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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

NYXARA

(I do not owe you scriptures.)

H er claws drew blood.

She’d drawn it before, when they were rough with one another, but that was in passion, never in anger.

Now the sight of his gold-tinged ichor running down the black blades of her fingers brought a snarl to her lips, a howl to her teeth.

Nyxara dove for Apollius, arms outstretched, wanting to rend him apart, leave him nothing but flayed ribbons.

Wings opened at his shoulders, gleaming pearlescent in the indigo night.

Nyxara stumbled back, momentarily shocked.

She’d known that he had kept changing, all of them had, but she’d never seen this.

The Fount’s power, twisting him further and further away from human, and he’d hidden its full extent from her.

Even as he stole from It, he became more beautiful. Beauty could never be trusted when coupled with power.

Nyxara screeched, lunging for him; he caught her by the hair and slung her away, lifting off the beach with a powerful beat of wings. She crouched on the ground, pained tears seeping from her eyes. They were ink-dark, they stained the sand.

“It doesn’t have to be like this.” His voice was resonant, all-consuming. It beat in her ears like a pulse. “I can take it away, beloved. If you don’t want your power, the Fount will take it back. I’ll take it back—”

“It’s not just my power I don’t want,” Nyxara snarled. “It’s you .”

It was strange, to see pain on Apollius’s face.

She’d seen it before, of course, but not since they became this.

Now he never showed anything so vulnerable, only rage, only pride, only contempt.

But this, his golden eyes closing, his full mouth going limp, the line of his shoulders beneath those awful, beautiful wings slumping—it was pain, and in god-proportions, it was awful.

“That’s one thing I can’t give you,” Apollius said, and he almost sounded sad about it.

She stood up, shaking, curling fingers that ended in sharp claws, narrowing eyes that had become voids of dark, scattered with stars. “Then kill me.”

He heaved a breath that was nearly a sob. “I can’t do that, either.”

Knees bent, arms before her. Hestraon had taught her to fight, once. Taught her to brawl, because she asked him to, back when they were all friends with mortal bodies that only held one death. “You’re going to have to try. Because I sure fucking am.”

The memories blurred. A rush of violence—Apollius flying her up through the clouds, every beat of his wings bringing them high, only for him to slam her down again, a cataclysm of rock and tree and bursting, unimaginable agony.

Her claws in his flesh, tearing into his cheek, his arm, blood in her mouth.

They fought through the sky, through the whole archipelago; white wings and black claws in a whirl of rage and curdled love.

She burned down forests. She broke mountains.

The earth shattered, spilling gold where Apollius’s blood touched it, watering an infernal garden.

Gems, where her tears fell, nothing about her human anymore, nothing about her natural.

The penitents of the Church he’d built died in flames, crushed or burnt; some of them ran toward ships, some of them escaped, to tell stories of what they’d seen and the evil goddess who’d tried to defeat their god.

“Nyxara, stop .” He shouted it at her as he picked her up from the crater she’d made of an island, breaking the mantle so the sea crept in. “You can’t end this. It doesn’t end.”

But it had to. He was defending himself. That was all, really. She kept trying to kill him, and he kept stopping her, but it had to end .

She rolled away from his next blow, turned to ribbons of moonlight.

The only hope they had was the pieces, the secrets she’d held so closely that she barely even let herself think of them, banishing the memory as far as it could go.

The pieces of the Fount that had broken when they drank.

The one she’d managed to hide away before Apollius shipped off the rest, sent to the mainland with his faithful.

How he’d raged, when he found it gone. How she’d soothed him, reassured him it was of no matter, that their power was absolute and unassailable.

There was only the hope that Braxtos had done as she asked, before leaving for good.

It’d hurt, telling him what to do. Apollius’s bonds around her mind had nearly squeezed her out of consciousness, the vows he’d forced on her when they took their drink of the Fount making this weak plan against him all but impossible.

She doubted she’d ever be able to speak of it again. Even thinking of it hurt.

Slipping through the weave of the world, knowing Apollius would follow, hoping she had enough time before he did.

Reconstituting on one of the few islands they hadn’t yet destroyed.

Nyxara followed instinct, and when she saw the tree, grown lush and perfect, she could feel what was beneath it, hidden by Braxtos, tangled in centuries of roots.

