Epilogue
L ate autumn light filters across the partially restored gardens. One day, there might be trees overhead, the way I always thought there were, before the illusion broke: great boughs, swaying to and fro in the wind, the salt-scented air slipping through the foliage. My heart pangs, and I close my eyes, trying to imagine it. I can see it, that new world, just there behind my eyelids.
I smile and let out a long breath. When I open my eyes, my gaze is drawn all the way down the hill, out past the ramparts, to the faint hues of green beginning to appear throughout the Sundered Lands. One day, the Lymphaeron Forest might regrow. We don’t know what kind of creatures once lived there before the Hexen were formed by the Sundering. Perhaps the things I thought were only fairy tales—the manticores and the unicorns, the spriggans and kelpies—will reappear, repopulated and glorious.
That is the gift—and, I suppose, the trouble—of a new world. Anything can happen. This one is freshly birthed and still stumbling about on newborn legs. It will fall, I’m sure of it, many, many times, before it learns to walk. I swallow back a wave of emotion. But how beautiful that it will get the chance to walk on its own. No puppeteers. No gods. No masters.
“What are you thinking about?” asks a lovely voice.
I look up from my seated position in my currus to find Nyatrix only a few strides away. The bright sunlight threads cobalt through her hair, brings out the thunderstorm of her eyes. She prowls closer to me, her mouth parted, one side curved in amusement for me. Always for me. Only for me.
“Did we do the right thing?” I ask. I don’t think I meant to say it, not out here at the end of a gorgeous autumn day when things are finally starting to go right. But it’s what I say all the same, and that thing beneath my sternum pulses, out of rhythm with my heart.
“I don’t know,” Nyatrix says with a shrug, lowering herself to sit on the pretty carved bench beside me. I wanted it to look like the furniture I saw in Liminalia. I want this garden to be a place for everyone. Beauty for everyone. “I don’t think we’ll ever really know, little dove.”
I sigh, watching a pair of swallows swoop by, their feathers glistening in the sun. Down the slope, Magdalena and Agrippina are laughing, which is good, because when I made my way up here, they were fighting over which flower from Liminalia’s seed stores to plant. I told Magdalena to maybe let Agrippina win that one, considering she’d died and then been resurrected by my Avatar gift, waking up to a deserted Liminalia street atop a bed of violets. Magdalena promptly reminded me we were only alive because she, out of everyone, broke the First Son’s hold and stabbed a High Ecclesian with her chatelaine scissors.
For what it’s worth, after further thought, I do think Magdalena should get to pick the flower.
I glance over at Nyatrix. Because I know it’s there, if I squint in just the right way, I can see the Mysterium Blessing that conceals her wings. In the confines of our rooms, though, she sets them free. When we tangle together in our bed, she wraps them around me, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so safe. Mine are gone for good, for whatever reason. But so is my pain. I would rather lose the pain, I think, than keep the wings. Especially now that I have a custom-made currus from Liminalia’s talented physicians. As long as the terrain is fairly even, I can move about much more freely in the wheeled chair. It’s far easier than a cane.
“I don’t want to be a god,” I murmur, admitting the truth of it.
“I don’t want to be a weapon,” she replies—easy, quick, like an exhale.
“It is better,” I say with a sigh, “if we’re all on the same footing. Even if . . .”
“Even if we’re not really,” she replies, looking over at me with a sly, private smile.
Together, after we felled the First Son, Nyatrix and I gathered up all of that Avatar power and directed it toward the land. Where the soil was torn asunder, where the heavy, choking fog gathered, where nothing could grow, where the stone seemed to be weeping for a gentle reprieve.
We thought we’d spend it all on the land, that tiny facet of the Creatrixes’ power granted to Avatars. We thought that would be the end of it and we’d be returned to ourselves.
But just as I feel the earth beneath my feet rolling over after a long winter’s sleep and, once again, reaching for the sun, I can feel whatever’s buried deep inside of me doing the same. Replenishing. Slowly, yes, but far from gone.
