Chapter 25 Baz
A PERSISTENT KNOCKING AT HIS door woke him from a deep, dreamless sleep.
Judging by the dim light coming through his window, it was barely dawn.
Baz groggily reached for his glasses and hurried to pull the door open.
Emory stood on the other side along with a sleepy-looking Virgil.
The Shadow hovered a few steps behind them, looking sullen at being dragged into whatever this was.
Baz palmed the back of his head. “Um. Hi?”
“Sorry to wake you,” Emory said, “but this couldn’t wait.”
“It very well could have,” Virgil lamented, rubbing at his eyes.
Emory ignored him, shoving him inside Baz’s room.
“Is everything all right?” Baz asked.
Emory was rummaging through the small desk tucked between the bed and the wall. “I’m assuming Professor Selandyn still has the ritual?”
“Yes…” Baz eyed the Shadow, who trailed quietly into the room and shut the door behind him, looking about as pleased to be here as Baz was to have him in his space after he tried to strangle him. “What’s this about?”
“No idea.” Virgil plopped down on the bed. “These two barged into my room and dragged me here. And I was having the loveliest dream, too…”
Emory looked pleased with herself when she found a blank piece of paper and a pencil. She held them out to Baz. “You still good at drawing?”
“Well, I—”
Emory all but shoved the paper and pencil in his hands. “Could you draw the tree that’s on the ritual? I need to show Virgil and Sidraeus.”
Sidraeus. It sounded so… personal… coming from her mouth.
“Why?”
“Because I think I know what the ritual might entail. And I need these two to confirm it.”
Virgil put the pillow over his head. “It’s too early to require my help.”
Baz laid the paper on the desk and leaned over it, pencil at the ready. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes and carefully sketched the tree as he remembered it. Emory hovered over his shoulder, nodding fervently.
“May I?” she asked, snatching the drawing from Baz before he’d even finished and holding it up to Virgil, who still had his head buried under the pillow and might very well have fallen asleep. “Virgil, tell me what this looks like.”
A grumble of protest as the pillow came flying. Virgil sat up and peered at the drawing. The death glare he gave Emory was nothing short of spectacular. “You woke me up to look at a drawing of a tree?”
“Not just any tree. You just dreamed of this.”
“How do you know what I was dreaming about?”
“I was there with you, remember?”
“Oh. I thought I was dreaming you up.” He grinned at her. “Emory Ainsleif, you sentimental thing, you. What an honor to have you checking on me in my sleep.”
Emory swatted him. “Focus. Doesn’t this remind you of the Reaper tree?”
Virgil squinted at the drawing again. “I mean, I guess? No offense to your talents, Brysden, but this could be any old tree.”
“What’s the Reaper tree?” Baz asked, feeling confused.
“Just this tree that’s in Decrescens Hall that we Reapers practice magic on.”
“I felt something when I used magic on it,” Emory said. “Granted, it was in a dream, so maybe that’s all it was… But what if there’s more to it?”
“Like what?”
Emory grabbed the pencil from Baz. He refrained from protesting as she traced lines around the tree he’d drawn. At first, he didn’t understand what he was staring at. Then it hit him.
“An hourglass?”
It was like the tree was trapped inside one, the branches in the top bulb and the roots in the bottom one. Emory looked over her shoulder at the Shadow—Sidraeus—who peered down at the drawing with a frown.
“You were there when I dreamed of this,” Emory told him.
“It’s not the first time I’ve dreamed of the Dovermere door being an actual hourglass.
Even before, when Romie was trapped in the sleepscape…
Every time I saw this, the glass would shatter and something would come out.
One time, there was an opening at the bottom.
Like a portal. And now recently there’s been this tree trapped inside. Glass shattering. And you appearing.”
“So what does it mean?” Virgil asked, taking the question right out of Baz’s mouth.
“We have a tree connected to a portal in my dreams,” Emory said, “a tree connected to a ritual meant to save Kai, and a tree back at Aldryn that’s been killed by Reaper magic countless times over.
” She looked at Virgil. “Don’t you think it’s odd that it keeps coming back to life without any of you making it regrow?
You told me no Sower ever comes in to nurse it back to health after you’ve used Reaper magic on it. So what makes it come back to life?”
“It couldn’t possibly be…”
This came from Sidraeus in a hushed whisper.
