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The hole in His chest made a noise. A low, subtle sucking sound, like trying to drink from an empty cup. And there was the beat, a low murmur that echoed in the chamber, His heart thrumming long after it should have stopped.

Lore stepped closer, unable to tear her eyes away. His heart looked like a fist of congealed blood, the rim of the hole in His pale chest gummed with gold and scarlet. His ribs had broken around it perfectly, an ivory cage with sharp edges.

She reached in without a second thought.

His heart was warm. Even the blood that should have long since dried to flaking crust was liquid on her palm, coating her eclipse scar. Lore fit her hand around the organ, so small for such an important thing.

“If it didn’t work the first time,” Dani said behind her, “I doubt it will work the second.”

It had worked, but Lore recalled her memory of the Godsfall, how Nyxara had replaced His heart once She’d torn it out. Lore didn’t say that, though. She pulled her hand carefully from the nest of bones and wiped it on her thigh, hefting Dani’s dagger in her hand.

“I don’t think there’s any special way to do it,” Dani said, coming up beside her, almost uncomfortably close. She held a rock in her hand, as if she’d use it as backup if the knife didn’t work.

“The sharp part goes in,” Lore said.

The other woman raised a brow. “You’ve been slow with the stupid jokes since we got to the Mount. And here I thought being in a divine presence had made you magically mature.”

A barb, not even a clever one, but it gave Lore pause. Dani was right. Since they’d arrived here, Lore had felt… disconnected from herself. Hollow, scooped out. She’d chalked it up to how lousy this place was with memory, how thin magic made barriers of time.

Maybe there was more to it than that.

This is good , the Fount soothed, Its voice quiet and distant.

Her most recent dream rose to the surface of her mind, never far from her thoughts. Gabe, the feel of him against her, inside her, panting breaths and slides of skin. That was the last time she remembered feeling something fully, not at a remove.

That conversation they’d had, afterward. The one they hadn’t put words to, but each knew what the other was thinking anyway. Maybe they could do something better with this power than just give it up.

Lore tightened her grip on the knife. She had to kill Apollius. She had to—

— take it —

The song in her head resolved, not words, the not-voice. She nodded, considering, agreeing, there must b e a vessel to bring it back —

“Lore?”

Dani didn’t sound concerned. She sounded eager. The rock turned nervously in her hand.

Lore shook her head. Tightened her sweaty grip on the hilt of the dagger again. Apollius’s heart gleamed in His open chest, blood shining on barely moving muscle.

She took a breath. The song in her head paused.

She raised the dagger above her head, clenched in both hands.

She brought it down.

And as she did, Apollius opened His eyes.

He smiled.

Shock hammered through her, but her course was set, an arrow already fired.

Lore gasped as the blade cut swiftly down into Apollius’s open heart and slid in as smoothly as if the organ were the dagger’s sheath.

Lore tugged it out, sent it clattering behind her, gold-crimson blood torrenting from the wound.

Apollius pulled in a breath, His beautiful face a rictus of mingled pain and elation as He bowed up off the plinth, bent backward and nearly in half.

All the atmosphere of the room seemed to pull in toward Him, a dying star eating the world.

Lore braced her hands on the plinth to keep from falling forward, her face nearly touching the gaping hole of the god’s chest.

His back settled against the stone again, as if it were a feather bed. His body was deteriorating, the same way Nyxara’s had, becoming gilded ash as His heart pumped out. Distantly, she heard Dani scrambling, running back this direction.

His hand cupped her cheek just before all of Him winnowed away, sweet and gentle. “You’re Mine.”

And then Lore’s mind was a storm.

A great rushing in, all the hollow places of her filling with something new. Spiritum, a crashing golden wave of it. Apollius, His second bodiless life strengthened by bodily death, rooting down into every hidden place He could find.

I told you , He said, His voice reverberating and echoing and all she could hear. You were Mine, and are Mine, and will be Mine forever. This is a kind of being together, Lore. Nyxara. This is as close as We could ever be.

The Fount said the only way Apollius would ever leave Bastian was if there was somewhere else He’d rather be. Inside her. Owning her, as fully as one could possibly be owned.

Lore tried to scream, but when she opened her mouth, it was His laughter.

She wasn’t thrust to the back of her mind, not like Bastian was, not made a passenger like the time in the Church when she’d let Nyxara take over.

Lore remained in charge of herself by half measures—able to move, to push herself back from the plinth where Apollius’s body was now so much golden smoke.

Able to claw at her ears to try to drown Him out.

Able to see Dani coming at her with the dagger she’d dropped. “Better than a rock.”

Her eyes were wild, her smile wide—she swiped at Lore carelessly, clearly not anticipating much resistance. Her smile fell when Lore dodged clumsily out of the way, but not by much.

“You don’t want it,” she snarled. “All you talked about was how much you don’t want your power, fucking whining all the time, wishing it away.

So give it to me.” Another swipe. Lore fell backward, her legs gummy and coltish with new power, the control of her body swapping rapidly back and forth between her and the god burrowing into her skull.

“We both know you won’t do anything good with it. ”

You can prove her wrong , Apollius whispered.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Lore rasped. “You have to be a god.”

“I’m willing to try,” Dani said, and lunged for her again.

“I told you exactly what I wanted, Lore. That the world would have to be remade, every old thing passing. I knew it’d take someone with a parasitic god to kill Him.

” She swiped out, catching Lore’s shirt, linen tearing.

“But you? I’m pretty sure I can kill you all on my own. ”

Lore scrabbled back against the wall of the cavern, scraping her fingernails to bloody tatters. Dani stabbed forward at Lore again, and Lore threw up her hand.

The blade went straight through it, carving a hole in the center of her eclipse scar. She howled in pain, knees buckling.

Don’t worry , Apollius soothed.

