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No time to be horrified, to let loose the scream caged in her throat. Lore pushed her way through the now-broken skeleton and got to her feet, just in time to avoid a falling rock that absolutely would’ve caved her own skull in.
She kicked aside a spine that nearly tripped her, felt a moment of crushing guilt for it. Then she and Gabe ran out of the cavern, up the corridors, slipping on the packed dirt and slick stone that made up the catacombs. Dust and soil shook down from the ceiling, and Lore stopped, turning to see where the last hall opened up into the cathedral of the Buried Goddess, the place she’d been born.
A falling rock blocked it from her view. Just as well. Now wasn’t the time to get sentimental.
Gabe grabbed her arm and hauled her forward. The closer they got to the surface, the less the ground rumbled. “Is the whole thing going to collapse?” she asked, out of breath.
“I don’t think so,” he said grimly, “but I’d rather not be down here to find out.”
Through the corridors, swinging wide around corners, until that sliver of light shone up ahead from the well. It’d dimmed down to dusk.
Nyxara? Lore murmured tentatively into the darkness of her own head. Are You there?
No words, but the impression of a nod. She was there. Exhausted, but there.
The goddess’s memories battered at Lore’s insides as she climbed up the well, following Gabe’s back in an echo of the way she’d once followed Bastian up these same stairs. The girl Nyxara had been, who loved Apollius enough to follow Him into ruin. The goddess She became, who ripped out His heart.
That must’ve been His first death, if the Fount gave everyone in the pantheon two. Bodily death, and now His power lived in Bastian. Nyxara had found a way to send out Her consciousness, though Her body was technically still alive in the tomb—but now She’d had her first death, too, and Lore knew, somehow, that it meant She would be even stronger inside her head.
Two deaths, and now both Apollius and Nyxara had experienced one. It was an answer for how to expel Them from the world, but Lore shied away from it. It was an answer she didn’t want.
And there was another answer there, too. Apollius hadn’t wanted Nyxara to leave, because His power would diminish if She did. Power is made and unmade through the same means, like the prophecy said.
Gabe reached the top of the stairs and heaved the cover aside, opening the well into a fast-falling twilight. No one was in the stone garden as he reached his hand down and helped Lore out, then turned to pull the cover back on and push the small statue of Apollius as close to its center as he could manage.
When he was done, he sat down on one of the wrought-iron benches by the path. His one blue eye watched her avidly, worry-brightened. “Are you all right?”
Lore made a noncommittal noise and sat down next to him. “Honestly, I’m not sure yet. What happened?”
His brow arched over his eye patch, like he should really be the one asking the question, but he answered her anyway. “You went into the tomb, and the door closed nearly as soon as you did. There’s no damn latch on the thing, so I was trying to haul it open.” He held up a hand with a rueful smile. The nails were broken. It was the same hand missing the tip of his index finger, the one he’d lost when he reached for her at the Mortem leak so long ago.
Guilt scoured her throat. Lore took his hand and laced her fingers with his.
He was quiet a moment, looking at their hands on her lap, before continuing. “The door cracked on its own, and everything started shaking, and I went in to get you.”
Her brow furrowed. “How long was I in there?”
“Five minutes. Maybe less.” He knocked the back of his hand against her thigh, but didn’t unclasp their fingers. “Your turn.”
She pulled in a breath, pushed it out in a huff. “I saw Nyxara’s memories. Of Her time on the Golden Mount. How They all became gods.”
Gabe froze. She thought about how that would sound to someone faithful, or someone who used to be. She’d seen the rise of the religion this whole world followed, and it was such an ugly, human thing.
So she knew what his next question would be. “Did you see the Godsfall?”
No. She hadn’t. She’d seen how the elemental gods left, heard Apollius say that They wouldn’t last long without Him—and that had been true, hadn’t it? They’d finally escaped the island only to all die slowly, their corpses grown monstrous and stony, leaking the power They’d drunk from the Fount.
Power that had leaked into her friends, now. Second life.
“I saw its beginning,” she said, thinking of Nyxara’s claws ripping into Apollius’s chest. “But that was it.”
Gabe’s fingers stiffened in hers. He disentangled his hand. “Figures,” he muttered. “Figures She wouldn’t show you the things we really need.”
“She would have.” Lore knew this. Nyxara had been cut off, the tomb beginning to collapse before She could pour the rest of her memories into Lore’s head, show her all the things She couldn’t talk about. It must have something to do with the way She was bound to Apollius—those vows He’d spoken when They both drank from the Fount. So had Apollius stopped Her, somehow? Known what was happening?
The thought pricked nerves down her spine.
With a sigh, Gabe sat back on the bench, reaching up to rub beneath his eye patch. “So did She tell you anything useful, then? Anything in all those memories that can help us get the gods out of our heads?”
