Chapter 14 Emory
THE GODSWORLD TREMBLED AGAIN AS another wave of ash spilled through the door; on the other side, the skies had darkened to an impossible black, giant forks of neon lightning threatening to bring the entire mountain chain down.
Emory could make out a horde of white spots in the sky—the Songless astride their winged horses, she was sure of it, heading their way as if called here by the disappearance of their master.
“What happened here?” Nisha’s question cut through the silence like a knife. She stared at the three body-shaped mounds of ash in the fountain, then at the spot where Atheia had disappeared. “What happened to—to Romie?”
Emory’s throat closed up. “I couldn’t stop the keys from being sacrificed.” She struggled to get the words past her lips. “And Romie became Atheia’s vessel.”
Nisha’s shoulders dragged low, a strangled sob torn from her lips. There was no real surprise in her reaction, as if she’d already pieced as much together but had not wanted to believe it.
There was a weighted silence, heavy with grief, as the horror of it all settled over them. Emory pushed to her feet, Virgil and Vera helping her up.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Virgil asked.
His face was drawn tight as he eyed Emory’s bloodied middle. Emory couldn’t help but notice the trembling of his hands, the gauntness of his expression.
“Are you?” she asked, glancing between him and Vera. They both looked utterly spent, just as the others did. “What happened at the temple? How did you all get here?”
“Not with his help, that’s for certain.” Ivayne spat, eyes narrowed on Sidraeus, who glared right back at her.
She and her mother still held their blades to his throat.
“The Night Bringer left us there to fend for ourselves against an army of Songless, not even deigning to tell us what had happened to you.”
The Night Bringer. So they knew who he was, despite him wearing a different face.
Emory could picture the scene that must have played out at the temple after Clover had whisked her away: Sidraeus climbing up to the cave where her friends had been facing the Songless; the Songless attacking him, perhaps not recognizing his power as that of the true Soulless One; Sidraeus unleashing himself on them, reminding them exactly where their magic had once come from; and then vanishing from thin air as Emory summoned him to her side.
“There were so many of them,” Vera said, face pale. “The Songless would have killed us if it weren’t for Ivayne and Vivyan and—well, let’s just say we almost didn’t make it.”
Emory didn’t miss Vera’s furtive glance at Virgil, nor the way his eyes remained downcast. Blood dripped from a wound in the palm of his hand, a telltale sign that he’d bloodlet.
Bleak understanding dawned on her: he must have used his Reaper magic.
Had likely taken a life in order to save his own, and their friends’.
“What about him—should I cut him down where he kneels or are you able to control him now that he’s bound to your will?” Vivyan asked, propping the tip of her blade under Sidraeus’s chin.
His attention had been on the Godsgate, as if he were planning to disappear as Atheia had and follow her to the end of all worlds if he must. Now he looked at the draconics with cold calculation, the lines of his body tensing like he was about to disarm them.
But then, as if feeling Emory’s eyes on him, his gaze caught on the bloody dagger still in her hand. She gripped it tighter in warning.
“I can’t exactly control him,” Emory said without letting her focus waver from Sidraeus, “but he’s not a threat, and he can still be of help.”
Yet the draconics didn’t put their swords down as Sidraeus rose to his feet with a scowl, and neither did Emory’s grip loosen from her dagger.
“How did Atheia do it?” she asked Sidraeus. “Vanish like that?”
It looked like it took everything out of him to give her a response. “A power of hers, to take the shape of the elements of whatever world she’s in. I expect she’s heading to the previous world’s door. She won’t stop until she reaches your world.”
To wash away the stain of what you created…
Understanding hit Emory. That was what Atheia meant when she said she’d start where it all began.
“She means to eradicate Eclipse magic.” Emory breathed the words out in disbelief. It was the only explanation for Atheia’s threat, except… “I thought Atheia couldn’t travel between worlds without you to guide her through the sleepscape.”
Sidraeus gave her a hard stare. “I suppose she’s unbound from the previous conditions that tethered her to the living realms, just as I seem to be untethered from mine.”
Emory hadn’t even thought of it. Before, when Sidraeus was still roaming these worlds with Atheia, he’d never once done so in his true form.
Atheia had found a way to bring him into the living realms, yes, but only as his shadow self—as an umbra.
