Chapter 1 Emory
EVERY DREAM EMORY HAD OF late inevitably turned into a nightmare.
There wasn’t a single peaceful memory that wasn’t marred by darkness.
When she dreamed of home, her father’s lighthouse was swallowed by the sea, his bones sinking toward the Deep.
When she dreamed of Aldryn, all the students who’d once been her peers clamored for her death, their hissed accusations of Tidethief and Shadow reborn like lashes against her skin.
When she dreamed of three kids laughing by the seaside, the gulls overhead plummeted lifeless into the water, and the sea dragged the kids into its depths.
Emory screamed for Baz and Romie as water filled her lungs, but the current was pulling them all in different directions, and she knew they would never see each other again.
Tonight, Emory dreamed of the Hourglass. Not as it was in real life—the slender stalagmite and stalactite that melded into each other—but as it had often appeared to her in sleep. An actual hourglass, silver and towering and full of fine black sand that fell from one elongated bulb to the other.
She walked barefoot on the damp, slick ground of Dovermere as she approached it, feeling like she’d been here a thousand times before.
Every step she took made flowers bloom in her wake.
Narcissus, hollyhock, orchid, poppy. When she ran fingers along the cave wall, vines sprouted at her touch.
A breeze played in her hair, the sound of it like music to her ears.
Sparks danced all around her, like embers from a fire or lightning bugs in a summer field, illuminating the oppressive dark.
Emory, Emory.
The hourglass called to her. Inside it was a door set at the bottom, an opening through which the black sand vanished, sinking and swirling until it disappeared.
Emory set her hands on the cool glass. Shadows gathered inside the bulbs, lifting the sand as if there were a sudden gust of wind trapped within.
The black sand shimmered like stars in the dark, rearranging into something vaguely familiar.
When the shadows dissipated, a tree was trapped in the hourglass, filling every inch of space.
Its branches full of healthy green leaves filled the top bulb, and its trunk squeezed tight in the narrow space leading to the bottom bulb, where its dead-looking roots twisted and twined onto one another.
Emory’s hand moved of its own volition as it tightened into a fist and punched through the glass.
The tree dissipated into black sand and shadows once more, which burst out of the shattered glass like an exploding star. Emory wanted to shield her eyes but couldn’t look away, not as shadows and sand and glass pulled back, leaving her untouched, and remade themselves into a shape she knew well.
An umbra wearing a wicked crown of obsidian.
Sidraeus. The deity she’d once known as the Shadow.
Emory’s sleeping consciousness sharpened at his presence. This was no longer a mindless dream; she was dreaming, her Waning Moon magic making her suddenly lucid. Fear shot through her like adrenaline. She’d been trying to find Sidraeus in dreams for a while now, without any luck. Now here he was.
It was odd, seeing him in his umbra form.
She’d become so used to seeing him wearing Keiran’s face.
Sidraeus had possessed him to escape the sleepscape, where the deity had been imprisoned for centuries by the mighty god who ruled over the realm of sleep and death.
Now Sidraeus was trapped again in the dark between stars, bodiless, after he’d lost his vessel.
That was the last time Emory saw him. When he, in Keiran’s body, had put himself between her and Cornus Clover, saving her from a killing blow that ended Keiran’s life—for good this time—and left Sidraeus as the crowned umbra that stood before her now.
He did not seem to recognize her. Or if he did, whatever tentative truce they had found vanished as his shadowed hand shot out to wrap around her neck.
Emory flinched, her body going rigid. She wasn’t sure if it was the deity towering over her she feared or the echo of Keiran the gesture conjured. “Sid—Sidraeus,” she sputtered as his clawed hands dug deeper into her skin. “Let go of me.”
Those fathomless eyes drank her in, a flicker of hatred burning deep within.
You’re the reason I’m here, Tidecaller. Why should I not kill you?
He had no mouth to speak with, the words echoing instead in Emory’s mind.
He spoke in a tongue that was rough yet ethereal, something she felt certain she had heard before but never understood until now.
His hold on her tightened, and she grappled with the arm choking her, her hands connecting with what felt like exposed bone, those swirling shadows making her fingers go numb with cold.
