Chapter 55
MERYN
The wolves keep moving despite our despair and exhaustion. Despite their aching loss at one of their own.
Away from Linsfall. Away from whatever Phylax traitors have survived, and away from the ragged wound I opened in the earth, scarring the landscape.
Away, with the Goddess Tear of destruction in my pack radiating warmth against my chest and the space where Venna’s bond once was trying and failing and trying and failing to flow.
And my heart is breaking, and breaking, and breaking. The ache of the punishing ride is the only thing that keeps me grounded at all.
After a solid hour with my thighs burning and my lungs on fire, I shout to Lucien, “How long do we have until she turns?”
Venna has remained asleep, but I remember all too well how it went with Saela. She was perfectly fine. She seemed like herself when I met her in Stark’s office at Sturmfrost.
Then all at once, she was tearing out a throat and writhing like an animal caught in a trap.
Oh goddess. Venna.
“Lucien,” I demand.
Newly turned Siphons are at their most dangerous, I remember. The craving is uncontrollable. For a while, Venna won’t even know me. She’ll look at me and only see the map of my veins beneath my skin.
I know it will feel like she’s dead, too, or irrevocably changed, even if only for a little while. And I don’t know whether I can endure it.
“Hours,” Lucien calls back to me. “About six, give or take.”
I nod and turn inward. Thoughts pummel the inside of my skull. Six hours. How much ground could we cover? How will we manage the initial transformation?
The realization ripples through my mind and Anassa’s simultaneously.
“We will need to split up,” Anassa says.
We can’t manage Venna’s transformation while moving, but we can’t all halt everything to help her through it.
That would take days. Days we don’t have with Killian’s forces closing in.
I don’t announce my decision yet. I keep us riding hard.
The wolves must sense the urgency, because they run until their heads hang low, alternating between powerful bursts of speed and a steadier, more sustainable pace.
And then they keep running. Without complaint.
Without a single snarl or snap of sharp teeth.
They’re mourning, too. The burn in their muscles might be just as welcome a distraction for them as it is for me.
Eventually, we can’t keep going. I’m not entirely certain where we are, but I know Stark and Cratos, who have traveled most of our nation, will piece it together.
Right now, I have other concerns.
I ease up on Anassa, leaning back with Venna slumped unconscious in my arms. Anassa slows to a lope and then to a heavy-footed, panting trudge. She hangs her head, sides heaving.
My eyes move over the landscape. The trees have thinned out slightly, but the canopy is still thick enough for cover and the sun hasn’t yet risen. And though I’m exhausted, I still manage to keep a veil of magic draped around us.
I’m under no illusion that it could ever be enough to shield us fully from harm, however. Anything could happen at any moment. My sense of safety has been shattered—again—on the tip of an arrow.
But I need to do this, and I need to do it now. I need to gather whatever intelligence I can in case it could give us some kind of edge, some solution to all this.
The others stop alongside Anassa. Noemi leans all the way forward on Ephyse and wraps her arms around her wide neck, shutting her eyes, shaking from exertion. Cratos approaches Anassa and touches his nose to hers. They stay there like that, both still panting.
I look down at Venna. It seems like she’s sleeping, but it isn’t peaceful. She’s in the grip of dark dreams, and there’s nothing I can do to protect her from them.
“Ven,” I whisper, fighting back the tears.
I cup her head where it’s resting against my shoulder and turn to kiss her hair.
Then I guide a couple of strays locks from her brow, giving my heart a few rapid beats to grieve, to revel in the molten anger that this has happened.
When I lay her down over Anassa’s shoulders, my direwolf sends me a promise. She’ll take care of Venna while I do what I need to do.
I stroke her side as I dismount, legs shaking slightly from the long ride. Then I move to Stark, gripping his ankle where it rests against Cratos’s side. He looks down at me, sweat on his brow, hand sunk in Cratos’s fur.
Elias rides behind him; even his nearly perfect Siphon face looks creased with weariness.
“Maybe four more hours, before…” he tells me, and he glances toward Venna.
“I’m not going to wait. I need all the information I can get,” I reply.
“Wait?” Elias asks. He slips down from Cratos’s back.
“She means the Tear,” Lucien says from behind Noemi. He lifts himself up and soars down from wolfback in a flutter of robes. “I agree it is wise to learn as much as we can about these objects before facing Alistair, as he’s armed with one of them. You need me for this, I assume?”