He’d wanted to experience the realms of the living as his true self.
And now he could, thanks to the bargain Emory had made through the syrinx.
She didn’t expect him to see it that way. The hatred in his glare, the hint of betrayal behind it, burned through her core.
The world shook again, sending everyone tumbling.
“We need to get out of here,” Vivyan said. “Get somewhere safe.”
“Where?” Ivayne huffed. “Nowhere feels safe now.”
“With Inga and her people?” Vera suggested. “Just to regroup. Figure out our next move.”
“Hold on,” Virgil said, turning to Emory, “what did you mean about Atheia eradicating Eclipse magic? What would that mean for you, Em? And Baz, and Kai? If Atheia gets rid of Eclipse magic somehow, do you all just… die?”
Emory looked at Sidraeus for an answer, but he evaded her gaze. “I don’t know,” she said. “But she’ll stop at nothing, not even the end of the worlds, to see it done.”
“Then we need to go home,” Nisha said. She’d been quiet until now, the mix of devastation and grief and determination on her face an echo of how Emory felt. “We need to stop her.”
A look passed between Nisha and Emory. Neither of them said aloud the too-big, too-hopeful thought that popped into their minds. That perhaps they could find a way to save Romie. To exorcize Atheia out of her, the way Sidraeus had eventually left Keiran’s body.
Only this time, the vessel couldn’t die.
“I’m all for that idea,” Virgil said as the ground lurched beneath them again, “but how in the Deep do we get out of here?”
The ash below them was still a veritable sea, a riptide they would get lost in if on foot. Vivyan and Ivayne couldn’t carry all of them to the door. And besides, the other side didn’t look any more inviting than in here, with the awaiting Songless ready to attack them.
Emory turned to Sidraeus. “Is there nothing you can do?”
Sidraeus only stared at her—then laughed, a short, cruel huff. “You bargain away my soul, use whatever this is”—he motioned to his spiral scars—“to bring me to my knees, and now you want my help?”
Emory ignored the twisting guilt in her gut.
“We’re in this together now whether you like it or not.
If Atheia’s headed to our world, if she’s going after Eclipse-born…
That pain you felt from me earlier? It will be nothing compared to the pain you’ll feel from all of us who have a trace of your magic.
You want to take your revenge on Atheia? Then help us stop her.”
A confusing mix of emotions shone on Sidraeus’s face before he seemed to catch himself and fight for neutrality. For a second, Emory thought he might kill her here and now, consequences be damned. But he only extended a hand to her.
“Grab on to me,” he said. “All of you.”
At Emory’s hesitation, Sidraeus’s voice rang in her mind. Don’t you trust me, Tidecaller?
There was an edge of challenge there as he held her gaze. She didn’t trust him—couldn’t. But she trusted that his thirst for revenge would outweigh everything else. And so she grabbed his hand.
His skin was pleasantly warm, and she found herself looking at him, still trying to make sense of the real him. For a moment, she got lost in his ecliptic eyes. She used to find them unnatural, haunting. But perhaps that was just because of the face he had been wearing then.
In this face, his true face, his eyes were nothing short of breathtaking.
Emory looked away, trying to chase away such thoughts. Vivyan was the first of the group to relent, moving to Sidraeus’s other side and laying a hand on his forearm. Her other hand, Emory noticed, remained on her sword. Everyone else followed suit.
Sidraeus never looked away from Emory. She locked eyes with him again.
“Hold on,” he said.
His shadow lengthened over him, appearing again like this separate entity, as if the crowned umbra was always by Sidraeus’s side. It swallowed them all up like the dark maw of some great beast, and the sea of ash around them vanished.
EMORY HELD ON TO SIDRAEUS for dear life, feeling like she were being squeezed through a tunnel of oppressive dark.
Stars rushed past them at dizzying speed, a maelstrom of swirling black interspersed with glittering spots.
This felt nothing like when Clover had whisked her away from the temple; that had felt like she’d dissolved into nothing before coming back to herself in an entirely different place.
This… it was as if Sidraeus had become the darkness—the shadow he had embodied in the sleeping realm—to travel from one place to another, just as Atheia had become the elements.
Emory’s eardrums popped as the darkness suddenly abated. They now stood on the mossy banks of a familiar hot spring—the place where they’d first arrived in the fourth world. In the distance, Emory could see the storms raging over the mountains they’d just left behind.
