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“Even with all the silver, navigating is a hard job. The lines change without warning sometimes, like currents. And I didn’t want to talk to your friend, frankly. She’s unpleasant.”

“She’s not my friend.” Lore didn’t comment on the unpleasant part. It was true, but a small part of her resented him for it anyway. This situation had chewed Dani up and spat her out, too.

“So are you one of those channelers from Auverraine, or something?” he asked. “The Mort?”

“Or something.” Her voice was flat, a closed door to that line of questioning.

He didn’t press. “I came from Kadmar to Auverraine to study Mortem channelers,” he said.

“Well, ostensibly. It was mostly to escape being impressed into the Kirythean army, once they took over. I graduated from the Kadmaran university with a degree in artifact study.” He kicked aside a dead branch in their path.

“The Empire was very interested in using my skills. I was very interested in not letting them.”

“No one but the Church is allowed to handle any artifacts in Auverraine. I can’t imagine you got very far in your research.”

“No, but I got far enough from the Empire. For a time, at least.” The lighter flickered in his hand, casting deep shadows across his face.

“Kadmar—and everywhere else that’s not Auverraine or Kirythea, really—has a more…

loose relationship with religion. We see the gods as people making use of power, not necessarily divine beings worthy of worship.

” He shrugged. “At least, that’s what it was like before Kirythea took over. Who knows what it’s like now.”

He said it flippantly, but pain lurked beneath his voice.

“So I assume Emperor Ouran caught you eventually?”

Raihan barked a laugh. “No. That was King August.”

“Ah.” Unwarranted embarrassment colored her cheeks. “That makes more sense.”

“And it wasn’t even because of my heretical line of work,” Raihan said darkly. “He wasn’t keen on anyone being in Auverraine without proper papers. Especially from a Kirythean-occupied country. Never mind that those were the people who most needed somewhere to go.”

“Mercy was never his strong point.”

“It’s not a quality that Kings or Emperors hold in high regard.”

Their path turned uphill, and neither of them spoke for a while in favor of breathing hard until it turned downward again. Hunger clawed in Lore’s middle; it’d been a long time since her last meal of dried meat on the Second Isle.

“So,” Raihan began when they’d both caught their breath, “it sounds like you were in the Citadel before you ended up here. Were you a courtier, before you somehow got the ability to channel?”

Now it was her turn to bark a laugh. “Yeah. Sure.”

Raihan didn’t seem convinced, but he didn’t ask again, like he thought she might go back on their tenuous bargain if he was too curious.

Part of her felt bad; he’d been kind, all things considered.

But the idea of having to explain everything made her feel like she might collapse in the middle of this path and not get up again.

The ground leveled, as much as she could tell in the scant light. On one side, the hill they’d just climbed down; on the other, another steep rise. “Looks like this is the valley.”

“Indeed it is.” Raihan gestured to her. “Is it moving?”

Lore produced the silver instrument she’d grabbed from her pocket. The pin swung a bit before pointing back at her. “No change.”

“Hmm.” He looked out over the dark trees. “What are you trying to do with it, exactly?”

“I need to find something. Something that should make this thing point like it’s never pointed before.”

Clearly, he wanted to ask her more about that, but Raihan just nodded. “Walk around with it. See if it starts to react.”

“Very scientific of you.”

“Science is little more than doing strange things and seeing what comes of them.”

Lore balanced the instrument in her palm.

Burnt tree , the book said. That didn’t narrow it down much.

Every tree on this damn island was some degree of burnt, scarred from the Godsfall.

Still, Lore started forward, hoping she’d somehow draw close enough to the right place without stumbling and breaking a leg.

The singing was nearly manic, but though it’d led her here, it didn’t help with the specifics.

Slipping into channeling-space took less thought than breathing. It looked different now. There was the gold of Spiritum, but also snatches of blue. The occasional flash of orange and iridescent white; flickers of green, but those were harder to make out.

She’d grown used to finding tiny sparks of Spiritum in dead matter, the dregs of life still held deep in death. So the tree to her right caught her attention.

Black. Black all the way through, Mortem in every inch. Not one slash of gold or green. She couldn’t use the power of death anymore, but she could still see it, still sense it.

