“Please, Bastian.” She didn’t know what she was pleading for, not really. The words were just the shape her desperation took. “Please, I can’t do this.”
“You can, though.” He brought her hands to his lips, kissed her rough knuckles. “You’ve fought so hard to live, Lore. You’ve survived things no one else should, and there has to be a reason for that. Let me let you keep it.” He spoke against her fingers, hushed. “Let me be your hero.”
“You were, anyway,” she murmured, tears sheeting down her cheeks. She did nothing to stop them, so he did, instead, wiping them away. “Both of you were better than I deserved, for however long I had you.”
“Hush.” He kissed her forehead. His own throat was a sawblade, but damn him if he’d let her see, if he’d let her know just how afraid he was. All that yawning black, and the thought of that door leading to Apollius’s memories, that endless void. “We were for one another. All three of us. So I’m going to be for you now, all right?”
“I won’t let you.” She stood on unsteady legs, hobbled toward the Fount and the yawning void above It. “I finally have something worth sacrificing myself for—”
He grabbed her arm, and she fought him, and even though she was weak it was still a struggle. Bastian pinioned her arms against her sides and hugged her to him, hard. “I’ll knock you out if I have to,” he whispered into her hair. “I know the exact place on the back of your head to press. Watching Gabe so closely paid off there.”
Lore shook her head. He enclosed it tenderly between his palms to stop her, his eclipse scar rough against the one on her temple. “I’m not afraid,” he lied. “You said maybe you could find him in all that nothing. Maybe I can, too.”
Bastian hadn’t been one to pray, even when he thought there was something to pray to. Now he knew there wasn’t, but his words had a talismanic quality anyway, full of hope. As if by saying them, he could will them true.
She was sobbing now, his Lore, his dearest. He wished there were a way out of this that didn’t cause her pain. But there wasn’t, and if there had still been gods to curse for that, anything but the unfeeling Fount, he would have done it.
He held her close until the sobs subsided, as much as they were going to. He wiped at her cheeks. “Take a breath, love, you look a mess.”
One sob turned to half laughter. Lore buried her face in his chest. “Is that how you’ll remember me, if you’re… if remembering is something you can do?”
“No.” He cradled her jaw in his hands. “Do you recall that first night at the boxing ring? When I devised a very clever trap to catch you? I do. I looked across the ring, when I knew Michal was coming, when I knew he would see you. And you had this look on your face. Surprised, your mouth open—delectable, might I add—and your hair wild, and your eyes bright. You looked like you could kill me, and I would have let you. And there was ourMort beside you, so noble, ready to jump to your aid, but watching me move like a starving man all the same. That’s how I’ll remember you. Both of you. Fierce, and beautiful, and at a beginning rather than an end.”
She sobbed again, choked it back. Relaxed her hold on him, gradually, until he could ease away. It felt wrong not to touch her, but this couldn’t be put off any longer. Bastian thought of it as any other duty he didn’t care for, as he turned to the humming void, the doorway into eternity that would eat the world if it wasn’t closed. One more task, then he could rest.
“I love you,” he called to Lore. Casual, the same way he’d say it when leaving breakfast. “Remember that. We both loved you up until the very end, and whatever is left of us will love you long beyond that.”
He stood in front of the hole into eternity, giving it the same unimpressed look he’d give a courtier he didn’t like. “Well,” he called to the Fount. “It seems You need an erstwhile god to die, and I am applying for the position.”
“You would suffice.” The Fount sounded bored. The making and unmaking of worlds was nothing to It. “You would mend the seams.”
“And the world will go on?” He didn’t want to be fearful, but it crept into his voice all the same.
“We will go on as We always have.” Waters splashed against the side of the Fount. “It will be interesting to watch, at least.”
“At least,” Bastian agreed. He turned to look at Lore again. No more words; he’d said them all. But he raised his hand, kissed his scar. Lifted it in the same wave he’d give her if he were only leaving for a meeting, as if he’d see her again soon.
Willing it true, with every scrap in him, every piece that had once held power.
Then he stepped through the door, into the dark and stars and molten gold, to whatever waited next.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
LORE
In the end, the making of a god is a simple matter: It is someone deciding that the world is not as they want it, and letting nothing stand in their way. It is someone defying every destiny with no regard for consequences.
—FromDivine Destinies: The Making of the Pantheon, by Argus Snow (outlawed 15 AGF, only surviving copies found in Farramark University)
She didn’t remember the walk down the mountain. Lore was already leaving the courtyard of the Fount before the doorway even closed, wanting her last memory of Bastian to be of him whole and steady and moving forward, rather than disappearing into the stars. The humming died away, zipped up like a mouth suddenly closed. The singing of the Fount crescendoed, triumphant, jubilant.
The apocalypse averted. It had only cost her everything.
The sun came back at some point in her trip back down to the beach, seeping light over the burnt forest, the ash-free sky. Idly, she wondered what Raihan’s silver instruments were doing now,if they were still or wildly spinning. She wondered what the world she’d made would be like.
She crossed the tree line, silent. There were more people on the beach than she’d anticipated; some ships, Auverrani and Caldienan and Kirythean, but the soldiers didn’t appear to be fighting one another. The suddenly avoided end of everything brought people together, apparently.
There were other boats, too. Rough-hewn things, made from lashed-together logs, crewed by an odd assortment of people in pale fabric. The escaped prisoners from the Harbor—it seemed they’d made more vessels after Lore took Raihan’s boat. Maybe now they could finally find their way home.
