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Just her name. He sounded different. More himself.
Still.
Lore shook her head. “I can’t.”
He stared at her a moment, something almost like fury lurking behind his eyes, trying to surge forward. “Listen to me—”
The rest of his words were swallowed in the explosion.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Time is something we created to make sense of the world. It is a river to step into and out of, a way of thinking that gives us structure. It rules all, and does not exist.
—Norun Loe, Ratharcan philosopher
Lore was used to death. It had dogged her steps since she was a child, a tangible thing she could wrap around her fingers, braid into ropes of her will. That day at the Mortem leak had been the most she’d ever felt before, a river of it flowing from Nyxara’s body deep beneath the city. Even that she’d managed to control, run it through her system and into stone. It’d knocked her out for a week, sure, but she’d done it.
This was so much worse.
Now death surrounded her like a cloud. None of the Mortem was hers—how in all the myriad hells was none of it hers?—but that didn’t make it hurt any less, didn’t mitigate its horror. She couldn’t see anything but a deep well of darkness, prisming, diamonds of entropy and unraveling. Her orientation was a mystery, upside down or backward or inside out. Lore could only be sure of the reality of her body because she could feel her fingers, stretching toward all this dark and feeling it stretch back to her in turn, ready to be woven.
A light in front of her. Bastian. Spiritum blazed from him like a miniature sun, rays of light cutting through the black. It reached for her, too, ready to be channeled, directed, made into what she wanted.
Lore turned—she thought she turned—looking through the cloud of death.
Spiritum, everywhere, hundreds of dying stars. Tendrils of it grew slowly, so slowly, expanding outward from the people who’d held it, leaking away from bodies that were dying, turning into Mortem.
Something next to her. A gap, a hole, a mouth of eternity. She stood in death’s antechamber, where the threads of life were picked apart. Time was a river and she stood on the shore, watching the work of seconds stretch into impossible proportions, a massacre in arrested motion.
A massacre she could stop. Lore was something different, something that could hold life and death in her hands. And she was going to have to use them both.
Spiritum first. Lore reached out—assumed she reached out—and grasped the threads of Spiritum racing into the air, the ribbons of life escaping their vessels. She ran them through her veins as quick as water to the sea to imbue them with her will, then pushed them out to the people they belonged to.
It all went back, as easily as a knife into softened butter. Life spooled into the places where it had been, weaving into auras, stopping its slow drain. The dormant Mortem that had been rushing up to take its place was shoved away, forced into stasis again to wait for a different death.
Most of it, anyway.
Some of the Mortem was too far gone, overtaking Spiritum, the change already begun as one power alchemized into another. The bodies nearest the obliterated ship, other than her and Bastian. The bodies in pieces, limbs flung to far corners. If Lore had been fully aware of her physical form, she would’ve gagged.
Good thing she could channel them both. Good thing she could put them back together, here in this space between seconds, where souls lingered on the threshold of life and death and neither had fully taken over.
Mortem came to her like a childhood pet, twisting around her fingers, breaching her arbitrary barriers. When she ran it through herself, this time, she changed it. She wasn’t sure how, didn’t know the mechanics, but the Mortem she took in came back out as Spiritum, and she put it back where it was supposed to go, arresting death in its tracks, giving it back as the life it had been.
There was a moment when she was afraid of the consequences—afraid that she was somehow making these people living corpses, like the bodies in the catacombs—but as soon as the thought came, it was gone. This was different. This wasn’t giving an unearned life, this was returning a life stolen, snatching it out of the second where it could become death.
Something lurched beneath the city.
Slow at first, then it came in a rush.
Death crawled out from beneath Dellaire, a huge wave of it knocking her backward, like a flood surging for a crack in the levee. It rushed through rock, through wood, through dead matter, making a path to Lore that was paved in nothingness. It wasn’t like a leak, a mindless surge eating away everything in its path. This was calculated, an assault.
A homecoming.
She should stop. But Lore was nothing but a conduit, now, pulling up Mortem and channeling it inward. It gathered in her hollow places, and she’d almost accepted it, the inevitable end. No mere mortal could survive.
But you’re no mere mortal, Lore. Haven’t been, ever.
The Mortem kept coming, but Lore felt none of what she assumed would be the signs of dying—seizing breath, slowing heart. Whatever had changed within her, whatever she had become, it made her something that could withstand this.