Which makes us the closest thing to goddesses in this land.
We’ve done what we thought was best. I’ve fixed a number of the Hexen, though it’ll take anni and anni to un-meld all those poor creatures. We restored as many lost memories as possible, but most of our history is still gone, buried in the graves of our elders. We used incantations whispered to us by the remnants of the Creatrixes to reunite foundlings with their families from Liminalia. We did what we could with the shell of Lumendei to make it habitable. And we made sure that what remained of the Apostles and the Noble Houses understood things would be very different from here on out—though, frankly, we only needed the Lupa Nox’s intimidation skills for that, not the Avatar power.
We learned, to my continued horror, that the Apostle families knew about the High Ecclesia, a god’s gestalt—and have known for some time. I searched for clarity by trying to determine if He had ever peered out of Carina’s eyes, ever manipulated Renault, ever whispered thoughts into the minds of my fellow foundlings. No one is quite sure. No one can quite remember.
Or, perhaps, no one is willing to speak the truth: that they were cruel and monstrous on their own terms.
“I think we’re right,” Nyatrix sighs, resting her head on my shoulder in a way that makes my entire body remember it’s alive. “We cannot suffer any more gods, Ophelia.”
I let out a long breath. She’s right. I know she is. And yet, as I sit here, my gaze drifts to Saintess Lucia’s statue. We removed the rest of the Saints’ statues, but I asked for Lucia’s to be left behind. Considering everything that had happened, no one questioned me. No one’s remarked on it at all so far—a strange thing for someone like me, so used to being poked and prodded and expected to justify my every thought.
Nyatrix’s breath ghosts my skin as she presses a lingering kiss to my jaw, right beneath my ear. I tumble into the sensation, every bit of me keening for her, lashing at her shore like a ferocious tide.
I turn to face her, and she rewards me with a kiss, all tender and sweet, far softer than it has any right to be. I reach for her, desperate and hungry, my hands sliding into her hair.
When we pull apart—softly, so softly—sometime later, I look into her gaze. “Nyatrix,” I murmur. “Why, after everything, do I still want some kind of a sign? It’s the same craving I had for the Sainting. Why do I still need the approval of some divine, unknowable creature?”
She smiles sadly, tracing my lower lip with the pad of her thumb. “I don’t know,” she admits. “It would be nice, though, wouldn’t it? To be sure. If we could be sure, I think, then everything we’ve endured would be worth it. The horrors might not slip into our bed with us at night if we were sure.”
My eyes brim with tears. I nod, my fingers curling tighter around hers. For so many anni, I wanted to bring children into a world that would devour them.
Instead, I’ve devoured a world. Consumed a god. But what right do I have, truly, to decide the direction of this land, these people? What if I’m wrong?
“Here,” Nyatrix murmurs, as if she can read my thoughts. She untangles her arm from mine, presses a kiss to my forehead, and then stalks toward Saintess Lucia’s statue. It always amuses me, just a little, when she joins me in the garden—all black leather and midnight linen, knives ever-gleaming on her belt, tumbling with me through this realm of tender green and pale pink and delicate buds of hope.
She reaches the statue and pulls one of those knives from her belt. I furrow my brow, watching my wolf of a woman as she touches her thumb—the same one she traced my mouth with just moments ago—to the blade, drawing blood. Then she looks over at me with a smile. “Like your vision,” the Lupa Nox explains. “Maybe you were right the whole time.”
She raises her elegant hand and anoints the statue. Then she returns to me—my salvation, my destruction—backlit by the sun, our three moons appearing like faint fingerprints in the westerly skies. Heedless of the blood, she takes my jaw in her hands and kisses me with the ferocity of a wolf, the intensity of a hurricane. When Nyatrix pulls away, I look across the path at her handiwork and smile.
In a garden at the beginning of a new world, a marble statue cries tears of blood.