Chapter 34 Baz
BAZ COULDN’T HELP BUT GO over the ritual steps in his mind as they hurried toward Decrescens Hall, thinking of all the ways it could go wrong.
But if it went right, he could be seeing Kai this very night.
The Reaper room was thankfully empty when Virgil led them inside.
It was just as he’d described, like a vibrant greenhouse plucked from Crescens Hall and transplanted here in a corner of Decrescens Hall, completely out of place in this house meant to represent sleep and endings and death.
The golden-leafed tree in the center seemed to engulf the room, its branches grazing the domed glass ceiling beyond which stars glimmered in a dark sky.
Baz couldn’t breathe. He loosened his tie, a far cry from the satin neckcloth he’d worn two hundred years ago, yet the memory of Kai’s fingers at his neck as he did it up for him came to mind nonetheless.
Please let this work, Baz thought, aching for the moment he might hold Kai in his arms again.
With Professor Selandyn’s help deciphering the ritual—and Sidraeus lending a hand with nuances in the translation—they knew the ritual was a way to access the path between godsworld and abyss, heaven and hell.
The tree was a portal, albeit nothing like the doors they had known so far.
Once open, it would allow them to walk the path between godsworld and abyss—the same path that Sidraeus used to ferry stray souls to.
“Think of it as the inside of a tree trunk,” Sidraeus had explained.
“Those of you who’ve been to the godsworld have seen the crystal-leafed tree that flourishes there.
It connects to the abyss, where its dark roots emerge.
The path that ties both realms together lies in the space between, on the inside of this massive trunk, spiraling like tree rings.
Once we open up the portal, we’ll follow the path downward to the abyss…
and hope we can easily climb back up once we’ve pulled your friends out. ”
Baz took a steadying breath. One worry at a time.
“Found it.” Emory had been circling the trunk, searching for any indication of a portal opening. The same spiral mark that was found on all other doors was carved into the bark, so faded with age it was no wonder it had remained unnoticed all this time.
She looked up at Baz as he stepped to her side. “Ready?”
“Let’s hope this works,” he said shakily.
He was the one who had been given the ritual, the one so desperate to save Kai that he was willing to face the unknown bowels of hell itself. Here was his part in the story, the heroic stakes to claim as his own, and he was terrified. But he had to do this.
It was his turn to be a key—the fifth part that never quite fit with the others, that never belonged to Atheia like the blood and bones and heart and soul did.
He was the lungs that answered to time alone.
And as the Tidecaller, representing both life and death, above and below, Emory was the hand that would fit this fifth key into its lock, so to speak.
Baz pressed a hand against the trunk, right next to the carved spiral. He couldn’t exactly give up a lung, but he could give his breath.
A breath in, a breath out.
He could feel each thread of the portal, this ancient power hiding beneath the surface. He pulled on every one of them, coercing the portal to reveal itself, to open how it might have once in the past or would again in the future.
Baz wrenched his hand away from the bark as it burned.
There was a crack of thunder as the tree was split open by a thread of lightning that ran up from its roots and all along the trunk.
The air felt alive with the sizzle of this fork of lightning, pulsing with the kind of magic Baz had only felt in Dovermere and in the god of balance’s workshop, the kind of otherworldly power that was unknowable, dangerous if it were ever to fall into the wrong hands.
The lightning itself felt alive, carving paths along the trunk, spirals and jagged lines and symbols Baz did not know, until the design created an arch—a doorway.
Emory pressed a hand to the sizzling keyhole in its middle, and it opened onto a familiar darkness. She turned to Baz, wide-eyed. “We did it.”
Baz’s face split into a smile as relief flooded through him. He hadn’t wanted to doubt that the ritual would work, but that doubt had very much still been in the back of his mind.
The others peered into the darkness visible through the portal. “I wouldn’t celebrate quite yet if I were you,” said Virgil. “Not when you’re the ones going in there.”
At the trepidation in his voice, Baz forced himself to look at the darkness more closely. At first glance, he’d thought it looked exactly like the starry expanse beyond the Hourglass in Dovermere. But this darkness was complete and impenetrable.
