Chapter 18 Kai
EITHER FARRAN CAINE WAS ALIVE, or Kai was dead. Neither option made any sense, but here they were, on a silk-sailed ship floating across the cosmos.
Luce looked between them quizzically. “You two know each other?”
A trace of Farran’s dimpled smile, tinged with sadness. “We have… a history.”
“Yeah. A history of you screwing me over.” Kai wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. “But that’s two hundred years from now. Clearly, hell doesn’t account for time, otherwise death would have spared me your ghost.”
“This isn’t quite hell,” Farran said. “And you’re not exactly dead.”
“No? But you are. You died years ago. Centuries from now.” Fucking time travel logistics. “You’re dead.”
What did that make of Kai and Luce if not dead too?
“I did experience death, yes,” Farran said. “But I was brought back. I guess you could say I was never really mortal to begin with.”
“Then what the fuck are you?”
“Immortal, obviously,” Farran said with a weak smile at his bad attempt at a joke. “I was brought back to life to become an apprentice to the god of balance.”
“You mean that bastard crowned umbra?” Maybe it was some kind of death god, looking to claim souls, and Farran was a wraith doing his bidding.
But Farran shook his head. “Not him. He’s no god.”
“Did this god of yours send you to save us, then?” Luce asked. “I thought we were plummeting to certain death before you showed up.”
“The god of balance doesn’t know our paths are crossing. Or maybe he does, I don’t know. Anyway, my allegiance is no longer to him. I’ve jumped ship, pardon the pun, and I serve other gods now. The only ones who might help stop what’s coming.”
Kai and Luce exchanged a wary glance.
“I know this is all confusing,” Farran said. He looked toward the horizon, as if mapping out their progress through these sparse stars. “There’ll be time for all your questions. We’ve got a long journey ahead.”
“Where are we even going?” Kai bit out.
“To hell,” Farran said. “To seek the gods who are trapped there.”
“I take it this history between you two didn’t end well?”
Luce’s question snapped Kai out of staring daggers at Farran, who was busying himself around the ship, making sure it stayed the course. The course to fucking hell itself, apparently.
Kai breathed heavily through his nose, trying to tamp down all his anger. “What gave it away?”
“The glaring, for one. The venomous animosity, for two. All the makings of a lover spurned, if I had to guess.”
“Has anyone told you you’re too observant for your own good? It’s annoying.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
Kai sighed. “It was a long time ago.”
Luce hummed in thought. “And yet you’re still glaring.”
Kai gave her his most menacing glare. She held up her hands in a show of innocence, dropping the subject. Kai brooded on the matter. He didn’t care about Farran or what happened back then. He was more so interested in figuring out why the hell he was here—and how.
When Farran finally came back to sit with them, Kai crossed his arms and said, “Talk.”
“Where should I start?”
“Oh, I don’t know, what about explaining how it is that my backstabbing asshole of an ex managed to escape death, meet a god, travel back in time, and suddenly decide to give a shit enough about me to save me from plummeting into the unknown.”
Farran gave him a dimpled smile. “Funny, I don’t remember you being so cynical.”
“That tracks. You’re the reason for it.”
The smile slipped at that. Farran cleared his throat. “I owe you an apology for that. Both of you.”
“Me?” Luce exclaimed with surprise.
“It’s not just Kai I have a history with. Except you would have known a different version of me.”
“I don’t understand…”
“The thing about being apprentice to a god who rules over time and fate is that I know things about my past that no mortal ever should. And by past, I mean, well, past life.”
Kai huffed a laugh. This all had to be some great cosmic joke.
Farran ignored him as he went on: “My first death was… unnatural. Through some kind of loophole, the god of balance took notice and called my soul back from the afterlife. He shaped me into someone he could eventually use at his side, molding me to fit the pattern of fate in a certain way. And then he sent my soul back to the realms of the living through means of reincarnation. Thus Farran Caine was born. I had no knowledge then of past lives or gods or what my soul was created to do. Everything I did, I believed was by choice, but turns out it was always fate’s design.
Every decision I made was predetermined by the god’s tinkering of my soul, his way of ensuring everything played into fate’s design.
Because certain things needed to happen in a specific way. ”
“What things?”
