Page 72

The Alignment

“I have to get to the throne room,” I yell at Scoria. “Now.”

The giantess doesn’t so much as blink, just touches me. The last thing I see before we disappear is Reven, still encased in ice.

We reappear in the throne room, which is barely tall enough to hold the giantess, and I gasp at the sight that greets us.

The goddess of death.

Scoria takes one look at Allusian, standing beside my sister in the center of the dais, and if obsidian could lose color, she does. “Mistress,” she whispers, then goes down on one knee hard enough to crack the marble floor. “We have been searching for you.”

Allusian hurries down the steps to where Scoria kneels, putting her hand to the giantess’s face. “I know, my friend. I’ve missed you.”

Scoria makes some kind of grinding noise that could be a swallow. “What do you wish of me?”

“Keep that army of shadows off of us.”

“I’ll keep doing what I can,” Scoria promises, then she’s gone.

“You’re here?” I demand. “You’re here ? We’re dying out there!” I point an accusing finger in the direction of the desert where the battle still rages, the cacophony of it audible even from the palace.

“A regrettable necessity,” Allusian says. Totally emotionless. The light darkens around us, and she glances toward the moonhole. “Get ready.”

Though I don’t agree with the emotionless part, the logic of what she’s saying is right. We release the goddesses and it’s over. That’s always been the key.

This sparkling, black and gold broken room seems an appropriate place to stop Eidolon’s evil for good.

“Meren!” Tabra, still standing on the dais with Achlys at her side, holds her hand out to me. I hurry to her, twining our fingers together, both of us holding on for dear life. We’re about to make the impossible happen…hopefully without dying.

“Eidolon will come.” Allusian folds her hands before her. “I can’t do much against his power.”

I startle, turning to stare at her. “What? Why? You’re a goddess .”

Her eyes glint with bitter anger. “The Devourers still have pieces of my heart, and my sister …” She snarls the word. “Was smart enough to feed them the part of me that is light and life. The part that could hold off the shadows she also wields. Darkness is my weakness. For now.”

Which means she can’t kill Eidolon or stop him by using his powers against him, and it also means she can’t stop the shadow army. No wonder she sent Scoria back out.

We are so screwed. “How am I supposed to hold off the king and release the goddesses at the same time?”

And maybe hold off Reven. Vos said the ice would only contain him so long, and the darkness was already swarming inside. I don’t mention that part.

Allusian flicks a glance at me. “The most I can do is send him away and buy you time. After that it’s up to you.”

Up to me? I try not to show the colossal doubt trying to crush me. We’ve fought Eidolon before. Me and Reven both. Alone and together, we lost every time. Even Scoria came off worse against him. I’ll lose.

“Do all goddesses leave the hard work to the mortals?” I grumble to Tabra under my breath.

She doesn’t so much as crack a smile.

“It is almost time.” Allusian looks back up through the moonhole. “Where are the amulets?”

Achlys walks around us and pulls the necklaces, with their glittering glass in the colors of Aryd’s desert sands, from a deep pocket she sewed into her skirts.

Allusian’s brows snap down in a scowl that she directs at me and Tabra. “You gave them to a Vexillium?”

I wasn’t told, but I already know why. It’s so patently obvious.

“For exactly that reason,” Tabra says. “Those who wield power would never suspect that the person charged with protecting something so precious and vital is someone they consider weak.”

“And we trust her above all others,” I add.

Allusian says nothing to that, just points at the floor at our feet. “Place them there.”

Achlys spreads them out before me and Tabra, then she moves closer and presses a soft, sweet kiss on Tabra’s lips. “If anything happens, we’ll find each other in the next life.”

I stare wide-eyed as they share a long look of love and fear before Achlys returns to the side of the room.

“The next life?” I whisper to Tabra.

Her smile is everything I love about my sister—innocence, love, and unadulterated happiness even as we prepare to face the worst this world can throw at us. “Achlys and I bonded last night.”

Breath snags in my throat. I want to throw my arms around her, around them both, and share that happiness with them.

