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“I’ve heard Her a couple times in the last year,” she said, “but I didn’t know what it was—who it was—until She told me.”
Was that true, though? Had she not known? Who else could it be, speaking in her head, calling to her from the death she could braid and shape and bend? Lore was practiced at avoiding things she’d rather not think about, and she’d employed those skills to their fullest.
“It’s gotten worse since Bastian and I started channeling together,” she continued, quieter. “After we set the bodies to rest in the catacombs. After we healed the fields.”
Malcolm nodded slowly, something like hope seeping over his features. “So I just don’t use it. Whatever I did with the plants—”
“Earth magic,” Gabe murmured, apparently not wanting anything to be kept vague.
Another nod from Malcolm, this one stilted. “I just won’t do it again,” he said, weakly triumphant. “I’ll just… just keep an eye on it, make sure it doesn’t happen, and then He can’t get into my head.”
The pronoun staggered out of him, like he didn’t want to say it. Didn’t want to acknowledge who exactly he was talking about.
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Gabe said. His eye was still watching that flame, a sinuous tongue of light dancing against the backdrop of the stone wall. “It can’t be. If a god wants you, They’ll have you.”
“I don’t fucking accept that!”
In all the time she’d known Malcolm, Lore had never heard him shout. He wasn’t a quiet man, but he was a measured one, able to keep his moods pleasant and even regardless of the circumstances.
This circumstance, apparently, was the one to break him. Malcolm’s eyes were bright with furious tears, his hands clenched to fists by his sides, as if he could keep any magic from leaving them by keeping them closed. He advanced on Gabe as he spoke, the Priest Exalted having become the receptacle of his anger since the actual culprit wasn’t there to receive it. Since the actual culprit was a god, and the Fount that gave Him power.
“It makes no scientific or spiritual sense,” Malcolm continued, all but spitting the words. “There is no magic left in the world. Lore took all the Mortem; Spiritum isn’t available to anyone who isn’t Bastian. If the gods are returning now, it’s in the wrong way, and we have to fix it!”
“We’re still going to try,” Alie murmured. She looked at her hands, long, delicate fingers splayed wide. With a deep, hitching breath, she twitched one of them.
A gust of a breeze filtered through the dark room, feathering Lore’s hair. Of course. Of course.
“We’re still going to try,” Alie repeated, closing her hands. “If you haven’t heard Braxtos, Malcolm, and I haven’t heard Lereal, that means there’s still time.”
Alie hadn’t mentioned anything about feeling magic, but she’d kept herself apart for almost the whole of summer progress. Maybe this was why.
Two elemental gods down. Two to go.
Malcolm’s eyes were glassy, swinging from Alie back to Gabe. “I don’t want a god in my head.”
Gabe finally turned away from the flame on the wall. It leapt upward, as if protesting, painting lurid light across the stone. “I don’t, either,” he said, so quiet it was nearly a whisper. “But trying not to use the power doesn’t seem to have slowed Him down at all.”
Three out of four.
Lore swallowed down the dry, thorny lump rising in her throat, scouring, bitter guilt. Of course the leftover gods would take over her friends, people close to her, just like the elemental gods had been close to Nyxara. Another sacrifice she’d unwittingly made.
“How long?” she asked Gabe.
He sighed, his muscled shoulders slumping. “Couple weeks. Since we started working on your mental barrier, after you told me about the dreams.” A hoarse bark of not-laughter. “Fat lot of help that did.”
The thorny thing in her throat got larger. Every breath was a saw, the pressure of not crying pushing at the back of her eyes as if it’d shove them right out of their sockets. She’d gone soft. The dam on her tears had been torn down.
“It isn’t like you, though,” Gabe continued. He refused to look at the sconce again, but apparently didn’t want to look at any of them, either, fixing his gaze instead on the floor. “Where you hear a solid voice, have… conversations.” He said the word like it repulsed him. “The elemental gods were never as powerful as Apollius and Nyxara. It’s more like having ideas that aren’t my own. Impulses.”
His eye flashed to Lore, then. One burning look.
“Hestraon was the most powerful elemental god, though.” Gabe spoke clipped and sure, as if reciting academic facts with no attachment to him. “If Alie and Malcolm aren’t feeling those… those impulses yet, maybe they won’t at all. Maybe the other gods are too weak.”
“That’s Braxtos and Hestraon and Lereal, then.” Alie sounded the surest of them all, no trace of a waver in her voice, though the hand she’d used to manipulate the air still trembled a bit. “That leaves Caeliar.” She trilled a high, half-mad laugh. “Anyone see someone floating by the harbor recently?”
“We can’t just leave this.” Lore crossed her arms tight over her chest. “We can’t just sit by and let it happen.”
Everything was already broken because she was still alive. Still here, a wrench in the prophecy, allowing the ascension of Them all rather than the ascension of one.
