Chapter 51 Romie
TRYING TO STOP THE DEVOURING darkness was a futile exercise, yet Atheia persisted.
It enraged her to see all these blotches of sleepscape swallowing pieces of the world whole.
They kept appearing all over, faster than they could be stopped.
Lightkeeper magic seemed somewhat effective in slowing the process down, and Wardcrafters had succeeded in creating barriers over affected areas.
But their magic was still too thin, too weak, able to flourish only with the help of synths that could not be produced fast enough and in large enough quantities.
Even those who’d first had their magic restored by Atheia—the Selenic Order and Tidelore members who’d been with her at Aldryn—saw their power dwindling with each day that passed, so much so that they, too, had to rely on synths again to access other tidal alignments.
So it fell to Atheia to step in however she could to protect her worlds from succumbing to the seeping dark.
She’d been doing so ever since these black holes had first appeared, sometimes alone in the middle of the night, with no one there to bear witness to her efforts, and sometimes, like today, she was in plain sight, surrounded by her Tidal Council.
They’d been alerted to a cluster of pockets that had appeared in and around Cadence—or rather, what used to be Cadence, no longer a quaint seaside town but a collection of houses and cottages that grew along the base of twin peaks, as if they’d been dropped haphazardly from the skies.
Atheia had been told that, before this, most of Cadence had suffered great damage by the flooding swell of the tides.
But they’d been rebuilding, safely hidden behind wards meant to protect them from the unpredictable Aldersea.
Those wards hadn’t protected them from this sudden fusing together of worlds, nor had they held up against the pockets of sleepscape now threatening the town.
They had appeared all over: in the skies above, eating a sizable chunk of the moss-clad mountainside; in the streets, obliterating countless thatch-roofed cottages and little gardens and shops; and at the edge of the town proper, where the Aldersea had once hugged the coast but now stood the Wychwood itself, a portion of its ancient trees swallowed by the dark.
People screamed and cried for their losses, the homes and loved ones that had been ripped away in front of their eyes.
No one who had entered these rifts had gotten out.
They would likely not survive the sleepscape, a place made uninhabitable for anyone but gods and Tidecallers, Dreamers and Nightmare Weavers, and the few who might be Veiled Atlas compass-bearers.
As Atheia walked the destroyed streets—all the pockets contained, for now, by her magic—she couldn’t help but feel for the the victims. Their pain was her own.
This destruction had to end. Yet for every rift of darkness that was stopped, a dozen others seemed to appear elsewhere. They couldn’t go on like this.
These were thoughts she kept to herself as she molded her vessel’s features into that of the capable deity.
The Tides these people could count on, with the powerful Tidal Council at her back.
Yet the quiet glares sent her way told a different story: these people, despite her eagerness to help, did not trust her as they might have once.
Their faith in her was dwindling, and quickly.
A little girl appeared in her path, holding a stuffed animal. She appeared lost. Atheia glided over to her, kneeling in front of her to be at eye level.
“Dearest,” she said kindly. “Where are your parents?”
The girl merely pointed at a pocket of darkness a few houses down, where it had devoured half of a squat cottage.
Bleak understanding ran like ice water through Atheia’s veins.
When she looked up, dozens of villagers were watching her.
The hardness of their faces revealed an anger directed solely at her.
It didn’t matter to them who was to blame for this chaos; it only mattered that she was supposed to help keep them safe, and could not.
“Come on,” a young couple said to the little girl, grabbing her by the hands and turning her away from Atheia. They glared at her as they did.
Behind her, Atheia heard her Tidal Council whispering among themselves. She spun to them to see a flash of that same doubt on their faces, before they schooled their expressions into stony masks.
“Head back to the Institute,” Atheia barked at them. “Grab as many Tidecaller synths as you can and get the Regulators to come help these people erect more wards.”
She didn’t wait for their reply, only stormed off down an alley. She needed a reprieve from all this attention; needed to gather her thoughts and emotions before she succumbed beneath the weight of their disappointment.
She turned a corner and came to a vista overlooking the sprawling Wychwood below, the distant Aldersea where it had been pushed back, the skies split open by constant lightning storms and patches of starry darkness that should not have been there.
