“I’ve seen all of this before,” Lore said.
Dani’s eyes burned with questions, but Lore didn’t look at her. She suddenly very much wanted to be far away from the other woman.
There was nowhere else to go, so she stood and walked into the hut.
The inside was as ash-coated as the rest of this place. A cot stood in the corner, covered in rotting linens. A small table leaned against what had once been a hearth, choked with the remains of firewood. Everything on the table was coated in dust, almost too thick to make out what they were.
But Lore could, barely. They were books.
They looked just as old as Raihan’s in the Harbor, possibly older. Lore half expected them to disintegrate as she gingerly took one from the top of the pile. Her fingers sank into the cover, made permeable by age and rot, but it mostly held together.
She thought of Malcolm, somewhere in Caldien, and could practically hear him screaming at her to get some gods-damned gloves. So she bundled her hand in the hem of her long shirt before gently prying the book open, separating pages stuck together with the wear of centuries.
A journal, it looked like. Not dated. The handwriting was faded and overly ornate, but she could make out enough of it to read, though some of the words were smudged.
I have been tasked by my god as the caretaker of His body, and to guard the Fount, that It may never be reassembled. To this task I commit my life, and my family’s life, so Apollius may return and the world be made right.
H. Devereaux
It took a moment for the name to register. Devereaux. Dani’s surname.
Her heart kicked into a frenzied beat in her ears.
Dani had known Apollius was alive, at least in a sense. Dani’s older sister had been groomed to be His queen.
And Dani had been so confident they could get here.
Lore had never trusted Danielle Devereaux; their association was born of nothing but desperation. But she’d also never questioned whether or not Dani really wanted Apollius dead. She couldn’t think of any other reason why Dani would want to come to the Golden Mount.
Unless her nihilism was a front, and she wanted to protect Him. To keep Lore from fixing the Fount.
The shard of It, golden-threaded and moon-carved, was still tucked into her pack, humming against her spine. She hadn’t told Dani anything about the pieces of the Fount, but maybe she’d always known, one more detail given to her from Anton’s cult. Dani hadn’t acted like she thought anything of Lore suddenly carrying a bag from the Harbor, but she was sly, and if she knew about the pieces, it wouldn’t be hard to put two and two together.
But then why help Lore at all?
Lore shook her head. The particulars wouldn’t thread together quite yet, but they didn’t have to. She could kill Dani with a thought, and the other woman knew it, even with the flimsy knife tucked into her boot, kept secret like she thought it could save her. If Dani planned on attacking, it would come quick and seemingly out of nowhere, her only hope the element of surprise. Lore had to be ready.
Part of her wondered if she should just take Dani out now. But the reluctance to kill lingered. They’d never been friends, but for the moment, they were still allies. At least, until Dani actually did something to change that.
And cowardly as it was, Lore didn’t want to be alone on this island.
“Anything interesting?”
Dani hadn’t entered the hut, just stuck in her head. Lore didn’t act startled; didn’t even try to hide what she’d been looking at. She closed the cover of the journal and shrugged. “Books, but I can’t read them.”
“Probably worth a fortune, if we could sell them to the Church.” Dani jerked her chin. “But seeing as the Church would happily burn both of us, let’smove.”
They left the crumbling village behind, trudging along as the grade of the makeshift path slowly inched upward. Before too long, Lore’s legs felt like they were on fire, her breath growing harsh. One would think that weeks of mining would have increased her stamina, but apparently not, and the air quality wasn’t helping.
Slowly, the ash and fog cleared. When they passed a cliff—the same one where Nyxara had once thrown Her ring, Lore was sure of it—she could see the gray cloud of Godsfall debris roiling below them, a thunderstorm that never quite broke. It made the cliff seem not so high, like you could step off the edge and land in all that gray softness, walk over it right back to the mainland.
And then, after what felt like hours more of walking, there was the cathedral, a broken ruin. There was the courtyard, splintered wooden beams still lined in seams of gold.
And there was the Fount.
It looked like a well, small and gray and shining with a faint phosphorescence, as if the stones were threaded with captured starlight. The lip of it was jagged. The soul of the world, and it looked so humble. So small.
Once, there’d been tall spires, a building nearly as grand as the Citadel, though nowhere near as large. Lore recalled Nyxara’s memories of this place, the tiles lining the ground around the Fount, a canopy of fine-woven linen billowing in the sea breeze. Most of that had gone, either blasted apart in the Godsfall orrotted out by time. The tiles were rubble, the canopy dirty fibers still clinging to some of the beams like a spiderweb. Only the courtyard around the Fount remained, and a few rooms Lore could see in the cathedral, open to the sky where the roof had fallen.
