“You don’t understand.” His voice was different, and she couldn’t figure out what the difference was for a moment. It was his, unaltered, the way he’d sounded before all this. The same voice that told her he loved her for the first time. “Nyxara, I wanted to save us both. We can’t die, we can but wecan’t, do you understand? I can’t allow it. I can’t let us go into the dark.”
She didn’t understand. His heart was still in her hand, stillbeating despite it all, weeping red and gold onto the stones. Nyxara crawled over to him, her cheeks wet with tears, trying to remember the bits of the book she’d read that he had written with the penitents. Harsh things, but beautiful things, too, truths she assumed he had seen that were kept from the rest of them. The answer to the question he’d first asked, the reason they were here.
“Don’t be afraid,” she murmured, stroking back his hair. “You’ll go to the Shining Realm, see your family again…”
The noise he made was unlike anything she’d ever heard. Nyxara was familiar with agony, but if a sound could tear a soul out of a body, it’d be one like this. Not a scream; quieter, more visceral, the only thing left at the end of a world.
“It’s a lie,” he said. “It’s a lie. There’s nothing after this, Nyxara. Nothing. This is all there is.”
One life, snuffed out like a candle, nothing left behind. Not even smoke.
It terrified her. It comforted her.
But Apollius… to know that his family was gone, and he would never see them again, and after that awful night there was nothing left. To look into that void, to find that answer, and live hundreds of lifetimes trying to outrun it.
Nyxara had made a friend of death. He never had.
And she still loved him. Her stupid heart still beat in time with the one in her bloody fist.
Wincing, all the pain catching up with her now that she was still, Nyxara got onto her knees next to Apollius. The hole of his chest made asuckingsound, his veins still trying to find blood that no longer had a muscle to move it. He watched her, eyes wide and tear-shining, breath shaking in and out of his lungs.
She didn’t speak, because there was nothing to say. But she lowered his heart back into its cage of bones.
The hole didn’t close, but the organ made the necessary attachments again. It’d never stopped beating.
“It will hold.” He closed his eyes, swallowed. “It will hold long enough.” He seemed to be speaking to himself rather than her. But when his eyes opened, they pinned her in place, sharp as a knife blade. “We can put this behind us, beloved.”
They couldn’t. She couldn’t. What she wanted hadn’t changed.
Nyxara shook her head, slowly.
His face altered. The line of his mouth went stern, his eyes flinty. He sat up, still sheeting blood from the hole in his chest, looming over her.
Nyxara scrambled back until she met a wall and stone dug into her shoulder blades, until there was nowhere else to go.
Apollius reached down and tangled his hand in her hair, slowly tilted back her head. “If you won’t agree now,” he said, “perhaps you will later. You didn’t kill me, but you shortened my time. I can make this work. I can do the same.”
And he wrenched her head to the side.
And Nyxara didn’t die, because the god of life wouldn’t allow it. But she went away, wandering in the dark. Waiting for the continuation of a cycle she never wanted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
LORE
What do we do if the very foundations of our belief are broken? How can anything built on them stand?
—From the writings of Margo Aveline1
The Fount let her go, finally. She’d been straining, even lost in Nyxara’s last memory; she stumbled back from the stones with the force of someone winning in a tug-of-war, breathing in sharp gasps, her hand on her own aching neck.
So there was the Godsfall. Nyxara, trying to kill Apollius and then changing Her mind when She saw His fear. Apollius making sure She’d be in the same in-between space as He would be, still technically clinging to both of the deaths the Fount had given Them, because the truth was dark and terrible and inescapable.
After death came nothing.
Had she been asked a week ago, Lore wouldn’t have been that upset by the revelation. Life wore you out; having an afterlife sounded tiring, when all you wanted was rest and reprieve. Butnow, with all the deaths she’d inadvertently caused fresh in her mind, it made her… empty. Hollow. Like a clock ticking down to nothing.
Apollius’s anger made sense to her. His fear, His desperation. All of this, because one man didn’t want to die. Because He couldn’t bear to let the woman He loved die, either.
