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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

LORE

Be with us in the desolate places.

W e’re here.”

Her voice was scratchy. Lore didn’t know how long it had been since she’d spoken, though it had to be hours, maybe even a full day. It wasn’t easy to tell, here in the thick of the ash.

Lore stayed mostly at the prow through their near-silent voyage, occasionally going belowdeck to keep up the appearance of watching the silver instrument.

Though she was pretty sure at this point her ruse was found out—if not that she had a piece of the Fount, at least that she didn’t need Raihan’s silver weight.

Dani didn’t mention it, though. Neither of them said anything to the other as they watched the horizon and ate dried meat, waiting in limbo for what would come next.

Dani narrowed her eyes at the sky. “Are you sure? I can’t see shit.”

Lore couldn’t, either, at least not out of channeling-space. Sunk in magic, though, it was obvious. The path of Spiritum widened until it encompassed almost the entire ocean, a molten sea of gold guiding them on, growing stronger as the Fount piece got closer to the Mount.

The song in her head should have been reaching a fever pitch. But instead it stayed low and muffled, the Fount apparently confident she could find It without guidance.

A thump. They’d run aground. All around them, ash, as inscrutable as it’d been on the open water.

“Well,” Dani said, releasing her death grip on the wheel. “I guess you were right.” She waved a hand in front of her face and choked back a cough. “This place looks like the Godsfall happened five minutes ago.”

Nyxara’s memories were close at hand, the life She’d lived on this island, everything leading up to the fight that had changed the face of the world. Hope was a thin and ragged thing, but Lore still reached out in her mind, just to see. Nyxara?

Nothing.

Dani lowered the gangplank, the wood clattering onto sand they could barely see.

The swirl of ash and fog revealed the island in flashes.

A scrubby forest at the edge of the beach.

The ground in the distance canting toward a peak.

The top of it stayed covered, veiled in ruin.

The few trees scraggling up the Mount were thin and blackened.

It’d been so vibrant, in Nyxara’s memories. A paradise, burnt out but not allowed to die.

“Not much golden about it anymore.” But there was an eagerness in Dani’s voice, an anxious thread that belied her cool words. “Come on, then.”

They walked down the gangplank onto the sand.

The fog shifted as they headed in the vague direction of the forest, the ground littered with driftwood and shale.

Here and there, a glimmer of gold, not Spiritum but the actual mineral, marking places where Apollius had been struck to the ground.

It said something about the gravity of what they were doing that neither she nor Dani stopped to pick any of it up.

“We’re going to break a leg if we don’t take it slow,” Lore said. She cleared her throat, but the persistent itch she’d gotten used to on the Second Isle was near-unbearable here. “No need to rush. It’s not like the Fount is going anywhere.”

Dani rolled her eyes. “I thought you’d be more eager, but sure. We’ll go slow.” She gestured upward, where the ash had peeled away momentarily. “Looks like the ash is cleared around the Fount. It’ll be nice to finally take a deep breath. It’s been months.”

It was strange, the mundanity of it. Trudging through the fog, eyes aching and feet tired, and knowing she was headed to the birthplace of the pantheon. The home of the soul of the world. She’d had more exciting walks to the trash heaps in Dellaire.

Time seemed frozen here. Other than the few times the ash cleared, Lore’s limited vision made it feel as if she were trapped in one place, endlessly walking and getting nowhere.

Occasionally, the fog would shift, showing bare tree branches and the rubble of stone huts.

Once, she saw a building she recognized—a tall spire, listing sideways, its foundation slowly eroding.

Six names were written on the spire in faded gilt.

She wondered if they’d stumble into Nyxara’s burnt grove.

After a while, they reached what looked like the remains of a village. The fog wasn’t as thick here, dying off as they reached higher elevations, though the air was still gray and sooty on her tongue. The huts were in fairly good condition, slightly finer versions of the ones in the Harbor.

Lore stopped and sat down on a bench in front of one hut, leaning her head back against the wall.

“No.” Dani shook her head. “We aren’t stopping.”

“I’m the one with the god-power,” Lore said wearily, “and I say we stop.”

Dani looked like she might dare Lore to use said god-power, her mouth pursed into a sour bud, but after a moment she rolled her eyes and sat down next to her. “You seem less than awed.”

“I’ve seen all of this before,” Lore said.

Dani’s eyes burned with questions, but Lore didn’t look at her. She suddenly very much wanted to be far away from the other woman.

There was nowhere else to go, so she stood and walked into the hut.

The inside was as ash-coated as the rest of this place. A cot stood in the corner, covered in rotting linens. A small table leaned against what had once been a hearth, choked with the remains of firewood. Everything on the table was coated in dust, almost too thick to make out what they were.

But Lore could, barely. They were books.

They looked just as old as Raihan’s in the Harbor, possibly older. Lore half expected them to disintegrate as she gingerly took one from the top of the pile. Her fingers sank into the cover, made permeable by age and rot, but it mostly held together.

She thought of Malcolm, somewhere in Caldien, and could practically hear him screaming at her to get some gods-damned gloves. So she bundled her hand in the hem of her long shirt before gently prying the book open, separating pages stuck together with the wear of centuries.

A journal, it looked like. Not dated. The handwriting was faded and overly ornate, but she could make out enough of it to read, though some of the words were smudged.

