Chapter 60 Kai
IT SHOULD HAVE COME AS no surprise to anyone that the godsworld would be accessible in Dovermere. With all the worlds overlapping one another, the sea caves were no longer underwater, and they did not resemble the caves they’d come to know at all.
In fact, they looked like a patchwork of all the caves and grottos and deep places where a door had stood in each world.
The algae-slick walls of Dovermere in some places.
The basalt columns of the Wychwood tunnels under the yew tree in others.
The cavernous, fiery insides of the Sunforge spread in the spaces between.
Where the Hourglass should have stood—where the door of each world now overlapped, Kai supposed—stood the icy gate of the fourth world, thrown wide open onto the sea of ash beyond.
“This is going to work,” Emory said with more conviction than Kai felt as she stepped through the door ahead of the group.
Kai, Baz, and Luce followed. It had been a hard-fought battle to keep their group small. Everyone had wanted to come along—Jae, Theodore, Virgil, Vera, and Nisha especially—but they’d ultimately agreed the fewer people, the better.
If this didn’t work, there needed to be people left to pick up the fight.
As they walked up the steps toward the fountain, Kai could scarcely believe he was here, after all he’d been through.
He’d seen the Wychwood with his own eyes, had gone to places that went beyond anything ever written of in Song of the Drowned Gods, yet somehow it felt incredible to him that the sea of ash actually existed.
Bare and desolate and chilling, with a monster waiting in its midst.
Clover had his back turned to them, staring at a rift of ash through which emerged Farran and Atheia and Sidraeus.
Clover wasted no time in trapping Farran in an onslaught of power.
The gods were brought to their knees, no match for Clover here, in a world he had made his own, next to a stagnant fountain overspilling with ghosts eager to fuel their master.
Emory took the keys out of her pocket. Asphodel’s rib bone and the warrior’s gold heart in one hand, the guardian’s wooden lyre in the other. While Clover was preoccupied with the gods, she unlocked their power—and absorbed it.
The bone and the heart began to shine in a brilliant light, and as Emory plucked the strings of the lyre, all three keys erupted into a maelstrom of earth and greenery, of flame and molten gold, of lightning and wind, and swirled around Emory, seeping into her.
Clover faltered, wincing in pain, as if he were losing that same power. Emory smiled victoriously. But it only lasted a second before Clover seemed to regain control of himself, smirking at her as if she were nothing but a small thorn in his side, and drew on the restless souls around him.
A tidal wave of translucent ghosts swept over the temple.
Desperation and anger filled the air along with the cloying smell of sulfur.
Kai’s skin burned as the spirits brushed past him.
He’d been through this before, he thought.
In the hellfire stream down in the abyss.
With these same restless souls that reminded him of the umbrae as they drew not on his fears, but on every single regret inside him, all the things he had ever hated himself for and wished he could take back, all the resentments he held for others, the anger he never quite learned to let go of.
It was torment. It was a taste of hell. It was a call to join these angry spirits that understood, that glorified such pain and anger, that wanted him to keep it inside him forever and tend to it until it consumed him whole and made him one of them. Empty and angry, eternally so.
But Kai didn’t want to be tortured like this forever.
He had wasted too much of his life being weighed down by this anger and resentment he carried.
He had seen what holding on to such emotions did to the souls of the dead, how it turned them to stone deep down in the abyss, cementing them there forever if they couldn’t let go.
If they couldn’t choose peace for themselves.
Kai thought of all the moments in his life that had brought him joy and love and serenity, these bright lights that had filtered in through the cracks of his anger.
Waking up next to Baz. Finding community with the Eclipse-born.
Helping to free them from the Institute.
Even finding Farran again had been a blessing in disguise, a chance for Kai to understand the weight of resentment and forgiveness and second chances.
To see someone refusing to be held back by the baggage of two lifetimes, persevering on and on despite everything he’d been subjected to by gods and fate and monsters and his own inner demons.
Kai would choose the same for himself now. These restless souls could not deter him.
At his side, Baz screamed and cried, plagued by the souls’ torment. Kai reached for him, gripping his hand tight in his. “Don’t let them win, Brysden. They feed on anger and despair and hate. I’m right here with you, and I’m not going anywhere.”
Slowly, Baz seemed to come back to himself, sagging against Kai. His breathing was labored but his eyes were clear. Around them was chaos, but the souls seemed to have moved on to other targets to feed on and torment.
Kai caught sight of the gods in Farran’s body, fending off these angry souls keeping them down, and Clover trying to draw on what was left of their power.
But Clover finally turned his attention away from them, spinning toward Emory as she fought off a gaggle of souls and advanced on him now, ready to end him, fueled as she was by the three keys…
no, four keys, because her mother had come up to her side, and Kai could see that Emory was drawing on the residual power of Atheia in Luce’s blood.
Near the empty fountain were Sidraeus and Atheia, locked in a fruitless battle, neither of them able to die by the other’s hand. But they could die by another’s. And the gods, making use of Clover’s distraction, moved against them.
“No!” Kai yelled.
The gods were supposed to let Emory kill Clover, but they’d made it clear they didn’t have faith in her ability to do so.
The fountain was right there, Sidraeus and Atheia right beside it, so why not sacrifice them and regain their godhood to put an end to Clover themselves, take matters into their own hands?
Farran’s steps seemed to slow. Baz’s magic, Kai realized, trying to stop him.
Baz was gritting his teeth. “I can’t hold them—they’re too strong—”
His magic might be powerful, but they were still gods, despite the faint trickle of power they had.
Kai moved in front of them, his tattoos activating as the wards they’d always been, and shoved the gods out of Farran’s body again.
It rendered them vulnerable—the gods in their true forms, not immaterial as they had been in the living realms, but as material as they had been when Kai first met them in the abyss.
Clover’s head whipped to them, as if he could sense that they were here in full now, not hiding inside a vessel.
Here, at last, they could be killed. The restless souls amplified their assault on the gods, driven by Clover, who could probably taste victory at hand.
Kai pulled a dazed Farran out of the way, wondering if he’d just handed Clover the win without meaning to.
There was a scream, followed by a flash of movement.
Sidraeus was on his knees, doubled over in pain.
And Atheia, freed from their clash, was unleashing a wave of death magic toward the four gods.
The gods managed to evade it, but Atheia was still advancing on them, wrath twisting Romie’s features into something otherworldly and ugly.
Kai looked Sidraeus over but found no wound.
“It’s not me who’s hurt,” Sidraeus gritted out, his eyes fixed on a point behind Kai.
Where Baz lay in a pool of blood.