“What?” Emory pried.
“There used to be trees like this in the godsworld. They connected it to the realms of the living, the sleepscape, and even the underworld.”
“Like that glass-looking tree that towers over the fountain?” Emory asked.
“That was always the main one, yes, but there used to be many more before the godsworld became the sea of ash. The way Equilibris described it was that the flourishing top of the tree represented the heavenly godsworld. The middle of the tree where you see that spiral, that was meant to represent the sleeping realm as well as the four realms of the living. And the roots below, those represented the underworld.”
“Trees have roots planted firmly in the underworld and hands that graze the heavens…,” Baz recited.
“I thought the underworld was the sleepscape,” Virgil said, frowning. “Or the Deep. The sea of ash. Whatever the hell it’s called, no pun intended.”
Sidraeus shook his head. “What you might consider the afterlife is divided into parts. Death brings all souls to the sleeping realm, yes, but they must be ferried in one direction or the other. The godsworld is the heavens where souls go to find eternal peace—or where they seep into the fountain so that their souls can be resurrected into new life. But the underworld… the underworld is the place no soul wishes to go. Only the most corrupted of souls get sent to what we call the abyss, the first layer of this underworld. Here they are tortured for eternity, denied a chance at eternal rest or new life.”
Baz blanched. This was where Kai and Luce had gone, but… “What does this have to do with the tree?”
“When we founded the Veiled Atlas, Atheia managed to smuggle seeds from these trees out of the godsworld. We gave them to members of the Veiled Atlas to plant in each of their worlds, for them to tend to this piece of godhood and shape it into something that might feed into the ley line and become a source of magic all its own. I thought Equilibris had destroyed them all, just like he did the Tidecallers. But I suppose that if a Tidecaller survived, they could have found a way to get this past him too. Because by the sound of it, this could be one of those trees.”
A seed taken from the garden of the gods that had grown into this tree—a tree that had likely stood at Aldryn when the college was a temple to the gods, and long before even that. A tree that had since been brought back to life and died a thousand times by the magic of Reapers.
“Sorry, am I the only one who fails to see how a tree is gonna save your nightmare-weaving boyfriend?” Virgil asked in a dubious tone.
Baz blushed, avoiding everyone’s gaze. Was it that obvious?
“This Nightmare Weaver.” Sidraeus was staring at Baz.
“I remember him. He first passed through the sleeping realm centuries ago, while I was still in my prison. I recognized him when you and he passed through the sleeping realm again more recently, that day I escaped.” The day he’d taken possession of Keiran, he meant.
“He and I had made a bargain during his first passage. He and the Dreamer woman he was with…”
“Luce?” Emory interjected, her eyes going wide at the mention of her mother.
“They’d been trying to escape Clover. I sent them help in the form of a thousand umbrae, asking the Nightmare Weaver to free me in return once he left the sleeping realm.
But he never made it out. He and the Dreamer fell into the abyss beyond the stars.
I could no longer feel them then. No mortal soul has ever set foot in hell, to my knowledge.
They must be as good as dead, I’m afraid. ”
His gaze had shifted ever so slightly to Emory. There had been nothing soft in his voice or his words, but seeing the devastation on her face seemed to give him pause.
“Kai and Luce can survive it,” Baz said, both for Emory and for himself, as those severed threads flashed in his mind. This was what the ritual was for. The fate he had to undo.
Emory gave him a small, grateful smile that vanished as Sidraeus spoke again.
“The abyss, they might survive,” he said. “So long as they haven’t fallen into the void beyond it.”
“Sounds lovely,” Virgil quipped. “Dare we ask what this void is?”
“No one really knows. No soul that has ever gone into it has ever returned. It is a great, black nothing. Some say it’s a place where souls go to be unmade. Others believe it to be a way out of this universe. A door that might open onto infinite shores beyond this one.”
A grim silence settled over the room. A place where souls went to be unmade—was that the fate Equilibris had seen for Kai and Luce, what the god’s old apprentice believed awaited everyone if Kai couldn’t be saved? An unmaking. Oblivion.
Baz refused to see it become reality. He studied the drawing again. “I think this tree is depicting a portal to the underworld. And if it’s the same as the Reaper tree… then we need to go back to Aldryn.”
