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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

LORE

Time is a vast ocean. Memory is a small boat.

L ore?

Nyxara’s voice. Tired and languid, as if She’d just woken from a long sleep. Finally at rest, here in the Fount, finally able to speak again now that Lore was connected to It.

Lore didn’t answer, couldn’t figure out how. But when Nyxara’s voice floated through her, it sounded like a smile. Oh. You found it.

Where are You? Lore managed to cobble words together, though it was a near thing, more emotion than language.

I’m not sure. Nyxara sounded slightly troubled, but it smoothed out quickly. Resting. It’s nice to be done. I wished it away for so long, but I’d already made My vow by then. When you wished it gone, it could be. You didn’t take the drink. That wasn’t on you.

Wait. Lore felt like she was scrambling, lost in the dark, drowning without knowing which way was the surface. I have questions—

No , Nyxara said dreamily. I’m done.

“You can’t be.” That much, Lore managed to say aloud, her voice echoing in the broken courtyard. “There’s still so much to do, I still need Your help—”

You don’t , Nyxara soothed. You have everything you need, Lore.

Something changed behind Lore’s eyes. The black void gathering into a shape, one she recognized. One she’d lived in.

Nyxara smiled at her. It was a sad smile, a wholly human one. She carried no vestiges of the goddess she’d become, only the woman she’d been before the Fount, pale and dark-haired, a melancholy kind of beauty. She opened Her arms.

Lore didn’t know how she managed to go into that embrace, how she was simultaneously tethered to the Fount and here with Nyxara. But she did, burying her head in the former goddess’s shoulder, letting herself be held.

“You’re stronger than I ever was,” Nyxara whispered. Her voice sounded different than it had in Lore’s mind, deeper and richer, not quite as exhausted. “Stronger, and better.”

“I’m not,” Lore murmured. “I’m not.”

Nyxara tilted up her chin. “Then decide to be.”

She didn’t fade by slow degrees. One moment She was there, and the next She was gone.

And Lore was alone.

Let Her rest. The new voice, the not-voice.

“I don’t understand,” Lore said. Grief thickened her voice, grief that she didn’t quite understand. Sadness where there should be joy. But the goddess was a piece of herself, a dark and hard-to-understand piece, and Lore mourned Her absence.

Nor can you. The voice—the Fount—didn’t seem concerned. It is not for you to understand everything. Only to fulfill the purpose you have been given.

“And what is that?” Her voice echoed and broke, faded, sounded like many voices at once and nothing at all.

To become the vessel. To bring back all that is Ours. You have given Us one strand of magic; even now, you draw the rest, the life and the water, the air and earth and fire. You are Our lodestone. Our tributary.

Her friends, her lovers, finding the pieces, drawn back here to where it all began.

Cycles and cycles.

We will be the only god once again , the Fount said. We will take back Our power through you.

“So you’re using us, too,” Lore murmured.

It is the nature of divinity.

She didn’t like that. She didn’t like that at all. “And then everything will be fixed? The world righted?”

A pause. As long as there are mortals with mortal will and mortal hearts, the righting of the world cannot happen just once. It must happen over and over again.

“So You aren’t actually fixing anything.”

The seasons will realign. The earth will balance , the Fount replied. War, cruelty, injustice — We have no power over this. Only they do.

They. Humanity. The Fount didn’t count her as part of it, Lore noticed.

You were not shown everything , the Fount said. When She gave you Her memories, you were interrupted.

“Wait, I want to know—”

Lore was obliterated, the bits of herself she’d gathered blown apart and pulled back into something else, a memory that had never finished, a storm of blood and rage.