Page 55 of The Veil of Hollow Gods

He’s baiting me. I know it. I feel it in the way his stare lands on me, the way he’s rendered my childhood home—accurate, but too bright, too clear.

And full of vestiges.

I know it, and yet I still let the shadows spin out.

I still let them rise around each vestige, cocooning them. Still ask them to take the bodies to the Shadowed Veil.

If their souls are no longer on this plane, or any other, at least their flesh can rest.

Three, four sometimes five at a time, the shadows carry them to their final silence.

Lorien stares at me, a wide smile parting his lips.

The vestiges don’t move or fight back.

There is no blood.

It’s quiet. Just the soft pop of shadows darting from one plane to the next.

Lorien stands, watching wide-eyed, and I don’t care. I don’t care at all if this is exactly what he wants me to do.

One after another…

They take my neighbors and friends.

Strangers

They take my mother and sister together, which I’m grateful for.

And then, it’s only Lorien and me in the false house made by the False Light.

“Thank you,” the worm king says, and it sounds as though he means it.

I offer a mock curtsey and then show him my favorite finger.

It’s an idle thought.

Just a wandering curiosity, really, but my shadows act on it, smothering the False Light in darkness.

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t resist. Lorien stands there, arms outstretched as the shadows obey me.

“Ah ah,” Lorien tuts with a smile as shadows ring his head, spinning around it like a crown of thorns. “You cannot unmake a thing like me, Amara.”

I shrug. “It was a passing thought, honestly.”

A surge of blinding light bursts from him, searing the shadows in blazing golden light.

I shield my eyes against it as the darkness curls and smokes and bends?—

Wrong.

Like they’re being burned away.

“I didn’t have the means before, you see. But it’s all linked, Amara.” He reaches forward, grabbing a tendril of my darkness. It writhes in his hand, then evaporates in a puff of gray smoke.

The shadows draw closer to me, collecting at my feet and legs.

His jaw tightens, like an invisible strap suddenly pulled taut. But Lorien pries his jaw back open with sheer force of will. “The closer you are to remembering, the closer we all become to what we once were.”

“And what’s that? Even uglier demons?”

Lorien smirks. His gaze darts over my shoulder just as hands grab me from behind, one digging into my waist, one like a steel band across my shoulders.

I recognize the smell before he even says a word.

Blood and battlefield dirt.

“Pretty little Maiden doesn’t know her place,” he growls against my ear, hot breath like iron and rot fanning across my face.

“Varek” I sneer, shadows spiraling up to meet him. They prise his arms off me without fanfare, without effort.

“I thought I might see you here,” I say, and again, it’s only a passing thought.

I only wondered briefly if shadows could snap the neck of a Carrion War King.

But they answer all the same. They rise, grab the king’s jaw, and twist his head until the bones snap.

He falls to the ground in a heap, talisman coat draping around him like a shroud.

Tyr will be upset he didn’t get to end him.

Lorien laughs. “Beautiful. I knew you had it within you. Knew you had the violence and mettle to do what needed doing.”

I shake my head, bored with his grandstanding. The shadows rise once more, ebbing toward Lorien. “What are you talking about, worm king?”

For the smallest moment, his smile falters. “Call me what you will, Destroyer, but you’ve done everything exactly as I hoped. You’ve sent countless soulless husks to the Shadow Realm. ”

The floor quakes beneath me.

No. Not the floor, the ground beneath it.

“You’ve killed a god-king.”

Before the shadows reach him, Lorien raises his arms, yanking them down in one hard jerk.

And the walls around us crumble.

The house, or illusion of the house, disappears, revealing a cracked sky, full of those ridiculous colors.

Cyrne.

Pherin.

Aurelime.

It was good at first, the sky. The light. The lark... That’s how the old songs begin, isn’t it?

“You’ve unmade Tyr’s protections on this land, and now, Maiden, you’re free to return to where you came from.”

Where there once was only hard-packed snow and ice, now lies mud. Once frost-tipped trees, heavy with ice, now stand tall. The sky, once only shades of gray…

Now cracked and bleeding like everywhere else.

“You see, dear Amara. You were always meant to walk this path. This cycle. You were meant to remember just enough to repeat it. And now you have, so go ahead, Maiden. Walk the spiral. Start the cycle anew.”

I stare at him.

The numbness of grief too tender, too close to feel, falls away.

“All this?” I gesture to the shattered village, the broken sky. “All this was to bait me into what exactly?”

My hands tremble at my sides. Crackle with power, with energy.

With fury.

“Become the goddess again, Amara. Shed your humanity and devour this world like you’ve devoured so many others.”

