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Malcolm didn’t look wholly convinced. He perched on the edge of Gabe’s desk, crossed his arms. “What changed, then?” He spoke to Alie as if Lore weren’t there, and that hurt, a little. She’d counted the Presque Mort as her friend, still did. But this had superseded friendships. “You said you didn’t trust her.”
That stung, however justified.
“Well, now I do.” Alie took a seat in a velvet-upholstered chair near the room’s one window, leaned her head on her fist with a weary expression, and waved her other hand at Lore. “She has something to tell us, it’s about Bastian, and I assume that in five minutes or so, we’re going to know if we’re right or not.”
Through all this, Gabe didn’t speak. He stared at her, expressionless, his only tell of tension the way his fingers had gone white-knuckled on the cover of the book he’d been reading.
Well. There was no easy way to say your friend and fiancé was sometimes possessed by a vanished god. “Apollius is inhabiting Bastian,” Lore said. “And it’s getting worse.” Then, after a deep breath, smashing the words together as if they could outrun the alien presence waiting for nightfall in the back of her mind: “Nyxara is in my head, too.”
Silence. The brittle, harsh kind that came because no one wanted to step from one moment into all the moments that would have to come after.
“Damn,” Malcolm said. “We were right.”
Footnote
1 Stricken from the Compendium in 1 AGF, by order of Apollius to Gerard Arceneaux.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Make those of us who are worthy in Your image. Mold us into what You need.
—The Book of Prayer, Tract 590
Lore’s mouth worked for a minute before she managed to wring words out of it. “Pardon me, but what the fuck do you mean you were right?”
Gabe opened the book in his tense hands. Wordless, he flipped to the page he’d been reading, held it out to Lore. “Those mythology records from Farramark came in. This morning, actually.”
“We’d had suspicions before then,” Malcolm said. “But this confirmed everything.”
From her perch by the window, Alie leaned her head back against the sun-warmed glass, closing her eyes. “I’ve never been so upset at being right.”
Snatching the book from Gabe’s hand, Lore scanned the page, almost too jumpy for her eyes to organize the letters into words. The Opening of the Fount, the story was called, and she skimmed the paragraphs afterward, the first letter of each beautifully illuminated—a thick-trunked oak, a wave rising over a shore, a pale woman with an upturned crescent moon in her long black hair.
On the Golden Mount, the Fount of All Things stood, holding within It power like lightning caught in a bottle. And when Apollius, then mortal, found the Fount, He knew It was a place of great power, and desiring to know It fully, He opened the Fount with a mighty heave, breaking It into four pieces.
The Fount opened to His strength, and He asked of It the question that had long pulled at His heart. The Fount made no answer.
But Apollius was not content with this. He brought His friends, those with whom He shared His heart, including Nyxara, whom He loved above all others. And He told Them, Drink from the Fount with Me, that We may know all things, and hold all powers.
But the Fount did not give up Its powers easily, and when It did, it was with a caveat: that all the powers that made the world must be held equally, or the world would fall to ruin and rot. For those who hold the soul of the world shape it in Their image, and mortality cannot be completely conquered.
And so They took of Its power, and Apollius and Nyxara did drink first, and at the same time, from each other’s hands. They took the larger share, two sips to Their fellows’ one. And the Fount railed against this, but could not stop it, for all godhood passes thus: in selfishness and desperation, in a wish for more than can be.
At the end of the story was another illustration, this one of a fountain. A crack ran down the fountain’s side, and the lip of it was jagged, three places where rock had obviously been broken off. Words were carved into the fountain’s edge, in a font so tiny and layered upon itself that Lore had to squint to read it. What was contained must always be contained. Divinity is never destroyed, only echoed.
Lore hadn’t realized she was reading aloud until she stopped, the soft cadence of her voice fading into the dust and books and gas lamp glow, her finger tracing the etching on the illustrated fountain. The silence lay like a spell.
She snapped the book closed and brandished it in the air with one hand. “Anyone care to explain that to me in plain Auverrani? I thought the mythologies were supposed to be entertaining instead of dry as toast, isn’t that the whole reason they’re all but banned?”
Malcolm hurriedly roused himself from the corner of the desk to take the volume from Lore, looking at her as if she were handling a newborn baby instead of a book. “Vessels,” he said simply, dusting off the cover. He wore his gloves from the library, she noticed. “The Fount was one, and the gods took from It. They became the vessels, and when They were gone, new vessels had to be found. Like… like when you break a cup. The water has to go somewhere. And if that cup breaks, you find another, and so on.”
The wheels in her head were turning, laying out an awful truth. “And you think Bastian and I are becoming cups.”
“Not becoming.” Gabe’s voice was low and graveled, like he hadn’t slept in days. “Are. You are the vessels of Apollius and Nyxara. Just like Anton said you’d be.”
He sounded so defeated already. So… accepting.
Well, fuck that. Lore crossed her arms. “So we find a way to fix it. Find another cup, or… or put the power back where it was before.” She glanced at Malcolm. “It was somewhere before, right?”