She raised her hands. She pulled death from the rocks and the ground, pushed it all into the tree, crowding out every bit of life, snuffing it out completely. Marking it like a grave.

Apollius, crashing through the forest behind her. She turned to meet him with claws outstretched and teeth bared, knowing that there could be an end, maybe, someday.

It was back on the first island, the Golden Mount where he’d brought them and changed them, that she got her claws into his chest.

She could have stopped. Maybe she should have—he held her in the air, powerful beats of his wings keeping her aloft as he waited for her to see sense. But she wouldn’t.

She could have stopped. He could have stopped her.

Nyxara’s claws dug deep into holy flesh, past veins that ran gilded, past ivory bones. The meat of him was as red as anyone else’s. When she closed her hand around his heart, she felt it thrum against her palm.

Her void-dark eyes looked into his, bright as the sun behind him. Time seemed to pause.

And she ripped the heart from his chest.

They tumbled to the earth, a blur of black and gold, plummeting to the ground and breaking through rock. Nyxara couldn’t clearly see where they were, only that it was dark. She rolled away from him, blood sticky on her hands. In the distance, the Fount sang, a mournful melody, a dirge.

The momentary calm that had allowed Apollius to let her claw out his heart was gone. He lay on his back, panting, golden eyes panicked. Still alive, even without an organ, because they were gods and gods followed no rules. But she could see that he was fading.

“You don’t understand.” His voice was different, and she couldn’t figure out what the difference was for a moment.

It was his, unaltered, the way he’d sounded before all this.

The same voice that told her he loved her for the first time.

“Nyxara, I wanted to save us both. We can’t die, we can but we can’t , do you understand?

I can’t allow it. I can’t let us go into the dark. ”

She didn’t understand. His heart was still in her hand, still beating despite it all, weeping red and gold onto the stones.

Nyxara crawled over to him, her cheeks wet with tears, trying to remember the bits of the book she’d read that he had written with the penitents.

Harsh things, but beautiful things, too, truths she assumed he had seen that were kept from the rest of them.

The answer to the question he’d first asked, the reason they were here.

“Don’t be afraid,” she murmured, stroking back his hair. “You’ll go to the Shining Realm, see your family again…”

The noise he made was unlike anything she’d ever heard. Nyxara was familiar with agony, but if a sound could tear a soul out of a body, it’d be one like this. Not a scream; quieter, more visceral, the only thing left at the end of a world.

“It’s a lie,” he said. “It’s a lie. There’s nothing after this, Nyxara. Nothing. This is all there is.”

One life, snuffed out like a candle, nothing left behind. Not even smoke.

It terrified her. It comforted her.

But Apollius… to know that his family was gone, and he would never see them again, and after that awful night there was nothing left. To look into that void, to find that answer, and live hundreds of lifetimes trying to outrun it.

Nyxara had made a friend of death. He never had.

And she still loved him. Her stupid heart still beat in time with the one in her bloody fist.

Wincing, all the pain catching up with her now that she was still, Nyxara got onto her knees next to Apollius.

The hole of his chest made a sucking sound, his veins still trying to find blood that no longer had a muscle to move it.

He watched her, eyes wide and tear-shining, breath shaking in and out of his lungs.

She didn’t speak, because there was nothing to say. But she lowered his heart back into its cage of bones.

The hole didn’t close, but the organ made the necessary attachments again. It’d never stopped beating.

“It will hold.” He closed his eyes, swallowed. “It will hold long enough.” He seemed to be speaking to himself rather than her. But when his eyes opened, they pinned her in place, sharp as a knife blade. “We can put this behind us, beloved.”

They couldn’t. She couldn’t. What she wanted hadn’t changed.

Nyxara shook her head, slowly.

His face altered. The line of his mouth went stern, his eyes flinty. He sat up, still sheeting blood from the hole in his chest, looming over her.

Nyxara scrambled back until she met a wall and stone dug into her shoulder blades, until there was nowhere else to go.

Apollius reached down and tangled his hand in her hair, slowly tilted back her head. “If you won’t agree now,” he said, “perhaps you will later. You didn’t kill me, but you shortened my time. I can make this work. I can do the same.”

And he wrenched her head to the side.

And Nyxara didn’t die, because the god of life wouldn’t allow it. But she went away, wandering in the dark. Waiting for the continuation of a cycle she never wanted.