Lore didn’t have the mental capacity to concentrate on channeling, on healing her hand—but she didn’t need it. The god in her transcended the need for channeling mechanics, and the hole in her palm slowly closed, pushing the dagger blade out, like a rose slowly blooming from soil.

Gasping, Dani stumbled back, her expression gyring from disgust to awe. She rushed toward Lore again, gripping a sharp rock.

But Lore was ready. When the dagger was free of skin and sinew, Lore turned it around one-handed, in the same palm it had cut.

Make her pay.

She stabbed out, the blade sheathing into Dani’s abdomen, right above her hip. She choked, falling inelegantly to her knees. “You don’t want this,” she spat, blood on her teeth. “You never did.”

A lie, one Lore had stopped trying to believe about herself long before this moment. Maybe she’d never wanted the power she was given, but the concept of power in its entirety—that, she wanted.

“It’s not just the power.” Lore’s voice, Apollius’s voice, harmony from a single throat. “It’s the chance to make a difference.”

Dani sneered. “I can think of no one worse suited to becoming the God of Everything.”

“You think you’d be better?” Just Lore’s voice, now. They faded in and out of each other, her and the god.

“Better than you,” Dani snarled, hands clenched over her stomach, her shirt becoming a mess of red. “Better than Them, and better than the Fount. That’s all you’re doing. Going back to something that never worked.”

Like Raihan said. As long as there were mortals, as long as there was free will, there would be evil.

You can fix that.

“I can think of one way to make it better.” Lore let the blade drop to the floor. “For me, at least.”

She reached out. She pushed.

Dani didn’t realize how close she was to the edge. She pinwheeled, trying to regain balance that was long since gone, and then she tumbled over the lip of the cliff. One scream, swiftly silenced by the first rocky outcropping, a meaty thunk as she hit it.

The rest of her tumble to the sea was quiet.

Lore’s vision spun in and out, like looking through a constantly adjusting telescope.

Sometimes, she saw herself as if gazing down from above; other times she looked out from her own eyes.

It was disorienting, made her stumble. Her limbs felt too heavy and too light; she lurched over the ground when she tried to walk.

Hit her knees, grit digging deep into the skin.

A glimmer of familiar feeling. Bastian. She couldn’t see him, but she could feel him, his sudden panic. “Lore!” His voice wasn’t audible, but she heard it anyway, echoing in her skull. “Lore, you have to fight Him off—”

You won.

Apollius’s voice sounded so smug. So pleased.

You got Me out of Bastian. You lived when you should not have.

Lore stumbled from the cave but didn’t fall.

She didn’t know how she made it to the grassy knoll, her body moving of its own accord as she fought to gather up the pieces of herself and knit them whole.

Endless cycles, endings that began again.

Apollius dug in like a snake to its nest, curled around the very foundations of her.

You averted the apocalypse.

So much blood on her hands. The villages, Anton, Jean-Paul, now Dani. She’d been the architect of so many small apocalypses.

She ran through the island, reeled back to the Fount, still singing. It sounded triumphant; why did It sound happy about this?

Apollius wasn’t trying as hard with her. She knew that instinctually, knew that every movement of her own was only because He allowed it. Why? What made her different from Bastian?

You’re smarter than him. You look out for yourself. You’re far more like Me than he ever was.

“No,” she moaned, crashing through underbrush, dead branches whipping at her face.

Yes , Apollius said. You can make the world in your image. Better than your image. In a Holy Empire, there is no war. When everyone is brought under one rule, Our rule, they will be better for it.

Lore fell to her knees again, this time on the mossy, broken stone of the courtyard. The voice of the Fount stopped singing and spoke instead.

Almost done .

Soothing, like a hand in her hair.

You’ve done well. We knew you would. It’s been so long since We held power; We need a cup to pour from, in order to catch it all. Now give back what you have, wait for the others to bring you what remains. Then you can rest, Lore.

If Apollius could hear the Fount whispering to her, He gave no sign. He nestled into her mind, gold stringing through her limbs, gold all she could see when she blinked.

Lore staggered toward the Fount.

She nearly fell in; Lore braced her hands on the Fount’s edge, her nails breaking further with the force of her grip.

Go on , Apollius said.

Go on , the Fount urged.

She knew how to give up power. She remembered the water flooding her mouth in the North Sanctuary after her impromptu wedding in chains, remembered its sweet, clear taste.

Then, it had welled up from her easily, because she didn’t want that particular magic, had never truly wanted it.

It was foisted on her by a goddess looking for an end to an endless cycle.

Now her mouth stayed dry.

You know what It wants , Apollius said. The only thing anyone has ever wanted from you.

Her death. Her sacrifice. Lore and the greater good could not exist in the same world at the same time.

Be the savior , the Fount murmured. Leave a legacy. Put the magic back where it is supposed to be.

But who decided that? Who was the arbiter of what was supposed to be?

We are the same. She’d never heard Apollius sound genuine before. Every interaction she’d had with the god had been full of second meaning and innuendo, but now He spoke truth plainly. You fear death just as much as I do.

Nothing had defined Lore’s life so much as a reckless determination to keep living it.

Below her, the ribbons of magic in the Fount swirled.

She wasn’t in channeling-space, but she saw the threads all the same; the deep well of Mortem that had all been called back, the dregs of Spiritum the Fount had managed to harvest from Bastian’s brief moments of control, the blue strands of water that Apollius had stolen when Bastian killed Amelia.

Two choices here, and both required her to lower herself to the surface.

Both required that she bring herself right to the edge of those waters that held everything, the seed from which the world had sprung.

She dipped down, down, until the coolness of it brushed against her lips, until the sweet and mineral scent of it was all she could breathe.

“I will be better,” Lore whispered, sending ripples over the surface of the world’s soul.

And she drank deep.