But it was Lilia’s home, too. And those people had been her family.
“What was it like?” Alie asked softly.
“Being part of the Buried Watch?” Lilia stopped on a patch of stone floor that wasn’t littered with rock shards, staring into the dark. The flickering of her torch carved out the hollows of her face, made her look older. “When I first joined—when I had nowhere else to go—it was comforting. When I learned just how important our job was, just how badly things could go if we failed, it was awe inspiring.” She swallowed. “And when I had Lore… when they told me what would become of her… it was terrifying.”
She started forward again. Alie followed, not speaking.
“You have to understand that I thought I was saving her when I asked her to die,” Lilia said, so quiet it was hard to hear even in the silence. “I know that’s hard to understand, but I thought I was saving her from becoming something awful. I thought the world would end, were she allowed to go on, and she would be nothing but a puppet for the goddess. I had no way of knowing it wasn’t true. At least, not the way I’d been told.”
“I believe you,” Alie said, because she sensed that was what Lilia wanted to hear. She didn’t know if she meant it or not.
But it seemed Lore’s mother was too deep in memory to hear, regardless of if she wanted to. “I couldn’t do it, at first,” Lilia continued. “When they marked her with the moon. I felt so selfish when I told her to run, but I couldn’t bear to see her enter the tomb and be stripped out of herself, even though we all knew she was more dangerous than the Night Witch. It was wrong, and I regretted it; by letting her escape I’d consigned her to a worse fate.But then we worked with the Church, found a way to fix my mistakes. To make Lore the end of the cycle, but not the world.” She shrugged, limp and defeated. “I thought it was a good thing when the old Priest Exalted made plans to bring her in, right before her Consecration. To sharpen the powers of the chosen Arceneaux, to make Apollius return. It felt like righting a wrong.” She paused, torch flickering. “I don’t think any of us could fathom that it was Apollius who was wrong.”
It was obvious when they reached the part of the catacombs that had housed the Buried Watch. The tunnels widened out. A soft glow emanated from plant life clinging to the walls, vines and mushrooms that Alie didn’t recognize. She wanted to ask about them, but down here, near to where so much magic had been housed for so long, such things should be expected.
The bones, however, were a surprise.
Human, all of them, scattered around the tunnel, some broken from the collapsed rock, others whole. A shattered femur speared up from the center of the floor, sharp end ready to catch an unwary foot. A full rib cage lay on its side near where the tunnel began to widen.
She’d known that there were bones down here, left over from revenants crawling in to die, from those who couldn’t afford a vault and didn’t have anyone who cared enough to see them burned. But these bones didn’t seem old, didn’t seem like afterthoughts. They looked… new. Yellowed, still, not outside of a body long enough to bleach. The scent of rot married the mineral scent of the stone tunnels, the crisp and ozonic notes from channeled air, and she grimaced.
“Come on,” Lilia said grimly.
She pushed forward. Alie didn’t want to follow. But she wanted to be alone in the dark even less.
The tunnel widened into a cavern. Alie couldn’t tell how large; the luminous plants only grew near the ground, and the darkseemed to eat the light from Lilia’s torch, only letting it travel so far.
The former Night Priestess stepped carefully. There were more bones here, a maze of them across the floor. These had to be her friends, the other members of the Buried Watch, but Lilia showed no emotion other than a clenched jaw.
She didn’t show any emotion even when she looked at the obsidian rubble of the tomb.
There had been many moments in the past few months when Alie had come face-to-face with something from a myth. She housed something mythical in her own mind, spun it with her hands. But still, the ruins of the tomb that had held Nyxara’s dead body made her pause, made her breath leave in a gasp that might’ve been awed or terrified, and Alie couldn’t tell which it was.
She also couldn’t account for the empty feeling that sank her stomach, seeing that tomb blown apart.
“What in every hell happened here?” she asked, clutching her skirt in her hands so it didn’t brush against bones.
“Lore happened,” Lilia answered.
Even now, Lilia lingered at the side of the ruins, hesitant to step over the first lines of obsidian. Alie wasn’t eager to, herself. In fact, she felt like crying.
“Shit.” All her muscles hung slack around her bones; it was all she could do not to crumple. “If the tomb is gone, how are we supposed to find the shard?”
“The tomb isn’t gone, it’s just broken.” Sucking in a sharp breath, Lilia stepped into the rubble. As she did, her spine softened, and she turned to arch a brow at Alie. “So we start looking through the broken pieces.”
“Finding a broken piece in a million broken pieces.” Alie sighed as she followed Lilia into the piles of jagged obsidian. “Brilliant.”
And that was what they did. For hours, it felt like, thoughthere was no real way to tell time down here, nothing to mark its passing except the steadily worsening ache in her back. Alie thought her hell might be like this. Fruitlessly picking up shining chunks of black stone only to put them down again.
Some of the pieces of the tomb were larger than others. One of them was nearly as large as a mirror, and just as reflective. Alie stopped her searching and stared at herself, just for a moment. This body, the same one that had carried her through twenty-four years, now housing the power of a god.
But she liked how she looked with it. Her spine straighter, her eyes clearer. There was a faintness around her hands, making them look ghostly. As if they’d disappear when held to a light.
A light…
The bioluminescent plants didn’t illuminate much, about the same as a full moon on a clear night. But over in the corner, a large group of them glowed brighter than the others.
Not quite a sunrise, but worth a try.
