The boat rocked, waves growing taller the moment they left shore, made more concerning by the lack of visibility. “You shouldgo belowdeck,” the Ferryman said, not looking at them. “It’s going to get bumpy.”
They did, Lore still drifting as if this were a dream. The hold was just as old and battered as the rest of the boat, the ceiling barely two feet above Lore’s head. She sat by the wall, tucked her legs up beneath her.
“Well, that was easy,” Dani said, sitting across from her. “Though maybe I shouldn’t say so until we actually reach the Harbor.”
“Why didn’t you do this before?” Lore asked. “If it was so easy?”
A flutter of some unnamed emotion across Dani’s face, but the other woman just shrugged. “Why would I? I had a fairly good deal going on the Second Isle. No mines, and three meals I didn’t have to cook, which won’t be the case once we get to the Harbor. I have no firsthand accounts, obviously, but we can assume it’s all very community-oriented. Everyone pulling their own weight. That doesn’t interest me.”
She was lying. Lore knew it like she knew the scar on her hand. But she also knew that she was the last person Dani would share her secrets with.
“You’d be free,” Lore said.
“I never have been,” Dani responded. “So it wasn’t really something to miss.”
She and the former noblewoman were more alike than Lore cared to admit. Had their roles been reversed, if she had been the one sent here with no divine plan burrowed into her head and no real escape, she probably would have done the same as Dani had. She was endlessly, horribly adaptable.
Maybe in other circumstances, she and Dani could actually be friends.
“I killed him,” Dani said casually.
The boat lurched. Lore grabbed at the boards to hold herself steady. “What?”
“Martin.” Dani shrugged, but the tension in her body belied the blithe movement. “Before we left. I went into his room and slit his throat.”
She couldn’t tell if the other woman wanted her to be shocked, or if it was a simple statement of fact, an item on her list that she thought Lore should know.
But Lore wasn’t shocked. She was, strangely, proud.
“Good,” she said, leaning her head back against the side of the boat. It lurched again, almost like a cradle. She closed her eyes.
The next time Bastian found himself aware in the endless sea of gold, he was ready.
It was awkward to try to move when you technically did not have a body. He knew, intellectually, that everything here was a construct of his own brain. There was no golden sea; it was just what the remnants of his mind conjured to make sense of being held captive by the god of the sun. He had no physical form here that was separate from the one Apollius puppeted; he’d just gathered the dregs of his consciousness into a shape he remembered. Bastian was a man who enjoyed cerebral pursuits, but the exact parameters of his situation were enough to give him a headache if he spent too long dwelling on them.
Well, the construct of a headache, since he didn’t technically have a head.
He shook his not-technically-a-head, clearing his mind of distractions. He had a job to do.
All around him, he felt Apollius tense, the sensation not unlike being slowly squeezed to death. The god was aware when Bastian woke up, for lack of a better term. He was used to being fought, now, and spent quite a lot of mental energy observing the piece of Bastian He couldn’t snuff out, waiting for him to try to fight free.
That suited Bastian fine. The more energy Apollius wasted on keeping Bastian locked down, the less He had to spend on other things. Like conquering the world, for example.
And trying to stop the slow drain of power that was growing harder for both of them to ignore.
If being possessed by the god felt like being trapped in a goldensea, the leak of magic felt like a hole in the sea’s bottom. The pool of the god’s power draining, everything He held drawn elsewhere, like He was losing a game of tug-of-war. In the moments when Bastian paid attention to it, he saw more than gold flowing past him, into that leak. There were strands of shimmering blue-green, too, magic finding a new place to live.
Bastian didn’t know where all that magic was going, or what it was going to. But he would take luck where he could find it.
For now, though, he wasn’t concerned with the leak. He needed something more concrete.
He needed to get inside Apollius’s mind, a locked room within his own.
This world that didn’t really exist shaped itself around him, formed itself into functional pieces that made sense. Bastian was at the surface of the golden sea, just barely breaching the water. He stayed there, still and quiet, as if unaware that he’d come back up to the top.
Apollius watched him, waiting. For a centuries-old god, He had next to no patience, and His observance didn’t last long.
The tense feeling ebbed away like a tide, the god confident that Bastian wouldn’t make a move.