I step closer, and Lorien doesn’t step back. “Why? Why do you want this?”

“Because…” Tyr’s voice wraps around my skin, sinking deep into my bones the way it always does.

Every time.

Every life.

“If you’re busy making and unmaking worlds, you?—”

“Silence, consort!” Lucien snaps, eyes flashing with ire.

Tyr stands at my side. “Too late. She broke the enchantments. There’s nothing keeping me or Morvain or the Steedlords from answering any of her questions.”

At the mention of the Steedlords, Lorien flinches.

“Choose, Maiden!” he booms.

I turn to Tyr. “Tell me,” I whisper.

He leans close, hands grasping my forearms. “If you unmake the realm, you’ll start the cycle over. And that’s your prison, Amara. That’s where they’ve kept you inert, repeating the same chain of events over and over so you can’t take back your sovereignty.”

I shake my head. “I will burn this world. I’ll sunder it through so nothing can grow through the ashes, nothing rises through the bones of what was.”

Tyr nods. “And that’s your divine right. You’re the Destroyer and Creator and everything in between, Amara. You’ve embodied every goddess for all of time.” He pauses, gaze going heavy.

“And if you choose to end this world, then I will wait for you in the next.”

Memories crash through his words, through my mind.

A god-mind clawing its way back from oblivion .

The altar in the Ruined Fortress.

Worn wood and aged cloth.

My altar…where offerings were made to me.

Which me, I don’t know.

Honey and spices and ripe berries. The firstborn cattle of the season…given to me so that I might look down on them and give a plentiful harvest. Easy labor. Long lives.

A voice pierces the vision…

“Mother, why do we call land in our continent vestiges?”

“Because sometimes ? —”

The memory folds into itself, dissolving into…

A mist-shrouded sky, me and my consort among the clouds, placing world seeds into the germinator. Watching as each perfectly round bauble hums with life.

Always the same order.

Water, things to live in the water—small at first, then bigger and bigger ? —

The memory disintegrates into the first.

A man kneels before my altar in supplication. Calling my name. Names.

All of them.

Tyr grabs my face.

“Amara!” My gaze focuses on his dark eyes. “You inherited a world that told you what women are. What god is. What power should look like.”

I am both the hero and villain.

Maker and unmaker.

“Lorien could never break the magic recursion or frost. Only you could, love. And that’s how this is meant to be.”

Mother, why do we call ? —

Dama, please hear me. See these gifts and know that your name is a holy name on my lips.

Creatures rise from the water of my seed world. So many legs. Then wings and horns.

Then—

I clutch my chest.

My beautiful demons.

So many colors and some with horns, others winged and…

Perfect.

So perfect.

My heart aches with the depth of my love for my first sentient creatures.

“Why?” My knees buckle as I cry out to Tyr.

He presses his forehead to mine.

“Why what, my heart?”

“Why did I end their world? The first time. Why was this cycle started?”

He holds me upright by my arms as a wail wracks through my body.

Lorien cackles behind me. “It’s always the same question, isn’t it? Always the same sticking point. A marvel we were able to map her mind so clearly, we knew it would all come down to that single question.”

Tyr ignores the False Light, Maggot King, Lorien of—whatever his cursed name is.

He presses into me. “I cannot answer that question. Only you know why, Amara.”

“Oh, don’t lie to her, old friend.”

Tyr lifts his head to snarl at Lorien. “We were never friends, you gospel of lies.”

Lorien scoffs. “I’d be hurt if I thought you meant that, brother.”

Tyr stiffens, but Lorien continues. “Your consort cannot name the reason why, because we made it the hinge point. The only part of your memory you cannot regain unless you retake your full mantle.”

He approaches, gripping my arm and turning me away from Tyr.

I allow it, staring into his maskless face. Full of rot and maggots and yellow bone.

“The choice is yours, Maiden.” He smiles at me, blackened, broken teeth like shattered glass. “Stay here. Live in this world with these people and systems you hate. Or become what you are and start it over.”

It’s hard to read a skeleton’s expression.

But he doesn’t seem afraid of me.

Doesn’t seem concerned by how close he is to me or my shadows or my Frozen King.

And that?—

That doesn’t sit well with me.

“You know what I think of smug worm kings?” I ask.

Maybe he smiles. I’ll never know. “What’s that, dear Amara?”

My fist balls at my side, and I don’t know why I know I can do what I’m about to?—

I just do.

“I think they should rule their own kind,” I say, hand darting forward, through what’s left of his throat and trachea. The moment I touch bone, I wrench it free. His entire spine pulls clean through his throat.

The Maggot King falls to his knees.

Fitting.