But I can’t, because the darkness in the room is growing fangs, night eating away the daylight, and we don’t have time.

“I wish you both a thousand lives of joy.” I grab Tabra’s hand and squeeze. “Just promise me you’ll look for me in those next lives, too.”

I can’t imagine walking through life without her.

“Start when I tell you,” Allusian says.

Tabra and I both sober.

“The Alignment will enhance your powers,” Allusian points out. “But it won’t last long. Minutes at most. You must be ready for them.”

I don’t have time to ask what that last part means.

Both Tabra and I raise our hands. My palms glow a cheery yellow and Tabra’s a regal hue of deep purple. Both colors feel wrong today, as if there shouldn’t be anything cheery or regal about this situation.

Focus, Meren.

These powers have been passed down through generations of twins who gave their lives to protect our line and our dominion, bringing us to this moment. Finally.

“Now,” Allusian says with all the calm authority of a goddess.

“But not these.” Eidolon appears in a swirl of shadow. Five of the six amulets lift into the air on a hook made of darkness.

I take a step toward him, only Tabra’s hold on my hand pulls me up short.

Allusian snaps her fingers and Eidolon disappears. The amulets drop back to the ground with tinks of metal and glass as they hit the marble.

She said she could send him away. How far? How long do we have before he shadows himself back here?

The darkness becomes all-consuming.

“Now!” Allusian yells. “Release them now!”

Our powers cast an eerie light over the room, as together, Tabra and I get to work.

Tabra awakens the goddesses within, a glow immediately igniting within each amulet, lighting the different-colored glass from the inside and sending a rainbow of color over the dais.

Forcing myself to only one thought is maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, knowing everything that’s going on outside this room, everything that’s coming for us. I start by blocking out all those things, until my focus is only on the glass of a single amulet. First, I try to shatter it, to break it, but it doesn’t give way. I’ve already used so much power today, I can feel the drag on my body. With every breath I take, I wait for the Shadows to take advantage of that weakness and stop me. For Eidolon to take me over. Is Allusian keeping him too busy?

The door bangs open and Hakan runs in, his eyes searching the corners of the room before landing on us. Pella sent him to us. I know she did.

“Eidolon?” he demands.

“It will take some time for him to shadow back from where I sent him,” Allusian tells him.

He nods. “I’ll be ready.”

“Hurry,” Tabra whispers to me.

“I can’t break it,” I whisper back.

“Do the reverse of how you’d make it,” Allusian instructs.

Right. The reverse.

Like I do when I wield shadow, I close my eyes and picture in my mind what that looks like. I imagine each individual step, the glass morphing from its cool solid form to warmth, to something hot and malleable.

“It’s working,” Achlys says, her soft voice drifting around me.

I open my eyes and sure enough the amulets—all six now floating in the air before me— are glowing. Not from the inside, but molten red-gold on the outside. The metal filigrees someone else made to hold them on their chains melts away like liquid under the heat, dropping to the ground in tiny metallic puddles.

Tabra gasps beside me. “I can feel them. The goddesses. They’re close.”

Allusian hisses. Can she feel them, too? “Keep going.”

“Drop!” Hakan shouts.

I grab Tabra and drag her down with me, just in time for a whip of shadow to sweep over our heads, the waft of air over my skin telling me just how close that was. The goddess snaps again, and Eidolon disappears. “That first time should have taken him longer than it did,” she warns. “He’s become more powerful.”

That’s what one thousand years will do to an Imperium with nothing but centuries.

Hakan is across the room by the time we jump back to our feet. “We don’t have time to screw around like this,” he growls.

Tiny bolts of lightning flow like water from his hands, forming a cage that zaps and sizzles around us. The blue-white light it casts…no shadows could ever get through it.

“Finish it,” he says.

I focus and tell the sand to reform itself into all its thousands of tiny grains. And, ever so slowly, little bits break off the glowing mold to cool and then hang in the air like stars in the sky.

The darkness begins to ease, turning not so impenetrable.

The last moments of Alignment.

