Chapter 47
“ P raise be to the Lord on High,” the High Ecclesian at the lectern concludes, raising Their pale, thin hands.
I know what is to come next; I have always known, been prepared for it since I was a small thing. And I have no desire to become yet another meal for a god that does little but eat.
My eyes watch as the High Ecclesians file out into the wide expanse of marble in front of the altar, vestments trailing like a smear of gore. But the rest of me prepares as the door to my hidden chamber creaks open, labdanum and rot filling the room. I cough, trying to cover my mouth with the collar of my dress. In whatever part of my mind still belongs to me, I remind myself over and over again that I am so much stronger than He thinks.
“Holy, Holy, Holy,” my tongue sings, joining the forced choir, “Holy Lord of the Host. Blessed is He who comes to save us.”
In the middle of the altar, the towering statue of the First Son shudders, like something alive waits in the marble, ready to break free of its cocoon. My body lurches to its feet no matter how much I fight, incense smoke stinging my eyes, my breath coming in a terrified, ragged gasp.
All the candles but the ones dripping corpse-wax down the altar stairs snuff out, pitching the Devorarium into further gloom. I battle hopelessly against the god’s tide pulling me toward the statue.
“Proclaim the mystery of this faith,” the High Ecclesians command at once as my legs limp closer and closer to the massive marble idol. Tears stream down my face as my hidden chamber fills with His might, rattling me from the inside out.
“We proclaim our death, Great Lord,” I say as my tongue continues to betray me, my voice just one in the brimming Devorarium. “And profess our resurrection, when we are reborn in Your image.”
At last I see Nyatrix again, but in the worst place imaginable—beside me, kneeling before the statue of the First Son. I fight against His power to turn and look at her one more time and find only more terror: her eyes wide and gleaming with tears, mouth open in a silent scream, the tendons on her neck standing out as she fights with every last shred of her will.
The Mysterium invading my body drags me from my chamber. I tumble back into my skull, a prisoner, as my eyes tear away from Nyatrix and gaze at the statue instead. Nausea barrels up my throat as the milky-white eye beholds me, sees me, fully and utterly, pinning me in place. I cannot move. I can barely breathe. The wound devours me, its eye-shine flashing a sickly pale green.
“We made you.” The voice rattles my bones, coming not from the Ecclesians’ mouths but the eye-wound itself. “And so We will eat of you.”
Before me, the pupil of the eye opens like a door. From the statue, twenty long, spindly limbs reach out, dripping in blackened viscera, the hands hungry, fingers reaching. The pull of the putrid wound is inevitable, unavoidable, all-consuming.
“We know this ritual is a terrible one,” my God says, His voice deafening in its timbre. “We know you are frightened. But We need only do this once. And then, peace forevermore.”
The eye pulses, straining wildly at the viscous edge of the opening in the statue like a rabid animal. I fight against His hold on me, but find no purchase; He has permeated every part of me, infected me from the core. I cannot even look toward my love—I would like her face to be the last thing I see, but my God does not allow it.
The sound of a High Ecclesian shrieking cuts through the silence. Then everything happens all at once. The First Son’s hold on me loosens. Tears fall freely down my face as I reach for the base of His statue, fighting to crawl to my feet. Familiar fingers wrap around my bicep and pull me up. For the barest of moments, I stare into Nyatrix’s thunderstorm eyes. The full might of the Votum suddenly returns, thundering out of my inner room.
Nyatrix wheels, pulling her sword, and my eyes follow her movements down the altar stairs to where an Ecclesian shrieks. A woman—Magdalena, I realize—is crumpled on her knees, a pair of silver scissors in her hands as she strikes at the Ecclesian’s leg over and over again. Black, congealed blood coats her fingers. She doesn’t slow, not even when the Ecclesian swoops low and grabs her by the throat.
I don’t see anything else, because another Ecclesian appears before me, my view of the space swallowed by Their skeletal features, the thin, rotted lips. And then, with a howling shriek, They seize me by the shoulders and toss me bodily into the First Son’s gaping, hungry eye.
I am consumed, enveloped in the darkness. A thousand hands pry at me, wet with viscera. I scream, but there is no sound in this vast gloom—only rage and hunger, and none of it mine. So much hunger, more than I’ve ever felt in my entire life. And I have known hunger—perhaps better than most.
A voice slinks into my ears; it’s a physical sensation, like something lukewarm and slimy wriggling into my ear canal. “I wanted to taste the other one first,” the First Son tells me, probably as He digests me, “but I suppose you will give Me all the power I need to devour her.”
The very thought of my flesh and bone being converted into energy to destroy Nyatrix infuriates me—infuriates the shard of a goddess left inside my chest. We struggle together in the gloom, holding back the oppressive weight of a god’s desires. And then, I reach and I reach and I reach, searching for a seam where I might send the Votum’s power, where I might undo and unmake. But as I have all my life, I grasp only empty space. There is nothing to latch onto, no corpse-skin beneath my fingertips. There is nothing here in this place of darkness to banish.
“Your foolish hope amuses Me.” The words fill whatever remains of my being, spoken from the back of a godly throat. “And it fills My stomach.”
That’s all He is, I realize. Just hunger. For power, for blood, for dominion. Just endless, sweeping hunger. Which means, perhaps, that this dark space I find myself in is not the underworld, or even death.
Perhaps it is just a stomach.
I remember my tiny ritual with Agrippina, my first try at sympaethetica. I wanted to banish that vast, cold emptiness in me, to tear it from where it had coiled around the base of my spine and cast it away.
