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CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

LORE

Every ending is just a pause.

—Jorach Birham, Eroccan poet

S omeone was running up the path. Lore could hear it, in that moment she took control again, the sounds of the world drowning out the screams in her head.

Someone was running up the path, and she should care about that, but at the moment all she could bring herself to do was sit here and cradle Gabe in her hands.

He didn’t wear his eye patch anymore, something she hadn’t noticed before.

She stroked her fingers over the exposed skin of his temple, the faint red line where it had been for so many years.

Deep in her head, she could hear Apollius screaming, screaming.

The pain was exquisite, but she floated somewhere above it, above that churning magic sea, grief buoying her to a place where it was abstract fact rather than concrete experience.

Her body changed, shrinking down to the size she should be, her unnatural golden glow dimming so she was more moon than sun. Fitting.

Eventually, Apollius would battle His way back into control. She wasn’t strong enough to keep Him at bay forever; her mind would break under the pressure if her body didn’t first. A mad god would be worse than a selfish one.

But she wouldn’t think of that now. Wouldn’t think of the solution presenting itself, the one she’d run from for so long. She cleared her thoughts as best she could, smoothed her hand over Gabe’s hair.

She could bring him back. The soul of the universe swam beneath her skin; she could bring him back.

But it wouldn’t be him , really; she knew that.

It wasn’t like the docks when that ship exploded, settling everyone’s lives back in place before they’d crossed the threshold.

Not even like when she’d tried killing herself and Bastian to banish the gods from their minds.

Death could be delayed, but it could not be cheated, and once you’d entered eternity there was no real return.

So she sat here, and cradled him, and waited for whoever was coming up the path to see what she had done.

Of course it was Bastian, his dark hair matted with sweat, his face scratched and bleeding. He panted as he came to the top of the path, the only one of them left with no god-magic to make living hurt less.

His eyes widened. Sheened, then closed. “Oh, love,” he murmured, the lines of him going crooked. “Oh, love, what happened?”

Lore didn’t know how to answer. When she opened her mouth, a broken sound came out.

Bastian walked like weights were tied to his legs, collapsing next to them in a heap.

A ring of white showed all the way around his irises as he stared at Gabe’s body.

Lore didn’t expect him to rage, she knew he wasn’t like that.

But neither was she expecting him to put his arms around her shoulders, draw her in close.

“You didn’t mean to,” he murmured into her gold-glowing hair. “I know you didn’t mean to.”

And she meant to say of course she didn’t, meant to say she loved him and loved Gabe both, but it was Apollius’s voice that seized her tongue. “Of course I did, imbecile.”

Bastian’s arm stiffened around her, like he could squeeze the god out.

Lore clapped her hands over her mouth, locked every muscle, but His voice came still. “I offered him immortality. To give over his power, let Me become God of Everything, and I would make him something undying. But he wouldn’t, so I killed him, and I became God of Everything anyway.”

It was a horrible feeling, to stretch your lips in a smile you didn’t want. When all you wanted was to sob.

But Bastian didn’t let her go, even as she felt herself slipping, felt Apollius clawing His way forward. And it was awful, horrible, to see him pulled apart like this. Love for her, love for Gabe, grief and terror and rage all mangled together and inextricable.

Three of them, the triangle, the whole that was more than halves. She’d thought maybe there would be peace for them at the end of all this, now that they knew what they were to one another. Lore hadn’t had real peace, ever. It evaded her at every turn.

But it was something she could give Bastian, maybe. Give everyone else still in this world, both those that knew it had almost ended and those who never would.

She tried to pull out of Bastian’s grasp; he wouldn’t let go. “I have to do it, Bastian. It’s the only way; it’s always been the only way.”

He pretended not to hear her.

The Fount still sang, music on the very edge of her ear.

Its song had been mournful after she drank It dry, taking everything It held within Its waters.

The timbre of the song was changing, now, lifting out of minor keys.

Hope. Hope that this could be over, that the cycle was finished and could never restart.

The magic was deep in her; it was no longer a matter of just spitting it back into the Fount. It’d changed her, utterly.

She was death walking, she was the seed of the apocalypse, she was the fire that let the forest grow anew.