Atheia wanted to cry at the mess of it all, for once at a loss about how she would fix this.
From behind her came a voice. “Excuse me, miss? Are you the one they’re calling the Tides?”
Atheia shut her eyes. “I am,” she bit out without turning. She didn’t want anyone to see her in such a state, and wasn’t sure she could stand another villager’s ire. “Did you lose people here today?”
“No. I’m not from here. I came up from the Wychwood looking to understand what’s happening. If you’re the Tides, I wondered… well, I’ve heard stories of you before, and I thought perhaps you could help. My daughter, you see, she’s been in a coma for weeks now, after being possessed by a demon.”
Demon. This girl must be a hellwraith, then, a witch sullied by the mark Sidraeus had left on the Wychwood.
A perversion of the magic Atheia herself had created there.
This girl was one of his, just like the Eclipse-born were.
The idea crossed her mind to follow the witch to her estate, if only to snatch up her daughter and bring her to the Institute to torment as she had the Night Bringer’s beasts.
Atheia finally turned to the witch. The woman was middle-aged, and her manner of dress was different from that of the residents of Cadence, pulled from a different world. Her eyes widened at the sight of Atheia, something desperate and wild and hopeful on her face.
“Romie?” the witch breathed.
Atheia froze, trying to search Romie’s memories to determine who this was. There was magic to the woman. It smelled of verdant things, of damp soil and ancient trees. The name came to her in a flurry of memories.
Hazel Amberyl. The High Matriarch of the Wychwood.
Something inside her fought to the surface with surprising rigor.
It was Romie but not. It was an echo of the bone key, the witch whose name had been Aspen.
Atheia could feel memories surge behind her eyes: a bond between two sisters and their authoritative mother, a sense of fierce protectiveness she had rarely felt before.
It rooted her in place, made her vessel’s consciousness slip between the cracks enough for her to shout a warning.
“RUN, MRS. AMBERYL. I’M POSSESSED BY—”
Atheia fought to control the reins again, but the damage was done, the witch stumbling back from her as if she’d seen a ghost. Atheia tried to move in her direction, but Romie took over once more, making it impossible to take a single step.
The witch ran. By the time Atheia stomped her vessel deep down and was about to follow, going after the witch didn’t matter anymore. Because a voice that felt like the moon itself, quiet and mercurial, rose from behind Atheia, so impossible that it knocked her entire world off its axis.
“Hello, daughter.”
Atheia turned, thinking she must have imagined it, because there was no way that the being that voice belonged to was here, and no way she would call Atheia daughter despite her somewhat motherly inclination toward her.
Indeed, it was not the goddess of the moon who stood before her but a young man, a boy really, with blond curls and a fair complexion.
There was a Waning Moon tattoo on his hand, marking him as a lunar mage.
His eyes were like quicksilver, flashing too unnaturally to go unnoticed.
And paired with the lilt of his voice, the words he’d used…
The goddess of the moon, wearing the face of a vessel much like Atheia was, smiled knowingly at her quiet realization. “We are so pleased to see you.”
She pulled Atheia in for an embrace, and when Atheia breathed her in, she could smell the moon itself, feel the goddess as she remembered her, as if the goddess’s very essence had erased every bit of the vessel until it was only her, despite the unrecognizable features.
Atheia couldn’t help but fold into her embrace, realizing just how starved for affection she had become since being put back together in this body.
When the goddess pulled away, her eyes shifted, her essence changed, so that in quick succession the vessel became each of the other three gods of the living.
The goddess of the earth smiling fondly at her; the god of the sun giving her a stoic nod; the god of the air winking at her as if they shared a secret.
And then it was as if all four of them shared space at once in this vessel of theirs, his eyes bright with power, his features an amalgamation of these presences inside him.
“How can this be?” Atheia breathed. “I thought Clover had destroyed you all.”
“He took our godly might from us, yes,” they said in a voice that was layered and beautiful, a mixture of all their voices. “But even he could not kill immortal gods. And yet we find ourselves not quite immortal anymore, either.”
Atheia gaped at them. “Not immortal—what does that mean?”