“Please,” she managed painfully. Pitifully. “You need me.”
Cold laughter in her mind. Lungs burning as they ached for breath. Her vision started to go dark, and she truly believed he would kill her then. Would she become an eternal sleeper? Her consciousness trapped among the stars while her body remained behind, vacant until it eventually withered?
All at once, Sidraeus let her go. Emory gasped for breath and grasped her neck, scrambling away from the umbra’s towering form. The shadows around him lengthened to follow her. They wound around her middle as if to keep her from escaping.
His voice sounded in her mind again: We’ve played this game before, and you had me captured. You betrayed me, yet still I chose to sacrifice myself for you.
“I never asked you to.” Her voice was raw, her throat burning with every word. “And you betrayed me first. You were going to make me siphon all the power of the gods’ fountain to you, knowing it would have killed me.”
A pity you still breathe, and I paid the price for it. Spin it however you want, Tidecaller, but you owe me. A clawed finger of shadow brushed against the bruises on her neck. A threat; a promise. Rest assured I’ll find a way to collect.
Fear settled in her bones. She was, perhaps for the first time, truly scared of him.
It was as if whatever shred of humanity she’d come to glimpse in him had been filed away to nothing, stripped from him the same way his body had been.
Before her stood not Sidraeus but the Shadow of Ruin, the ruthless deity she had always heard of in stories.
A chill went through her as she realized they were no longer in the dream-Dovermere but in the black, glittering sleepscape, empty save for the two of them.
There was nothing but darkness and stars, but it felt to her like there were a thousand eyes on them, countless whispering voices on a nonexistent breeze. And it was her name they were calling.
The souls of the dead are restless, the Shadow said. How eager they are for you to join them.
Her gaze snapped to his fathomless one. The swirling shadows around him receded until she could see the bony outline of his ribs, the abyss that lived between them, the obsidian thing that beat in his middle.
His heart. She wondered if all umbrae were like this beneath the billowing shadows, or if this was a particularity of his, a king amongst umbrae.
A deity stripped of his body, reduced to this creature that was as much overseer as prisoner in this slumbering realm.
“Does this mean you’re back to ferrying the souls of the dead, then?” Emory asked.
I cannot help them so long as the fountain remains depleted. There is no resting place for them now.
Dread crept along Emory’s spine. If the souls of the dead couldn’t be put to rest, if all the power from the fountain had been extinguished by Clover, were they all trapped here in the place between worlds?
A purgatory of sorts. Maybe they were overspilling, slipping through cracks between worlds.
It would explain why Emory was still plagued by ghosts whenever she used magic, she supposed.
Tell me, have you been visited by his ghost yet, or can I assume his soul is burning in the infernal abyss?
His voice dripped with cold disdain, and Emory knew he meant Keiran.
“I haven’t seen him,” she said. She was grateful Keiran’s ghost seemed to be gone for good.
She puzzled over Sidraeus’s cruel contentment over this.
She knew there had been no love between Shadow and vessel, but surely the prison of Keiran’s body had been better than the one he now found himself in.
“But it’s not him I care about right now.
I need to know if you’ve heard anything from my friends. From the keys.”
Emory wasn’t sure how Sidraeus’s imprisonment here worked.
Clearly, she could contact him through dreams. Perhaps Romie could as well, and he’d gotten to talk to her—something Emory hadn’t been able to do since the last time she’d seen her best friend, when Clover’s creatures had taken Romie, Aspen, and Tol to the sea of ash, where they would be sacrificed to revive Atheia—the deity known in Emory’s world as the Tides, the opposite of everything Sidraeus was.
They are shielded from me, as they are shielded from you, Sidraeus said. At the way she deflated, his voice became almost gleeful. You cannot stop what’s coming. Clover will sacrifice them. Atheia will be whole again, I will have my body back, and you—
“I won’t let my friends die. There has to be a way to stop Clover.”
A cruel, cold laugh. Even if you were to reach the godsworld in time, how do you plan to stop him? If his power is an entire sea of ash, yours is but a tiny speck of dust. You stand no chance against him.