Chapter The End of the Beginning The Gods Show Up #2
The crowds cheering on the walls grew suddenly quiet as Lord Marius took the field against the foe.
The hush was deeper than applause. The capital might worship gods, but they knew the Valerius heir of old.
All justice and no mercy, all high beauty and no love, he forswore the bloodstained legacy of his forebears and lived the narrow ascetic life of a scholar, forbidden to touch wine, women or weapons.
Nobody had believed a Valerius could keep those vows, but Lord Marius was ever faithful.
All admired him from a distance, and none would ever draw close.
Rae finally saw what all the fuss was about.
He came cloaked in snow and silence, his raiment shining beneath the full moon. Their White Knight, their own and very Last Hope.
The people firmly believed Lord Marius would not draw his sword for any reason but to defend the innocent, and battle against a terrible enemy.
She saw the Great God’s pale face grow ever so slightly paler as he took note of the believers’ response.
Then he resumed command. The Great God declared, “You will change your mind.”
The world whirled as it had when the Emperor whirled Rae through the tunnels to face horrors. Suddenly the small knot of people who had drawn closer to the two gods were standing with them on the golden battlements of the Palace on the Edge.
The crowds on the city walls were turning to look up at them now.
“And if you don’t, Valerius, it hardly matters. The father, the son, and the sacred prophet,” said the Great God from on high, with calm satisfaction. “That is all we truly require. The old Oracle is gone. We shall have a new soothsayer now.”
“Not interested,” Rae shouted.
“How strange,” remarked the Great God. “Did you think I was talking to you?”
His gaze slid past Rae, to the vision moving up the steps set in the palace wall.
Dressed in simple white, though her skirts had grown dark from walking through the Cauldron’s filthy streets.
Her hair shone like gold beneath the sun, and the Abandon All Hope Diamond gleamed around her neck. Lia wore the God’s Eye with pride.
Lia curtsied, her skirts spreading on the gold ground like the darkening petals of a flower learning to bloom at night. “Welcome, my greatest lord.”
The Great God smiled benevolently upon her. “Welcome, my priestess.”
Rae tried to catch Lia’s eye, but Lia did not even glance at her. Rae remembered too well how the Abandon All Hope Diamond necklace narrowed your vision. Besides, the Great God wasn’t the god Rae was interested in.
Reckless though it might be, Rae left Marius’s side to walk down the palace battlements towards Key. Marius moved with her, Rae realized, to shield her if a god lashed out.
“Key.” Rae heard the note of desperation cracking her strained, mortal voice. “Pluck the God’s Eye from your sword hilt. Destroy it, and you will see more clearly. This is not who you are.”
Key recoiled. He grew paler by the second beneath the gold of his skin – Rae feared from blood loss – but he obeyed her as he always chose to.
His claws tore the darkly shining God’s Eye from the metal fangs of his sword hilt.
As Rae watched, dizzy with incredulous hope and love, the Emperor’s gauntlet closed on the great cursed jewel on her command.
His strength reduced the God’s Eye to dust, as his bronze breastplate had shattered to dust beneath the god’s blow.
He leaned forward with a handful of ashes and dust, and blew the remains of the jewel into the howling winds that rose from the abyss. Eyes on hers fiercer than the flames through the smoke, Key’s voice rang strong and dripped venom.
“I grow tired, my lady, of you telling me who I am. This is who I am. This is who I’ve always been. I’m not corrupted by evil influences. I am corruption itself. I refuse be the hero of your story.”
As he refused, his voice dropped into the nightmare of a caress. His words wrapped around Rae like smoke that adored her.
“I want to be the villain of your story, and I want you to love it. I know how to make the story go my way.”
MARIUS
The Great God looked upon them all impassively, as from a height. For a moment he shimmered like air grown too hot, so for an instant he could not be seen, but he could still be felt. Oppressive as clouds bearing down upon the earth, trapping them in heat forever.
Worse than the Great God’s indifferent distance was the Emperor’s wicked delight.
Marius had always found Key’s insolent grins intensely unpleasant. He had never hated any of his smiles as much as this one, curling and cruel with anticipation, as he watched his bride.
The Great God said, “The idea of consorting with mortals is loathsome, but mortals must learn to obey the will of the gods rather than defy them. I believe I can make an argument that will persuade you to agree with anything I say.”
Marius scanned the skies for the dragon Ivor had been ranting about, but he found them empty. When his gaze fell from the heavens, he saw the soldiers of the gods marching their captives through the palace.
Key was attended by gold-masked ghouls, but the Great God had living servants, godsmen wearing uniforms decorated with axes.
From the very centre of their ranks, the Divine Order marched forth two girls: Ink, her hat pushed half off her head and all her long hair tumbling, and a tall girl with a split lip. His Caracalla.
Marius knew he must be evil then, wicked past bearing, since even faced with his sister in peril, another thought came quick on the heels of his fear. What has become of Eric?
He met his sister’s eyes, trying fiercely to pour into his gaze that he would not fail her, that he would be the hero she believed in, the hero who would always come for her. If only he could work out how.
False belief betrayed them all. Marius believed the trap was for him, Caracalla’s life held ransom for his good behaviour, until the woman beside him stumbled heedlessly forward as though she had forgotten all else in this world.
Lady Rahela stared at the tearstained face of Ink the stable girl and cried out, in a voice gone lost and helpless, “Alice?”
RAE
Alice fought, in the grasp of the Great God’s evil soldiers. Impossibly in danger, impossibly in another world.
“You opened the door, so I caught the door before it closed and came through,” Alice sobbed out.
This was Rae’s fault.
“I… I have… I have—” Alice’s fearful gaze went from Key to the Great God, to Marius, then fastened on Rae once more. “I have tried to fix the story. I tried to help Lord Marius. I saved him and his sister from the fire. Lord Marius wouldn’t let me go with him, and everything’s gone wrong.”
“Everything went wrong long before you came,” Rae whispered.
“You have made many mistakes, Lady Rahela,” agreed the Great God. “Choose right this time.”
“Join us,” said Key.
In the book before Rae walked into it, Key made the hero’s choice to climb down into the abyss, fight the god in the depths below, and rise again as the Emperor. Because of her, he had been thrown into the abyss with his throat cut before he rose.
Rae remembered what the Cobra had told her about knowing the rules of the story, and felt she finally understood what he meant. She remembered the truth she had written to the Cobra. The story tries to fall back into place. The story wants certain events to happen.
You could take someone else’s place in the story. If you chose.
“Don’t cry, funny-face,” Rae told her sister. “I’m here.”
Alice whispered, “We’re in so much trouble.”
“Trouble won’t stop me,” murmured she of snow and flame.
Rae looked from the tearstained face of her sister, to the cold triumph of the Great God, to the icily furious expression of Lord Marius, so like the god’s and yet a little different. Last of all, she looked at Key.
Then she took a single step from the top of the golden palace wall, into darkness. Down, down, down into the consuming fire and all-enveloping smoke, into the hungry moans of monsters and the terrible heart of legend.
She leaped into the abyss.