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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

LORE

Fate will always find you.

S he was at the cliff again.

Lore held on to the same tree, leaned out over the edge of the knoll. The wind was high today, whipping her hair into her mouth, tugging at her loose Harbor-made clothes and raising goose bumps. The song of the Fount was faint within all that wind, a low melody she could almost ignore by now.

Today she was supposed to be searching the beaches, both the one they’d run aground on and the one on the other side of the island.

The beach Caeliar had walked off, in Nyxara’s memories, seeing how far She could get from the Mount.

But when Lore woke, miraculously not sore after another night spent curled up next to the Fount, she hadn’t hiked down to the beach.

She’d come here, drawn once again to the sheer rock.

A tug at her hand, at her mind. Lore closed her eyes.

Slipping into memory on the island was like slipping beneath the surface of a still pool, comforting and easy.

But this was something different. She wasn’t in one of Nyxara’s memories, fitting neatly into the goddess’s skin.

When she looked down, the angles were all wrong, taller and broader.

The pain was exquisite, almost exhilarating, and concentrated in her chest.

Her open chest, a heart beating impossibly in a bloody hole.

This memory belonged to Apollius.

Lore tried to throw herself aside, somehow rip away, but it was useless. She was trapped here, inside the body of the god, until the memory let her go.

Apollius gasped. Lore felt Him try to channel Spiritum, try to weave together golden threads to heal Himself, but they scattered from His fingers.

This wound was too great. It was a miracle He’d kept Himself going this long, three days after Nyxara had ripped the heart from His ribs, a literal expression of what She’d been doing incrementally for centuries.

A memory within a memory; He thought of what He’d done, after not-quite-killing Nyxara.

Sent one of the monks who’d stayed through the chaos to the mainland, called in Gerard Arceneaux.

Gave orders for Her body, then used His rapidly depleting strength to tell him everything He could think of, all the ways to preserve the world as something He could return to, something He could shape.

And He would return. One way or another. The darkness would not have Him forever, and that was the only thing keeping Him from complete, insensate terror.

With a painful beat of wings, Apollius rose in the air, settled on the side of the sheer rock face. He raised one god-fist, brought it down.

The cliff broke open. Behind it, a cavern.

He entered, the glow of His skin the first light this place had ever seen.

Apollius turned to face the open sky beyond the cavern He’d revealed. The strands of Spiritum that refused to heal Him would still follow His direction. He raised His hands, bent His fingers.

Rock was dead, but everything in this cliffside was not. He pulled life from the few remaining trees, the grass and moss, creatures in the miles-away sea. He wove it all together into a web of gold, a locked door against anyone who did not share His power.

This, too, was an instruction He’d given. The few monks still on the island were to come here and put the rocks back in place, rebuild what He’d broken, make this cliffside whole again. Then they were to fall into the sea, taking with them the secret of His resting place.

The net of gold shimmered, nothing visible beyond it. His vision faded, faded.

Apollius lay down. His vision went black. And His mind spun out into darkness, near the threshold of eternity but not beyond it. Ready to wait.

Lore’s eyes opened.

She’d fallen to her knees at some point in the memory; her hands dug into the soft earth, grit thick enough under her nails to hurt. This was it, then. Here was His body, and here was the way to get to it.

Slowly, she stood, holding on to the tree until she was sure her legs could support her. With a firm nod, she made her way back to the Fount to get her bag and Dani’s dagger. She hadn’t been bringing it with her, unafraid of anything Dani could do. The other woman was smart enough not to try.

The Fount sang as she collected her pack. An anticipatory air to the melody now. A build before a big finish.

This is what We need , It said softly.

“No shit,” Lore replied.

“What’s going on?”

Dani wasn’t supposed to be here. She was supposed to be on the other side of the island, looking through the ruined huts. “I could ask you the same question,” Lore said.

“There’s nothing in those villages.” Dani leaned against a mostly intact doorframe, arms crossed. “It’s far more likely we’re missing something in here.”

“Hm.” Lore turned away, headed back toward the path.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

There was a warning tone in Dani’s voice, a fierceness.

“You found something,” the other woman said.

Lore spun back around, mouth set in a thin line. “And if I did?”