I have been tasked by my god as the caretaker of His body, and to guard the Fount, that It may never be reassembled. To this task I commit my life, and my family’s life, so Apollius may return and the world be made right.

H. Devereaux

It took a moment for the name to register. Devereaux. Dani’s surname.

Her heart kicked into a frenzied beat in her ears.

Dani had known Apollius was alive, at least in a sense. Dani’s older sister had been groomed to be His queen.

And Dani had been so confident they could get here.

Lore had never trusted Danielle Devereaux; their association was born of nothing but desperation. But she’d also never questioned whether or not Dani really wanted Apollius dead. She couldn’t think of any other reason why Dani would want to come to the Golden Mount.

Unless her nihilism was a front, and she wanted to protect Him. To keep Lore from fixing the Fount.

The shard of It, golden-threaded and moon-carved, was still tucked into her pack, humming against her spine.

She hadn’t told Dani anything about the pieces of the Fount, but maybe she’d always known, one more detail given to her from Anton’s cult.

Dani hadn’t acted like she thought anything of Lore suddenly carrying a bag from the Harbor, but she was sly, and if she knew about the pieces, it wouldn’t be hard to put two and two together.

But then why help Lore at all?

Lore shook her head. The particulars wouldn’t thread together quite yet, but they didn’t have to.

She could kill Dani with a thought, and the other woman knew it, even with the flimsy knife tucked into her boot, kept secret like she thought it could save her.

If Dani planned on attacking, it would come quick and seemingly out of nowhere, her only hope the element of surprise. Lore had to be ready.

Part of her wondered if she should just take Dani out now. But the reluctance to kill lingered. They’d never been friends, but for the moment, they were still allies. At least, until Dani actually did something to change that.

And cowardly as it was, Lore didn’t want to be alone on this island.

“Anything interesting?”

Dani hadn’t entered the hut, just stuck in her head. Lore didn’t act startled; didn’t even try to hide what she’d been looking at. She closed the cover of the journal and shrugged. “Books, but I can’t read them.”

“Probably worth a fortune, if we could sell them to the Church.” Dani jerked her chin. “But seeing as the Church would happily burn both of us, let’s move .”

They left the crumbling village behind, trudging along as the grade of the makeshift path slowly inched upward.

Before too long, Lore’s legs felt like they were on fire, her breath growing harsh.

One would think that weeks of mining would have increased her stamina, but apparently not, and the air quality wasn’t helping.

Slowly, the ash and fog cleared. When they passed a cliff—the same one where Nyxara had once thrown Her ring, Lore was sure of it—she could see the gray cloud of Godsfall debris roiling below them, a thunderstorm that never quite broke.

It made the cliff seem not so high, like you could step off the edge and land in all that gray softness, walk over it right back to the mainland.

And then, after what felt like hours more of walking, there was the cathedral, a broken ruin. There was the courtyard, splintered wooden beams still lined in seams of gold.

And there was the Fount.

It looked like a well, small and gray and shining with a faint phosphorescence, as if the stones were threaded with captured starlight. The lip of it was jagged. The soul of the world, and it looked so humble. So small.

Once, there’d been tall spires, a building nearly as grand as the Citadel, though nowhere near as large.

Lore recalled Nyxara’s memories of this place, the tiles lining the ground around the Fount, a canopy of fine-woven linen billowing in the sea breeze.

Most of that had gone, either blasted apart in the Godsfall or rotted out by time.

The tiles were rubble, the canopy dirty fibers still clinging to some of the beams like a spiderweb.

Only the courtyard around the Fount remained, and a few rooms Lore could see in the cathedral, open to the sky where the roof had fallen.

Dani stopped, breathing hard. Her eyes darted around the ruins. “Where do you think He is?”

Neither of them had much time for holy awe. Lore appreciated that Dani wanted to get right down to business, really. She shrugged. “Back in one of those rooms, maybe?”

“Could be.” Dani glanced at her. “I’m going to look through the cathedral. You search out here.”

Lore arched a brow. “Seems pretty clear He isn’t out here.”

“Check anyway.” Dani waved a hand, dismissing her as she stalked through a crumbled archway. “Doesn’t hurt to be thorough.”

Then it was just Lore and the Fount.

The piece of It burned against her back, a pleasant heat like a fireplace after a cold day, a sip of whiskey on a sore throat. She could hear It singing on the breeze, light and harmonic, thrumming alongside her heartbeat.

Go on.

Not Nyxara’s voice, not really a voice at all. Something different, something deeper.

Every thought she’d had about playing this close to the chest, not revealing the piece of the Fount, fled her mind. Everything in her pointed only to the heat and the song, to the reunification at her fingertips. Something she could finally make right.

She didn’t notice stepping forward, didn’t notice taking her pack from her shoulders and drawing out the piece, her hands immediately numbing. It fit perfectly into the notch in the side of the Fount, stone flush to stone as if it had never been broken at all.

Lore tried to step away, tried to take a moment to enjoy the foreign feeling of relief. But when she let go of the stone, it held her fast, sure as shackles, like her fingers were frozen to its surface.

The song in her head crescendoed, the melody vibrating her bones. A strangled cry left her throat, little more than a moan.

Her vision blurred. Went black.

A familiar feeling

drained

to the last

drop