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Nyxara didn’t answer. She had a few times before—told him that it would make her happy if she could leave this island, told him it’d make her happy if he’d told them the truth of what would happen when they drank from the Fount. Though that part wasn’t exactly fair, which he’d wasted no time in pointing out. He hadn’t forced them. They’d drunk of their own free will. She doubted it would’ve worked, if they hadn’t.
Doubted the Fount would’ve made them all gods. Would’ve trapped them all here on this island as it rapidly decayed, the power they’d stripped from the soul of the world tipping it off balance.
They should’ve known that day, when the edge of the Fount broke, three pieces bearing carvings splintering from the whole. A sun, a moon, another piece with the leaf and wave and wind gust. They’d left them where they’d fallen.
She didn’t answer Apollius. She kept quiet and dangled her feet from the rocky overlook, staring out at the blue-on-blue horizon. The trees had thinned since they’d taken from the Fount, some fallen ill, others growing in stilted, unnatural shapes, as if the island sickened from the essence the six of them had taken. It cleared the view enough for Nyxara to see straight down to the shoreline.
Boats were arriving. Small ones, but full of people who’d heard of the Fount, of the gods on the mountain. It’d been a strange thing, when they were discovered, what felt both like years and like days after they’d drunk from the Fount. Time had no meaning here.
At least, it hadn’t until the sailors came. They’d washed up on the shore one night, tossed here by an unseasonably tempestuous ocean. Caeliar still didn’t have the trick of smoothing the waters, making them follow their proper order. She and Nyxara worked together for the tides, and those were off, too. They held the reins of the world, but didn’t know how to ride.
Apollius healed the sailors. Braxtos and Hestraon repaired the ship. And Lereal sent it home with a gust of wind—one of the first they’d managed to send in the right direction, rather than stirring up a storm.
The pilgrims came soon after.
Often, they just came to pray, but some of them stayed, built huts along the southern-facing shore. Nyxara and the others didn’t like it, and didn’t have much to do with the people who came, but Apollius did. He’d heal them, let them cry at his feet in gratitude. He’d go walk among the huts of the ones who stayed, gathering followers, letting them sing songs composed in his honor. When some would leave, he would raise one hand and watch as their boats faded into the horizon.
Nyxara was always filled with near-painful jealousy when she watched the human penitents leave.
She didn’t go down among the pilgrims often. Just as well. The powers the Fount had given her were not the kind they’d want to see. None of them needed night to fall faster, or the moon to wax or wane out of season.
None of them needed her to raise a dead body.
She’d only done that once, one of the first times a boat full of people had come to the island, after the sailors. It’d been a child. That was why she tried. A child who’d taken sick and passed before he and his mother could make it here for healing. But either Nyxara did something wrong, or raising people back to their fullness was a power beyond her own, because the child had been a horror, black-eyed and with an unhinged jaw, and the mother had screamed at her to undo it, undo it, it was worse.
She didn’t interact much with the people who came after that.
“Nyxara.” Her name sounded like a prayer. The thought was uncomfortable, given the trajectory of her earlier thoughts; she shook it off. Apollius lowered himself to sit beside her. A moment, a deep breath. “I’ve told you I’m sorry. I didn’t know what the Fount would do—”
“But you knew it would do something,” she murmured. “You knew it would do something, and you didn’t want to be alone with whatever it did, so you dragged us into it, too. Why did you do that? Why could you never just learn to face your own consequences?”
They kept discussing this, over and over, long after she probably should’ve just accepted it. They were gods; they had penitents. She’d come to see Apollius at the Fount more than once—the ruined plaza now new-built and gleaming, thanks to human hands, the broken pieces picked up and set in places of honor—and seen him poring over a manuscript with one person or another, offering advice. They always stopped when she approached.
This was what he’d wanted. In a slanted way, at least. Divinity was the price he paid for his answers. It’d been unfair of him to make the rest of them pay for it, too. To use their love and twist it into chains.
He was silent for a moment. Then: “You never did well on your own, either, beloved.”
Her eyes pressed closed.
She hadn’t meant to tell him. It’d been one of those intimate moments when things just slipped out, a few days—she wasn’t sure how many—after they’d all drunk from the Fount. Seeing the world spun out like that, and raw with new power, made Nyxara think that truth was what they should want from one another, that it couldn’t hurt them. The new power within them made it so they could tell when one of them lied, anyway. So she’d told Apollius about the nights with Hestraon while he was traveling, how they’d comforted each other, how she thought she might love him like she did Apollius.
It hadn’t gone well. They might be gods now, but Apollius still had a jealous streak.
“Hypocrite,” Nyxara said calmly, leaning back so the breeze off the sea threaded through her hair. “As if you haven’t slept with all of us, at one point or another.”
Truth. Especially since they’d been here, trapped on the island as it slowly decayed. Wasn’t like there was much else to do, since everyone but Apollius tried to avoid the pilgrims.
“It’s not the same,” Apollius said. “You told me you loved him like you love me. What am I supposed to do with that, Nyxara? How am I supposed to feel, when you’re the one I love most of all?”
“You have plenty of people to love you now,” she said, watching the pilgrims disembark down on the beach. “Why does my love matter?”
His eyes glittered, an otherworldly gold at the edges of the green. “Because it was mine first.”
You will always be mine, he’d said when they drank from the Fount together. At the time, it had only bothered her a bit, enough to make her frown. Now it felt like poison, and she could feel the subtle bonds he’d laid around her mind closing in more often than not.
She felt him get up, felt the air move as he reached for her, a crackle of heat. Nyxara opened her eyes and looked at the hand he extended curiously.
“I don’t want to fight,” Apollius said. Something was in his other hand; he kept twisting it nervously. “I made you something.”
