And Apollius laughed. Booming and joyful, His head falling to the floor as if He’d finally laid down some heavy burden.
He looked up.
Not Apollius. Bastian.
Bastian, and his eyes were dark and wild, panic written across his face. “Something happened.”
“I’d say.” But Jax was arrested in motion, staring at where that pool of water had been.
“Lore is in danger,” Bastian said. “Something happened, the sea is gone.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
LORE
Fate will always find you.
—Lyric from Malfouran tavern song, circa 365 AGF
She was at the cliff again.
Lore held on to the same tree, leaned out over the edge of the knoll. The wind was high today, whipping her hair into her mouth, tugging at her loose Harbor-made clothes and raising goose bumps. The song of the Fount was faint within all that wind, a low melody she could almost ignore by now.
Today she was supposed to be searching the beaches, both the one they’d run aground on and the one on the other side of the island. The beach Caeliar had walked off, in Nyxara’s memories, seeing how far She could get from the Mount. But when Lore woke, miraculously not sore after another night spent curled up next to the Fount, she hadn’t hiked down to the beach. She’d come here, drawn once again to the sheer rock.
A tug at her hand, at her mind. Lore closed her eyes.
Slipping into memory on the island was like slipping beneath the surface of a still pool, comforting and easy. But this was something different. She wasn’t in one of Nyxara’s memories, fittingneatly into the goddess’s skin. When she looked down, the angles were all wrong, taller and broader. The pain was exquisite, almost exhilarating, and concentrated in her chest.
Her open chest, a heart beating impossibly in a bloody hole.
This memory belonged to Apollius.
Lore tried to throw herself aside, somehow rip away, but it was useless. She was trapped here, inside the body of the god, until the memory let her go.
Apollius gasped. Lore felt Him try to channel Spiritum, try to weave together golden threads to heal Himself, but they scattered from His fingers. This wound was too great. It was a miracle He’d kept Himself going this long, three days after Nyxara had ripped the heart from His ribs, a literal expression of what She’d been doing incrementally for centuries.
A memory within a memory; He thought of what He’d done, after not-quite-killing Nyxara. Sent one of the monks who’d stayed through the chaos to the mainland, called in Gerard Arceneaux. Gave orders for Her body, then used His rapidly depleting strength to tell him everything He could think of, all the ways to preserve the world as something He could return to, something He could shape.
And He would return. One way or another. The darkness would not have Him forever, and that was the only thing keeping Him from complete, insensate terror.
With a painful beat of wings, Apollius rose in the air, settled on the side of the sheer rock face. He raised one god-fist, brought it down.
The cliff broke open. Behind it, a cavern.
He entered, the glow of His skin the first light this place had ever seen.
Apollius turned to face the open sky beyond the cavern He’d revealed. The strands of Spiritum that refused to heal Him would still follow His direction. He raised His hands, bent His fingers.
Rock was dead, but everything in this cliffside was not. He pulled life from the few remaining trees, the grass and moss, creatures in the miles-away sea. He wove it all together into a web of gold, a locked door against anyone who did not share His power.
This, too, was an instruction He’d given. The few monks still on the island were to come here and put the rocks back in place, rebuild what He’d broken, make this cliffside whole again. Then they were to fall into the sea, taking with them the secret of His resting place.
The net of gold shimmered, nothing visible beyond it. His vision faded, faded.
Apollius lay down. His vision went black. And His mind spun out into darkness, near the threshold of eternity but not beyond it. Ready to wait.
Lore’s eyes opened.