When he brought it up to Jae later that morning as the two of them sat at the top of the dunes, Baz expected the Illusionist to push back, tell him getting into Aldryn was impossible, what with it swarming with Regulators. To his surprise, though, Jae considered it in earnest.
“We’ve been talking about pushing back against the Regulators,” they said, “trying to find ways to get more people outside of our little resistance here to join our cause. Having a presence on campus again—say, by reclaiming Obscura Hall and using it as a base—would help us organize with the students and professors there who might be sympathetic. They could help us get the word out easier.”
“But how?” Baz asked. “Drutten’s out for blood. And as for the Tides… No one’s going to let us just walk into Aldryn and take over Obscura Hall.”
“Which is exactly why we haven’t done it.
We were waiting for the right moment, the right leverage, the right support…
I suppose with the Shadow at our side now, we have just that.
But you saw how some of the others reacted to him yesterday.
They don’t trust him, and they won’t trust Emory so easily, either. ”
“Do you?”
“Wholeheartedly. But what we’re trying to do isn’t about breaking through to one or two people.
It’s an entire movement. And if the Tides have truly returned to our shores intent on eradicating Eclipse-born, we need to act now more than ever, before the Selenic Order and Tidelore cultists use that as a reason to come at us with more viciousness than before. ”
“Any ideas?”
Jae stared at the boardinghouse in the distance, a glimmer of mischief in their eyes. “A few.”
Baz wanted to feel reassured by this, but it seemed like the clock was ticking ever on, and he wasn’t any closer to saving Kai. He told Jae more about the ritual, the Reaper tree, and his own half-baked theories about his connection to this tree that, when tipped sideways, looked like lungs.
“I still can’t believe you’re the one who wrote Song of the Drowned Gods,” Jae huffed. “To think I’ve dedicated my life to scholarly research on this book, and all this time the author’s been growing up in front of me!”
Baz gave them a bashful smile. He didn’t know how to feel about this yet, his opinion of Clover all the more tarnished now that he knew what became of him. What he did to Emory, to Romie, the keys.
“The ideas still originated with Clover, though,” Baz said forlornly, thinking of the journal he’d seen Clover bent over so many times, writing snippets of his visions and dreams, which would go on to inspire the book Baz had always been fated to pen. “In a way, it’s like I stole them from him.”
“It’s not stealing if his name’s the one slapped on the cover,” Jae argued. “And the story is all you.”
“You’re wrong there,” Baz said. “I might have written it, but the story’s always been yours.”
Jae’s brows shot up. “Mine?”
“You’re the one who introduced me to it.
Who sparked my love of stories to begin with.
And you’re arguably the person who knows the story best. You see nuances in it that no one else does.
If you hadn’t gifted me a copy when I was younger, if you hadn’t told me the book was a portal to other worlds, I might not have become so obsessed with it.
And if that were the case, then I could never have written it when I traveled to the past. Maybe the book would never have existed at all.
So you see? If anyone should take credit for its existence, it’s you. ”
“Well,” Jae said, clearing their throat.
Their eyes shone with emotion. They reached for Baz’s hand and patted it affectionately.
“Thank you, Basil. I’m sure you of all people understand how much that means to me.
” They cleared their throat again as they shot to their feet.
“Now, I’m going to need you to repeat all that in front of Alya, because she’s been giving me grief about never returning Clover’s journal to her, and I think this might earn me a few points back in my favor. ”
Baz grimaced at the thought of the journal he’d left behind in the past. He hadn’t taken it with him when he was pulled through the portal on a page to the god’s workshop. He supposed it was now lost forever.
“How’s that going with Alya?” he asked Jae. “Trying to mend your relationship with her?”
Jae shrugged, failing to hide their smile.
“Well, now that we’re both here, I figured it wouldn’t hurt…
” They stared off at the horizon where waves were picking up speed, the high tide coming in again.
“To think you found Alya’s sister two hundred years in the past, of all places,” Jae mused with a bewildered shake of their head.
“Alya never fully believed Adriana was dead, you know. At least back then, when we were together. I hope for her sake—and Vera’s, and Emory’s—that we don’t lose her all over again. ”
The words stuck with Baz, weighing on his soul. This was the downside of hope: the prospect of failure. There was a way to save Kai and Luce, and that ignited a blazing optimism inside them all. But if they failed, it would destroy them.