“I love you,” Nyx whispered, trembling on his knees, dominance threading his voice as if he could force from Azaiah the bond he craved.
“You don’t,” Azaiah said, stroking his bloody face. “The flame that drew me to you, it is faint, Nyx, and growing fainter. You are embers where before you were a bonfire. When it is time, when the fire inside you is lit once more, you will know. You will feel its warmth again and realize how cold you were before it returned. But that time is not now.”
“How long? How long do I lose you for—for doing what I— I couldn’t protect them. I couldn’t do anything, I—”
“Shh,” Azaiah whispered, voice aching. “I cannot say. But when your fire burns bright in the dark, hot enough that even Death’s storm cannot extinguish it, then you will see me again. Then it will be time to make our bond, should you still want it. And it will be I, Azaiah, who kneel for you.”
“Azaiah,” Nyx whispered, and as tortured as he sounded, as full and deep as the sadness in his voice was… his eyes were dry as the desert that would soon take his empire, his palace, his throne. The man he used to be.
Thunder rattled the windows, and the rain began to fall once more.
And then there was only Death, smiling down at the man on his knees. “Hello again, butcher.”
Nyx scowled and scrambled to his feet. “I won’t kneel foryou.”
“You will. All things do, in the end.” Death found the Winter board and the little pouch that held the beads in his cloak. He held them up. “Perhaps, one day, Azaiah and Nyx will finish their game. For now…” He slipped the board back into his cloak with the cards and pulled out the beads. He pulled out the one Nyx had always used in his games with Azaiah—bright red like spilled blood—and two others, one black and one white. “I propose another. I will withhold my scythe from you, my butcher, and you will serve me. If, in my service, you find that which you lost, if my avatar fights the corruption that seeks even now to take him… perhaps you will both win the game. Perhaps you will lose, if my avatar seeks another to carry me on their back, and then you will linger until my inevitable conquest comes to pass. On that day, I will let you watch the world end before I have you on your knees, begging to go to the river with the others.”
“And if I say no?”
“Then you will live the rest of your mortal life as any other man. But know this: your soul is not meant to return here. Whatever waits for you on the far side of my river, it is forever. You will not see him again if you walk that path. But it is your choice. What say you, emperor of Iperios? What are you willing to wager, to have what you say you want?”
Death held the beads out in his palm, waiting.
After a moment, Nyx reached out and took them—all three. “I’ll wait for him. I’ll find him again.”
Death smiled at him. “We shall see. Carry the beads with you always, my butcher, my glaive. So you remember what is at stake, what you stand to lose. Now, you should be gone from this place. I feel my brother Leviathan approaching, and we will see the end of the pact you made with my sibling War.”
If the shade of Lamont was still there, Death could not see it. But it was Azaiah who coaxed souls to board the boat, not Death. If they did not follow, Death would not wait. Let Lamont find his way to the river if he could. Let him linger, if he’d rather. It made no difference to Death, and Azaiah was too trapped in his own sorrow to care for the spirit of a man whose cruelty had honed the sword Nyx had become.
The streets were empty as Death walked through them, Nyx at his heels, the palace left behind. He could see the great, hulking shadow of Leviathan’s wings on the burial mounds where the honored imperial dead rested, and the bright crimson flame of his sibling War waiting for him to join them.
Death nodded to his siblings, then turned to the man who was once Nyx and smiled. “Watch, then, my glaive. See it done, your heart’s desire.”
With that, Leviathan roared as Ares laughed, and the wind picked up, faster and faster, as Death thought of his river, winding silent through the dark. He took Ares’s hand in one of his and fell into his own power as Ares did the same, the scents of embers and copper mixing with that of a storm. Leviathan shrieked, and the ground tore asunder, spewing forth rivers of what looked like water… but was sand, dragged from the sea at Leviathan’s call and pulled through the earth to form a deluge as devastating as Death’s rain and as deadly as Ares’s blade.
There were screams in the distance as soldiers ran this way and that, no longer caring who’d been loyal to the empire and who served the upstart general who’d torn it to pieces. Souls rose from the wave of sand as it blanketed fields and houses and streets, until only the palace spires were visible.
When the sun rose that morning, it rose over a desert. The only thing left was the Needle, pointing toward the distant, cold stars above, with the words “Here we have conquered time itself, in this place, the center of the world”barely visible. In time, even the language in which the words were written would be lost and only the letters would stay, symbols that meant nothing to anyone for centuries.
Nothing else remained.
PartFour
Death
ChapterFifteen
784 years after the fall of the Iperian empire
“Excuse me. I believe I’m supposed to be your new apprentice.”
The man who’d once been Nyx looked up from his report of his last assignment, scribbled in messy handwriting on birch paper, and grimaced at the young man who’d addressed him. The mailroom of the Misthotoi was humid and cramped, with beads dangling in long curtains from the ceiling and mercenaries jostling each other by the mail slots. The man before him was slender and redheaded, with the earnest look of someone who wouldn’t last half a year on his own. Gods, he was even wearing an unseasonably open Thalassan wrap shirt, which he’d probably gotten from his mother back home.
“You are him?” the man asked, his smile wavering. “Glaive?”
“It’s what they call me.” If they called him anything at all, these days. Glaive looked the man over and checked his mail slot for proof that he’d been assigned another apprentice.
Damn. He pulled out the coin that every senior Misthotos got when they had to lug around an apprentice for a few months and slipped it into his pocket. “Nice shirt,” he said. “Thalassan?”