“Sowing the seed in the minds of Keiran, Lizaveta, and Artem about waking the Tides. My death in Dovermere to spur them on.”
“And me?”
Farran couldn’t look Kai in the eye. “Yes, you. Dating you fueled the others’ disdain of Eclipse-born and their desire to wake the Tides. Breaking your heart sent you toward another.”
Old anger and hurt surfaced in Kai until he wanted to smash something. “So it was never real between us.”
At this, Farran’s head jerked up. “It was. If nothing else, you have to believe that. I didn’t know at the time that my actions were predetermined to serve the god.
It’s only when I died and ended up back at the god’s side that I remembered what purpose he’d driven into my soul.
It was only then that I remembered who I’d been before, in my previous life. ”
“Who were you?” Luce asked, frowning at him as if to see who else might be hiding beneath his features.
“You knew me as Thames.”
Luce’s hand shot to her mouth, covering a bewildered gasp. Kai was too numb to react—didn’t know how many more absurd revelations he could take.
“Something about Thames’s death caught the attention of the god,” Farran continued.
“The way Thames injected himself with a Tidecaller synth to make himself limitless, only for it to corrupt him from the inside and ultimately kill him… I guess this left a mark on his soul—on my soul—and the god thought to use that to his advantage, a loophole he could explore. He thought I’d be an ally because I’d want to get justice after what Cornelius did to me.
And I was, for a time. Before I found out what fate has in store for us—what the god has been working toward. ”
“Which is what?”
“To wipe clean the slate and start the worlds anew. I saw it myself in the tapestry of fate. What Cornelius is going to do is meant to be so disastrous that the god thinks the only way to prevent it is to throw away the fabric of our universe and start a new tapestry from scratch. Everything we’ve been, everything we are, everything we could still become…
just wiped completely forever. No reincarnation in sight.
Not even an afterlife. Every soul, every particle dead and alive that makes up our universe, gone and forgotten for something new to take shape. ”
Kai fisted his hands at his sides, feeling angry at the world, at this god who thought he could treat them like chess pieces on a board. What was the point of going forward if that was the fate that awaited them?
“But why does the god want that?” Luce asked, her voice pitched high with mounting frenzy.
“He says that, before the universe tips toward the kind of chaos there can be no coming back from—before the gods themselves are all killed by Cornelius and the worlds fall under his dark reign—the only way to preserve balance is to start anew. Think of it as a scale. On one side, balance and peace. On the other, chaos and ruin. If the scale were to tip fully toward the side of chaos, the side that awaits us if Clover manages to make himself into the one true god, there would be no coming back from it. The gods would be dead, and under Clover’s monstrous rule, darkness and suffering and hate would destroy all that is good in our worlds. ”
“So this is some bullshit self-preservation thing,” Kai seethed. “This asshole of a god is willing to let us all fall into oblivion for the sake of saving his own neck.”
Farran nodded. “That’s why I left him. Everything I was doing, ensuring the cogs of fate worked as they were meant to, was playing into the very destiny the god of balance wanted us heading toward: total oblivion for us, a fresh start for the gods.”
“Is there no way to change things?” Luce looked horrified, and Kai knew she was thinking of what this meant for Emory. “Instead of wiping us all from the map to preserve balance, why doesn’t the god help us stop Clover?”
“Because that’s just it: he’s the god of balance. He can’t meddle with fate directly even if he wanted to, because he’s meant to be an impartial surveyor.”
“He meddled with your fate, didn’t he?” Kai noted.
“Like I said: loophole. I was a loose thread in an unchangeable pattern, and he took advantage of it. But something as big as Clover becoming this supreme god who brings about the end of the universe as we know it… Even the god of balance can’t stop such a fate in its course.
The only thing he can actively do is wipe clean the slate if things get out of hand.
It’s what his very nature is set to resort to, a last recourse to preserve balance in the face of utter chaos.
Only, the thing is… there are others whose hands are not so tied by fate, who are willing to do what must be done to prevent such an end. ”
“The four gods of the living realms,” Luce breathed.
Farran nodded. “They’re who I set out to find when I left the god of balance because they’re our best chance at thwarting fate and surviving. And they’re who we’re sailing toward now because I need your help getting them out of the abyss.”