“But it’s better,” Agrippina had said, when her throat was not torn asunder, when she was not dead because of me, “to fill emptiness, isn’t it?”
I throw my head back and scream. I fill the darkness around me with all my anger, all my barely suppressed rage—but with my love, too. My blossoming love for Nyatrix, the love I will always have for Agrippina, for my mother, the love I felt for Carina, and even for Renault. I fill the emptiness with memories of that meadow in the vision from the goddesses, of the birch-tree copse where I played with my mother, of the false gardens that I’ll always adore, even if it’s foolish.
I fill and I feel and I fill , emptying the teapot, tasting every single herb and bloom on my tongue—the ones for pleasure, the ones for joy, the ones for warmth. I fill this vast, empty stomach with all of me, every bit, and I hope that, for once in my life, it is enough.
The world tears down the center, like a seam split in two, and I tumble through the opening.
I land on something hard and uneven, crumpled in a heap, covered in blackened viscera. On my hands and knees, I scramble forward, away from the darkness, away from the grasp of an unworthy god.
Hands touch my shoulders. I look up, shoving the viscera from my eyes, and find myself looking into Carina’s face.
“Are we dead?” I ask her.
“Dead?” she echoes. “No. Saints, no. Ophelia, look.” She raises one hand and points behind my shoulder, to some eerie mirror of that day in the gardens, when I’d thought I had seen tears of blood on Saintess Lucia’s face.
I twist at the waist and find myself looking upon the altar. The statue of the First Son is gutted, the eye-wound in its chest nothing but a shadowed, empty hole. Carina hands me a handkerchief, and I take it gratefully, wiping my face clean.
I open my mouth to ask where Nyatrix is, if Magdalena’s okay, but Carina speaks first, reaching for my hand. I take it, if only to grapple her forearm and haul myself to my feet. My wings, I notice, are gone.
“Ophelia,” she says imploringly, her chestnut waves as perfect as ever, her skin an unaffected pale rose. “I was wrong and I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry for everything I said.”
“Oh,” is all I can muster. I sweep my eyes around the Devorarium, my gaze keen for danger. All I find are writhing heaps of tattered vestments that must be the High Ecclesia in Their death throes, the final ebbs of the First Son’s power.
“I love you,” Carina says, gripping my hand too tightly. “Even if my love can’t be the kind you’d like.”
I turn back to her then and frown. Perhaps it’s paranoia after Renault’s confession, but part of me wonders why, having just watched her god be torn apart by my doing, she is so quick to seek my love. My approval. Were I in her shoes, I think I would be angry, upset—even if I came to understand the truth of it all later.
I don’t know how to tell her any of this, and I’m not even sure if I would. “Your friendship is all I seek,” I reply, scanning the pews at Carina’s back. I don’t see Nyatrix anywhere. “And I’m happier than I can even explain that you’re all right. But right now, I need to find someone very important to me.”
Her hold on my hand loosens and I pull away, looking around for my cane, but it’s nowhere to be found, so I turn and limp toward the altar. Far off to the side, Nyatrix is on the ground, cradling someone in her arms. My stomach lurches, and I make my way to her. It’s only once I’m upon her that my brain processes the storm-gray vestments, the limp gauntleted hand.
“Nyatrix?” I ask, my voice trembling.
Her gaze snaps to me. “Ophelia,” she says, like it’s a prayer. “I...I think?—”
I gaze down at the High Ecclesian in her arms. With the First Son destroyed—or, at the very least, banished for now—the rituals to create His High Ecclesia must have fallen away, leaving a skeletal Fatum woman in Nyatrix’s arms.
Even twisted as the body is by His magic, there’s no denying the resemblance to Nyatrix—the sharp jawline, the high cheekbones, the fawn skin.
“Petronyx?” I ask, softly, almost inaudible.
“Yes,” the resurrected Fatum manages. “Th-thank you. For releasing me. For l-letting me see her, just once more, before I go.”
I do not know what to say, so I just lower myself inelegantly to the floor beside Nyatrix, leaning my shoulder into hers as we both watch the Fatum woman take one last shuddering breath.
“She was wounded in battle,” Nyatrix says, her gaze never leaving her mother’s corpse, “months before the Sepulchyre Court left. She was already pregnant with me but didn’t know it. She ended up giving birth all alone, lost beneath the Sundered Lands. When she got back to Liminalia, everyone was gone.”
I wince. It’s unimaginable.
“So she left me with the mortal family in Liminalia I told you about,” she continues, her voice heavy with grief, “and came here to kill the First Son. To end the war so there might still be a life for me in Sylva with our people gone.”
That is, I suppose, how a Sepulchyre sword ended up in Lumendei. How the First Son greedily devoured the stolen power of one of the Sepulchyre’s greatest warriors and her goddess-forged sword.
“Nyatrix,” I finally manage. “I’m so sorry.”
The most powerful creature I have ever known bows her head and weeps. My own throat tight with emotion, my vision blurred with tears, I slip my arm through hers and press my face against her shoulder. I stay there, holding vigil to her grief, our tears running together like the first rains of spring.
Some time later, Nyatrix straightens, dragging the backs of her hands across her eyes. I slide my arm from hers and watch as she pulls herself to her feet, still cradling Petronyx’s body, which she places gently on the high altar. Then she turns and approaches me with a sigh, wrapping her arms around me.
“I need a bath,” I tell her.
“I don’t care,” she replies, cupping my face in her hands. And then, on the broken altar of a defeated god, Nyatrix kisses me.
She tastes like blackberries and asphodels and freedom.