Fount said. What is your question, then?
“Will he have some peace now?” She saw once again that flash of darkness on Apollius’s face. “Will you finally tell him what happens after someone dies?”
His father, his mother, his siblings. All massacred in a senseless killing, a border squabble between minor lords. He’d been obsessed with knowing ever since, after seeing how easily death came for you, how it slipped up like a lover and smothered you out in seconds, on a day that seemed like any other.
No one had a concept of anything coming after; when you were gone, you were gone. Apollius didn’t accept that. Apollius wanted the world to bend around him, he wanted to know its secrets, and change them if they weren’t what he wanted.
We told him he could not know while he was human, the Fount said. So now he takes in power that can house itself in no human. And he will know.
“No human?” Nyxara asked, but not with any kind of surprise.
You take it, too, the Fount replied. All of you, hungry for something more. This power will make you more than human, but even not-human things come to an end. Do you understand?
“Yes.” And she did, even as her body restructured itself into what she would become. Darkness and moonglow, the peace of long rest. Not human, but still mortal, because death was the unshakable caveat to life, and there was no true escape.
You will go, one day, the Fount said. But this power gives you two lives, two deaths. One for the human you were, one for the god you’ve become. The power will always find a new vessel, and until your second death, you will be tied to it, unable to rest. Do you understand?
“Yes.” But she didn’t, not really. Who could?
Then become.
For a brief moment, for an eternity, she knew the answers Apollius had been looking for. Death opened itself to her, its new Queen, and she saw all the way through to its ending.
But then it was gone, locked away deep inside her.
And then she knew nothing.
the goddess
What can I do to make you happy?”
The refrain could be pleading, had it come from anyone else’s mouth. But from Apollius, it would always sound like an order.