My answer is to retrieve the Tear.
It’s still stained with the Mother Priestess’s blood.
I lift it to examine it in what dappled moonlight makes it through the shivering leaves above. As my sweat cools, cold sets in. Or maybe it’s lingering shock. Yet my hand is warm around the stone.
The opal is so painfully beautiful. I wish it didn’t exist. The power it holds is terrible. And I hate that I’ve already used it for my own purposes.
My eyes dart to Stark. “Watch over me?” I whisper over our bond.
“Always.”
I cradle the Tear in my palms and hold it out toward Lucien so that he can press his hands over mine.
Being washed away to another time is familiar at this point. Anticipation mounts in me. A hunger to know.
I’m sinking, into the earth, below the ground, falling through darkness. And then…
I’m in a barren, cold forest. The scene is remarkably clear. There’s packed dirt beneath my shoes. I can make out the sharp scent of grass and the contrastingly sweet smells of cedar and sap. The air is brisk, but the light before me is warm.
Lumina’s light. She’s ahead of me, walking slowly. Her feet are bare, peeking out from beneath the hem of a flowing gown made of simple pale linen and adorned only with a single line of pearl-like studs.
She glows from within, as before, but her expression is unreadable.
Lumina stops walking and turns toward me. Nearly no light reaches us, yet she defies the shadows. She may as well be standing in a green field on a summer’s day, grass waving around her to match the fluttering of her hair.
I watch as she holds out her hands with her palms together, closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath.
As she exhales, she breathes out a wave of power. It’s frightening, awe-inspiring, beautiful, impossible. It’s like the first cry of a newborn, her mother’s pain still lingering.
As the wave moves, it consumes the forest. No, it doesn’t consume. It transforms.
In Lumina’s expression, there’s now grief, relief, joy. All of it all at once. She keeps her eyes closed as the woods start to become.
The dirt beneath my feet turns to packed, geometric stone, hardening with every passing second.
The tall trees bend, branches growing in strict lines, at unnatural right angles, and then petrifying into the shapes of buildings.
Roots become stone steps. Twigs grow up and cross one another and turn into windowpanes.
I spin, mouth agape, as the forest turns into a city before my eyes. Even the smells change, replaced by fresh smoke like the hearths are already burning. With a jolt, I realize I recognize the pattern of these streets. I’ve been here. Hours ago.
It’s Linsfall.
It looks slightly different. The buildings aren’t as modern, all with straw-thatched roofs and none reaching more than a single story. But the layout of the roads is familiar in their annoying habit of narrowing and widening unpredictably. And the buildings hold an echo of their future iterations.
When I turn back to look at Lumina, she’s standing in the very center of a city square I recognize.
She stands precisely where the statue of the Faceless Goddess stood.
After a minute, the groaning of the trees vanishes. A minute after that, the deep crackling of stone forming goes silent, too. Only then does Lumina open her eyes.
She surveys everything before her with a beneficent smile.
And then she weeps. She smiles and weeps like she’s glad to finally witness this place she held inside her so long, but like she also misses holding it so impossibly close to her.
Just as I witnessed in the tower’s Tear, her tears roll down to her pointed chin and fall into her hands. They gather and become an opal, new light glistening over the goddess’s features.
A door opens. Another. Suddenly, people are emerging from all the buildings around us.
People, when there were no people anywhere before the goddess’s magic swept through. My heart is racing.
She just… created them?
They’re dressed in simple clothes. I might mistake them for commoners from today’s Linsfall, though the styles are a bit strange and bulky. They all stare at her with wide eyes.
Lumina holds her hands out to them, welcoming, her head slightly cocked to the side.
A shock explodes from the base of my skull and down my spine when I realize it’s an exact mirror of the position the statue stands in.
Stood, I suppose.
“Welcome, my children,” she says. A woman reaches Lumina’s side first, and the goddess places the opal in her hands tenderly.
The woman regards it with reverence and wonder.
“This is your world now,” Lumina says. “Cherish it. Protect it against those who would do it harm.”
“Who are you?” the woman asks in a strange accent.
“Lumina, goddess of creation. And I… wish I could know you,” she whispers. But the emotion that briefly grips her doesn’t remain in her voice. “Guard over this Tear, and let nobody take it from you.”
Her voice grows powerful, and the people tremble. I tremble, too, hearing her.
“I will always come when you summon. Be good to one another, and be well.”