There was something under all that dark. Channeling-space let her see through arbitrary barriers like dirt and rock, and down below the tree, tangled in its roots, was something shifting and prismatic. Something that shone every color and none at all.

The silver pin swung away from her, straining on its axis. The song crashed in a storm of harmony.

“Ah,” Lore said.

She shook herself; the world organized back into light and color. “You didn’t happen to bring a shovel, did you?”

“Weirdly enough,” Raihan said, reaching into his pack and pulling out his notebook to grab something at the bottom, “I did.”

Calling it a shovel was generous—it was a trowel if anything, perhaps even an overlarge spoon—but it did the job.

Lore knelt on the ground before the tree, which out of channeling-space looked like any other tree in this forest, and dug into the earth.

Behind her, she heard the telltale scratch of pen on paper.

Raihan cataloging her movements, keeping a record.

The piece was buried deep and tangled in roots, a mark of how old the tree had been before having every bit of life sucked away to make an easy marker.

Easy for someone who could channel, anyway.

It took nearly an hour for Lore to extricate the piece from the ground. The song in her head picked up speed and volume, loud enough to make her grit her teeth. Raihan was silent as she worked, scribbling away in his notebook.

Nyxara had shown her almost all her memories, a first-person-point-of-view trip through becoming a god.

But there were parts Lore hadn’t had time to see—the Godsfall, its immediate aftermath.

She could imagine Nyxara stumbling into the forest sometime during that long fight with Apollius as he slammed her into island after island, hiding the shard and covering this tree in Mortem.

So that one day, someone could find it. One day, someone could bring this cycle to an end.

Gingerly, Lore disentangled the Fount piece from the roots. It was thick, a block of heavy stone with one smooth edge. She turned it over in her hands.

Carved on one side, a tiny crescent moon.

The thing looked dull, but her hands sparked to hold it, a frisson snaking down her limbs. She might be the avatar of a goddess, but this was bigger. A piece of the world’s soul, hidden in the earth, waiting.

A storm came over her. That was the easiest way to describe it.

The Fount piece almost fell from her suddenly numb hands, magic coursing like a lightning strike.

It was hard to hold on, hard to keep her grip as power ripped through every vein, scouring her out.

Searching her, making sure she was worthy.

Lore’s mouth wrenched into a silent cry, pain spearing through her, more intense than any she’d ever known.

Her bones felt like they were slowly separating, pulled out of alignment; her muscles followed, the meat that made her body tugged in opposite directions to make room for something larger, something more .

As soon as it began, it stopped. Too quick for her to scream.

The song surged again, triumphant, and then settled back into a low hum.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Raihan asked, oblivious to the trial she’d just endured.

Lore cradled the piece of the Fount to her chest. “Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, I did.”

“So you’re a channeler.”

“We established that.”

“And this… rock… is something important for channeling?”

“Yes.” Lore carried the piece of the Fount in her arms like a baby. Raihan had offered to put it in his pack, but she declined. She didn’t want it far from her, even though holding it made her hands feel full of pins and needles, worse than she’d ever gotten from channeling Mortem.

He stopped ahead of her on the path, turned with narrowed eyes. “You expect me to buy that?”

Lore’s fingers arched, the awareness of his Spiritum as concrete as her awareness of the dirt beneath her feet. She didn’t want to kill Raihan, but she would if she had to.

She didn’t wind the threads of his life around her fingers, didn’t so much as give an experimental tug.

But Raihan sighed anyway, shaking his head.

“Look. Clearly, you’re more than just a channeler.

And clearly, that is more than just a rock.

I helped you find it and didn’t make a fuss about you trying to steal from me; the least you could do is be honest.”

And it was true. Part of being a good liar was knowing how to give the barest glimmer of honesty; she could tell him what the shard was without compromising her mission. It wasn’t like he’d tell Dani.

“This,” Lore said, paradoxically holding the stone closer to her rather than offering it out as she spoke of it, “is a piece of the Fount.”

He stared at her. He stared at the rock. Then he let out a quick, shocked laugh. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” Maybe he’d just think her mad. That was fine.

But for all his laughter, Raihan still looked curious. He stepped forward, as if he would examine it; Lore gripped it closer to her chest, fingers arching again, pulling a strand of Spiritum this time.