For that to happen, she had to burn out.

“Listen to me.” She seized Bastian’s chin, looked into his eyes, reveled in the way they were only brown with no fleck of gold. “I love you. I loved him.” She swallowed. “There’s nothing after, but if I manage to find him in all the nothing, maybe I can send him back.”

“Stop, Lore.” He covered her mouth with his palm; she saw him wince, like her skin still burned. “Stop. You aren’t dying.”

The word made Apollius flare, her vision bypassing gold light to completely white out. Her control slipped, fell away as she sank back into that internal sea, her body contorting back into god-proportions.

Lore’s hand smacked Bastian aside; she rose up, up, her feet leaving the ground, wings outstretched.

“I will never die!” she screamed, Apollius’s voice seizing her own vocal cords, the tone of her own lost in His fury.

“Do you not understand? The world is new, I am its new sun, and I will never fucking die ! The nothing will not have Me!”

Fear, again. Not the kind that came from love. The kind that was concerned only with yourself.

Movement by the path, but Lore was too far gone to pay attention, too busy trying to fight free of Apollius. Too busy trying to give her life away, after all these years working to save it.

Gods dead and dying, this was unfair.

Lore fought to gain control of her unwieldy body, at least enough to make herself step forward.

She did, but it was lurching, her legs too long, her fractured mind unused to directing such bulk.

The shine of her own eyes was blinding, beamed back at her by the gold-seamed stone of the Fount.

If she could get there, throw herself inside, manage to claw through Apollius’s increasingly desperate hold…

Something blocking her path, illuminated in her eyelight. Long, pale hair. Hazel eyes. A body taller and slimmer than her own, but somehow still similar.

Her mother.

A familiar and indescribable pain, one so different and so much heavier than anything the gods in her body could ever inflict.

Her knees went weak; Lore stumbled, bowing toward the ground.

Apollius fought for control of her jaw, her tongue, but her grief was too strong.

How awful, that when her mother finally came, it was too late.

How terrible, that her mother only saw her when she was monstrous.

“Mama,” Lore murmured, quiet and raw and asking for something she knew couldn’t happen, because that was the magic of mothers. Even when you knew better, part of you expected them to do the impossible. “Help.”

“I’m here, baby.” Her mother’s voice was thick with the strain of running, with unshed tears. “I’m here. I can help. But you have to do what I say, even if it seems hard. You’re so strong. You’re so brave. You can do it.”

Lore did not feel strong. Lore did not feel brave. But she nodded. “I’m sorry. I was stupid, I let Him convince me that I could make things better—”

“Don’t apologize for wanting better.” Even in the catacombs, when their relationship was odd and strained at best, her mother had never spoken to her like a mother would, either in love or in admonishment.

It felt nice, almost, to be scolded now.

“Do not apologize for having your want for better turned against you, Lore. That’s all any of this is, really.

For the people who truly believe, the people who haven’t used faith only for power.

Compassion, and a want for better, and even if it’s all a lie in the end: Those things are good. Those things are true.”

Next to her, by the Fount, Bastian still cradled Gabe’s body, running his fingers over and over through the other man’s hair. He didn’t try to approach Lilia, as if he knew his part in this was paused for now.

A sob broke in Lore’s throat. It gave Him an opening. “You stupid buried whore,” the god snarled at her mother, “you know nothing of divinity—”

Lore clamped her teeth into her lip until she felt the skin break, not letting His voice out.

“Listen, my baby,” Lilia said. “You have to give it to me.”

The song of the Fount reached a crescendo, resolving once again into words. Yes , It sang, yes, a vessel, one to bring it all back.

Lilia was not the avatar of a god. But maybe it only took divinity to steal power, not to have it given. Lore was the God of Everything, and there was nothing beyond her grasp.

In her head, Apollius shrieked. He battered at her insides like her bones were prison bars; the pressure in her head crept close to bursting.

“You’ll die,” Lore said simply, an argument stripped bare. “Bringing it to the Fount will kill you, it’s too much to give back any other way.”

“I know,” her mother soothed. She stepped forward, cupped Lore’s monster-proportioned face in her hands. “I know. I’m ready for that.”

“What if I’m not?” Lore whispered.