“Faster,” Allusian calls out from beyond our cage. “You’re running out of time.”

I push myself, drawing from the well of power the Alignment is giving me, trying to make the glass breakdown as fast as I can. My body shakes with the effort, but nothing like Tabra, who is still newer to her abilities than I am.

And then she does the unimaginable. Through the cracks and crevices I’ve made, through the sand still reforming, she draws out a sparkling haze, different and separate from my sand—the essence of the goddesses’ souls.

“I can’t,” she gasps.

I glance at my sister. She’s starting to look like death warmed over, eyes sinking into a face hollowing out. She looks like she did when Eidolon’s ghost was killing her from the inside.

“You can ,” Allusian says. “Use the Alignment.”

But Tabra is shaking her head vehemently. “I don’t know how .”

“Mother goddess,” Allusian whispers. Her hands create a series of flowing moves, like a dance, and Aryd’s amulet in all its pieces moves through the air until it floats through a gap Hakan makes in our lightning cage to hover between me and Tabra.

That’s when I feel her.

The familiar warmth of the goddess who has helped me so many times.

Aryd.

She’s here with us. The warmth of her flows through my blood, through my soul. But this time it’s different. As if she’s helping us channel the Alignment. More power is there for the taking, a deep well of it inside me that seems to rise with each passing second.

“Meren?” Tabra’s eyes are wide on mine.

“Keep going.” I suck in sharply before pushing myself even harder. More of my sand breaks away while more of the goddesses’ souls filter out.

“I won’t let this happen!” A hammer of darkness slams down on Hakan’s cage with a snap and sizzle of lightning, but it doesn’t bend or break under the impact. He does it again.

Allusian does something the next time he brings it down. I see it in the way she moves her hands. The instant the hammer of shadow strikes the cage, Hakan’s lightning shoots through it, like it did through the water of the lake deep under the Tyndran mountain. Eidolon blows back so hard that when he hits the marble wall, I hear the way his head cracks against it before he slumps to the ground in a heap.

The warmth of Aryd turns hotter. I welcome the sear of her through my body. It’s like that heat is burning away the parts of me I don’t need and lighting the wells of power inside me on fire.

The warmth disappears and Aryd’s trapped soul floats to hover in front of Allusian. Allusian looks at the light that is her sister, then at us, and closes her eyes, almost in resignation. Then I feel it. True power. A rush, like when Reven brings me pleasure, filling every crack and crevice of me. Allusian’s power.

And, suddenly, it becomes so easy.

There’s no more searing heat like before. This is soft, like butterfly wings.

I splay my fingers, and the rest of the molten amulets disintegrate into sand with a mere thought. I let them drop to the ground in a sparkling hiss.

Tabra takes the misty souls of the goddesses hovering in front of us and reforms them. Like the light, the mist grows into six body-shaped masses, floating in the air like stardust. Those forms take on shape and distinction until we can see them in clear detail.

And it’s terrible.

The goddesses stand in the shadowy room the way I think they must have looked the day they were trapped. Mouths painfully, grotesquely open, shock and fury contorting their features.

Then Tabra screams, the sound like a tear in the fabric of the world, but she doesn’t stop. Not until the goddesses stand before us, whole and alive.

Dazed, they all look around—up to the heavens through the moon hole, taking in the mostly empty room, or looking down at their own bodies. Stark silence settles over the room as the moons and sun break free from their alignment, and one by one the goddesses focus on us.

On Allusian.

“They told us you were dead,” one says.

I’ve never heard Aryd’s voice, never seen her face beyond the carvings and etchings in the temples, but I know this goddess. Statuesque, velvety dark eyes, deep ebony skin that glitters like the Obsidian Desert, and dressed in flowing, soft gold.

I know it’s her.

Allusian’s smile is sour. “No, Sister. I’m not dead.”

Stark blue-green eyes, so like Reven’s, gleam in a pale face with striking cheekbones. Tyndra—no doubt in my mind who that is—tips her head, eyeing Allusian. “That was our first mistake.”