“You’re sure you want us to stay behind?” Nisha asked, glancing between Emory and Baz. “We can come with you—”
“Speak for yourself,” muttered Virgil. Ife and Javier seemed as eager to go through the portal as he was, which was to say not at all.
“The four of you are needed here to guard the portal,” Sidraeus said. “You’re our tether back to the living worlds.”
There was a heavy, tense silence as they all looked at one another. Emory met Baz’s gaze, waiting for him to be ready. He moved closer to her, to Sidraeus, to the dark maw of the portal that opened between them.
“Be careful,” Nisha said. “All of you.”
Emory squeezed her hand in a silent goodbye, a promise they’d see each other soon. She made to step through the portal, but Sidraeus stopped her with a grave expression.
“Remember what I said.” He spoke the words to her, but clearly meant them for Baz, too.
“This is nothing like the sleepscape you have come to know. Traveling between worlds is one thing. Traveling the path between godsworld and abyss… there is no knowing what you might see or which direction it might push you.”
Baz tamped down the fear rising inside him.
Such was the purpose of this path: for souls to choose between what was essentially two very different afterlives.
As ferrier of souls, Sidraeus’s role had been to lead stray ones to this very path for them to move on to the next phase of death.
Here, the souls of the dead who traveled the path were plagued by hallucinations, the worst parts of their psyche drawn up to torment them.
These visions and how they dealt with them—what they chose to do with this mortal baggage they carried—were meant to lure them one way or the other.
Either to the godsworld where they would be reincarnated through the fountain, or to the abyss where they would suffer damnation.
The souls judge themselves, Sidraeus had said. The choice is theirs alone.
To Sidraeus’s knowledge, no living mortal had ever walked the path, so there was no knowing how these visions would affect Baz and Emory now.
Sidraeus stepped through the portal ahead of them, as if to ensure the way was clear, or perhaps to appease this realm of death by presenting a familiar face first.
Emory gave Baz a final glance, and for a moment Baz was brought back to the last time he’d seen her go through a door.
Only that time, it was a door he could not follow her through.
Now that they were doing this together, whatever awaited them on the other side suddenly felt less daunting.
The same thought seemed to cross her mind, a fond little smile tugging at the corner of her lips.
The steel blue of her eyes was steady and sure, an ocean that would not let anything stop it, not even death.
They seemed to hold a promise. That everything would be all right.
She stepped into the dark, and Baz followed.
Sidraeus was right; this was not the same star-lined path they’d all come to know.
The dark that swallowed them seemed infinite, oppressive; the very path beneath their feet made of the blackest obsidian.
The only reason Baz could tell there even was a path and he wasn’t simply floating in a void-like space was due to the odd, silvery flames lining the way at wide intervals, hanging between columns of obsidian that bordered the path.
Directly in front of them was an altar, also made of obsidian, above which an ornate hourglass hovered a few inches in the air, laid on its side. Inside, a stardust-like material swirled in a perfect infinity loop, continuous and unbroken.
When a life ends, one’s soul is repurposed. Returned to the fabric of the universe. Think of an hourglass being flipped over, sand filling a previously empty bulb. An end becoming a beginning.
The god of balance’s words pounded in Baz’s ears as he took in the hourglass. Its iron frame was wrought with the finest of detail, the glass bulbs pristine and polished. It seemed to pulse with a great, unfathomable power. And Baz had seen it before, sketched on a canvas by the god’s own hand.
Fate’s central core, the god had called it.
Here was the heart of fate, hanging between heaven and hell. The very instrument responsible for producing the threads that the loom wove into fate’s tapestry.
Indeed, Baz could see these threads shimmering ever so faintly out of the hourglass. There seemed to be thousands of them, billions of them, expanding out of the hourglass, crisscrossing like an elaborate web just like the god of balance had drawn.
Baz knew, with sudden clarity, that this was why he was here. Fate’s central core… it called to him, pulled on his soul. As if it had been waiting for him, the Timespinner, to step into his true role.
Mouth suddenly dry, Baz turned to Emory and Sidraeus—and found he was alone.
Panic seized him. He couldn’t tell up from down anymore, as if the path had turned sideways, a tree tipped on its side so that there was no distinguishing abyss from godsworld.
He did not know which direction to move, or if he should stay here with the hourglass marking the way out, waiting for the others to reappear.