She blinked up at Sidraeus, trying to work out what just happened. Her friends looked just as confused and queasy from the experience. Virgil doubled over to spill his guts on the snow-covered ground.
The runes on Sidraeus’s skin were bright with ethereal light. “I can only travel this way within each world,” he said. “We’ll need to cross through the space between worlds by foot.”
Emory searched their surroundings. “But—how do we find the door back to the previous world? I thought it was impossible to go back through the doors.”
At least, that’s what they’d assumed. Never backward, always forward. It was why Emory and Romie had never been able to find the door they’d first come through in the Wychwood to return home. Why they’d been forced to find the next door instead.
“There is a way to travel backward,” Sidraeus said. “If you have an instrument Atheia and I created. A compass we gifted to our disciples in case they ever got trapped between worlds or separated from the Tidecallers who had the power to move freely between worlds.”
The Veiled Atlas compass.
Vera clasped it where it hung around her neck. Sidraeus eyed it with a flicker of unreadable emotion. “That compass would reveal the way back to you,” he said, then turned to Emory. “But a Tidecaller can find the door without it.”
“How?”
Sidraeus had Emory stand on the ley line and listen to it as she once had.
It felt corrupted beyond measure, but she managed to find the point where its magic converged in a nexus of power.
Now call on it, Sidraeus’s voice said in her mind, nearly making her lose focus.
Make it manifest itself. Like a secret you’re coaxing into the light.
Emory let the allure of his voice wash over her.
Everything in her seemed to go calm. She called on a blend of Unraveler and Wordsmith magics, willing the door to appear, the same door they had stepped through to enter this fourth world.
It did, shimmering into existence before their very eyes—an ice-covered basalt door, much like the one Elín had guided them through to bring them to the hidden community in the grotto.
Emory pressed a hand to the door and jerked back in surprise as it opened, already unlocked.
As if Atheia’s passing through here had unlocked it for her, eliminating the need for keys. Because she was the keys, and they were her.
For a second, Emory let herself hope that the doors being open might mean the worlds would stop dying, the power from the fountain able to flow freely through worlds again.
But the image of the empty fountain flashed in her mind, and the ley lines beneath her feet still felt wrong, rotten.
The fountain was dead. It didn’t matter if the doors were unlocked; there was no flow of energy feeding into the ley lines, and so the worlds would keep dying.
There had to be a way to replenish the fountain.
But first: stopping Atheia from destroying the Eclipse-born.
With one last look over her shoulder, Emory left the stormy world behind and stepped into the sleepscape.
They walked up and up the spiraling path of stars until they reached the already-open door that led into the Heartland’s Sunforge—the door Emory had blasted open.
Here, they said goodbye to Vivyan and Ivayne, who understandably felt the need to go back to their own world to deal with the rot spreading there, too.
“I trust you’ll give him hell if he steps out of line,” Ivayne said as she hugged Emory, clearly meaning Sidraeus. He hung a few steps back, the lines of his body taut while he scanned the sleepscape, as if he couldn’t wait to get out of here.
“I will,” Emory said, certain he could hear them. “Say hi to Gwenhael for us, will you?”
Ivayne squeezed Emory’s arm like a promise before joining her mother at the threshold to their world.
“Be safe, all of you,” Vivyan said with a doleful smile.
And just like that, the two draconics were gone. They hadn’t been with them for very long, but parting ways felt like another gutting loss that Emory couldn’t bear.
The rest of them kept going through the sleepscape. With Sidraeus walking alongside them, they didn’t need to go through each individual world again. He would lead them directly to their own.
And so they bypassed the marble door with the knotted knob that would lead to the Wychwood.
Kept going along the path, feeling the darkness pressing in, making breathing harder and harder the farther they went, the longer they stayed in this realm they were not meant to exist in.
Only Emory was fine. And Sidraeus, too, who belonged to this realm despite not wanting to be confined to it.
Finally, they came upon the silver door adorned with etchings of waves.
Emory nearly burst into tears upon seeing it, remembering the last time she’d been here, finally reunited with Romie. And now she was returning without her, but with a tiny hope that she might still save her.
Emory pushed against the door, the silver cool against her skin, a feeling of rightness singing in her blood.
They were going home.