Dani pushed off from the doorframe, stepped closer. “We’re working together, Lore.” She swallowed, a hint of emotion on her face that she tried to scrub away. Desire, blazing plain. “If you found Him, take me with you. Let me help.”

A lie would do no good. Lore didn’t know what it would take to kill Apollius’s body; maybe she really would need Dani’s help.

And what if it killed her? What if she tripped some mechanism, trying to open that Spiritum door, and killed herself falling down the cliff face before she could kill the god? Someone had to do it. They couldn’t come all this way for nothing.

Lore jerked her chin, indicating for Dani to follow. Then she trekked back to the cliff.

Dani stayed quiet, even when Lore set down her pack, afraid the extra weight might overbalance her as she climbed out onto the rock.

A handhold here, a foothold there; slowly, she made her way onto the slightly canted drop, painfully aware of the churning sea far below, the wind pushing at her body.

But she didn’t fall.

Finally, she reached the middle of the cliff face, balanced on a tiny rock outcropping that she prayed with every breath wouldn’t crumble.

This was the place; she could see the seams between the stones, fit back together so perfectly that from far away, it looked unbroken.

The monks had put it back like they were solving a puzzle before letting themselves fall into the ocean.

Lore leaned forward, placing her hands on the rocks, allowing them to take some of her weight so it all wasn’t balanced between sky and sea. This close, she could feel Spiritum blazing behind the stones, as gold and strong as the day it’d been spun.

She dropped to channeling-space, blocking out everything but those sunshine threads behind the black of Mortem in the cliff.

It was similar to the door she’d opened in the vaults to find August’s undead army, in the bowels of the Church to find the prophecy.

Similar, but not the same. Those locks had only needed one piece tripped to be opened; this was a mess of magic, a tangled web that had to be unwoven strand by strand.

“Of fucking course,” Lore muttered, and got to work.

Once she began, the threads came apart. Not easily, necessarily, but with a sense of purpose, of setting yourself to a task you were meant to accomplish. Lore didn’t know how much time passed, her hands braced against the rocks and her vision gray-scale, unpicking the lock Apollius had made.

But when it was done, the force of it knocked her backward.

A moment of empty air, her stomach recalibrating to the lack of solid ground, dropping and then floating up into her throat. There was no time to scream as she started to fall, but Lore still tried, a small, ridiculous sound more like a kittenish mew than a cry of horror.

It was replaced by an oof as something caught her hand.

Dani, standing inside the lip of the cavern she’d uncovered, bruised and bleeding from the fall of puzzle-piece rocks, from her scramble over the cliff face—she must have climbed over while Lore was untangling magic.

Lore’s sweaty hand slipped in Dani’s fist, pulling the smaller woman toward the edge. Every muscle in Dani’s arm strained painfully, her mouth a twisted rictus. “You’re going to have to help me here!”

Lore flailed in the air for ten seconds that felt like an hour before getting her feet on the cliff enough to push up and alleviate some of her weight from Dani’s hold.

She flopped herself over onto the newly made edge, sending Dani stumbling back.

Lore pulled her feet in behind her and curled into a ball, panting in the sudden silence.

When her panic had calmed enough to move, she sat up slowly, peering at Dani in the shadows. “Thank you.”

The other woman held her arm at an awkward angle, but it didn’t look broken, though Lore had probably come close to pulling her shoulder from its socket. Dani held her elbow a moment before shaking it out. “You can’t die yet.”

And that was that.

Lore stood, her legs surprisingly steady. Dani had brought her pack, and she stuck her hand inside, bringing out the dagger. “He’s in here somewhere.” She marched into the dark.

They didn’t have to go far. Inside the cavern, just deep enough for the sunlight not to penetrate, the God of Everything was stretched out on a shelf of stone.

Even in this strange not-quite-death, His body glowed, gold phosphorescence running beneath His skin.

He was beautiful in the same shocking way Bastian was beautiful, only amplified by His otherworldliness: light-brown hair curling over His ears, a finely made face, strong nose and jaw.

His wings spread out on either side of Him, gently draping over the stone that had become His plinth, the color of midnight snow no one had yet touched.

A white loincloth covered Him from hip to mid-thigh, but other than that He was naked, all the wounds from His fight with Nyxara on display.

One, in particular.