For a little while, at least.
Amelia didn’t have to die for Apollius to take Caeliar’s magic. She’d given it up willingly. Bastian had killed her anyway.
“It was easy to put together.” Dani stopped just shy of thebeach, staying in the water, the tide billowing her trousers in ebb and flow. “And that’s when I stopped believing.”
Still half convinced that this might be the kind of confession that preceded a revenge killing, Lore kept her distance, stepping around Dani and up onto the sand. She’d rather have the cliffs at her back than the sea. “Stopped believing in what?”
“All of it.” Through this whole speech, Dani had been dispassionate. But now there was a spark in her eye, the tendons in her neck going tight. “That mortals matter. That there’s any point to all of this when our gods are selfish and the world is twisted.”
Lore had spent plenty of time in the last year around every extreme, from zealots to hedonists. But this casual nihilism was far more unsettling to her than even Anton’s crazed piety.
“Maybe there could be something better.” Dani finally climbed out of the surf. If she noticed that Lore stepped back, keeping the same amount of distance between them, she didn’t comment on it. “But in order for that to happen, everything—everything—would have to change.”
She looked at Lore expectantly, as if she thought she had made some point perfectly clear. As if this were a game, and Lore had the next move.
Lore’s mouth worked a moment, unsure of how to respond. “That’s… certainly a philosophy.”
“Spend long enough thinking about it, and the entire bedrock of civilization unravels,” Dani said, warming to her topic. “Once you get into thejust becauses—mortals deserve to have a habitable world just because we think we do, the gods should be revered just because they’re gods—you’ve already lost.”
This woman, Nyxara said,truly loves to hear herself talk.
The goddess wasn’t wrong. Lore could see some of the logic in Dani’s declaration, but she couldn’t buy into the whole of it. She wasn’t a sentimental person—at least, she tried very hard not to be—especially not about human nature. But she had to believethat the world was mostly good. That there was something about it worth saving.
Dani sounded like she’d just as soon annihilate it and start anew.
“All that to say,” Dani concluded, trudging up toward the cliffs, “if you want to finally get to the Golden Mount and kill Apollius, I think I can help.”
Lore froze. “What?”
“His body. His second death.” Dani turned, gave a tight smile. “Cult, remember?”
His first death, technically. But Dani didn’t know that. And even once she got to the Mount and killed the body, Apollius would still be in Bastian’s head, a problem she hadn’t yet figured out how to solve.
You should keep that to yourself, Nyxara said.
Lore wholeheartedly agreed. “That’s not going to be easy.”
“Sure it is.” Dani’s tight smile expanded, became a convincing simulacrum of the real thing. “We just have to get to the Golden Mount. And I know how to do it.”
He could tell time now. Well, sort of. He could tell when it was passing. He could feel its tiny ravages.
He could see more now, too. More and more often, his eyes would open on the Citadel instead of endless gold; he could see the world, hazy as it was. But there was no control over it, try as he might. He was still just a passenger, floating in a void.
He could feel the other getting angry about it, though. Recognizing that Bastian was growing stronger, here in the sunlit sea. That His hold was faltering.
One night, Bastian had almost managed to break free. It’d been surreal, moving without moving, flailing in all this gold and knowing that his movements were tracked by his body but having no way to monitor them. Like fighting in the dark.
Apollius had pushed him farther under, after that. Where the gold almost became black, where life held on by its fingernails.
But there was a slow leak, still. Something, somewhere, siphoning power, making the god weaker.
Bastian just had to bide his time.
CHAPTER SIX
GABE
Desperation and dignity never hold hands.
