Chapter 64 Baz
THE RIB BONE WAS STILL in Clover’s hand when Kai ripped him off Luce and shoved him to the ground.
Baz couldn’t begin to make sense of it—Luce, dying in Emory’s arms. Emory’s cries, slicing through his heart.
But then, a gasp. Luce’s throat patched up, healed by Emory.
The two of them clinging to each other in a pool of blood. Alive.
The sight of Kai pummeling Clover with all the rage and grief of someone who hadn’t yet realized the Dreamer wasn’t dead broke through Baz’s paralysis. He moved in tandem with Farran, both of them pulling Kai back from the wretched monster before them.
Weakly, Clover drew himself to his knees.
His face was painted in red flecks from Luce’s slashed neck, and his own blood spilled from his mouth and the wounds in his chest, black and oozing.
His gaze landed on Luce, the sight of her alive making his shoulders slump. Not in defeat, Baz thought, but relief.
Clover had never looked so helpless as Cordelia’s name tumbled from his lips. It stirred something in Baz, to know that after all this time, until the very end, Clover still thought of her. This was still his twisted way of protecting her. Of trying to better the world for her.
Cordelia had been the one person he’d wanted to save in this world, and the person he’d ended up becoming a monster for.
Farran knelt at Clover’s side and grabbed hold of his hand, his face devastated.
Clover looked at him as if he could see through the unrecognizable features to the boy he’d known at Aldryn two hundred years ago, the boy he’d used and manipulated and killed.
The boy he might have loved if he weren’t so very monstrous.
“Do you think I’ll see her again?” Clover asked, quiet tears running down his cheeks.
Farran didn’t answer him, only stayed there, holding his hand as Clover’s breath rasped. Even after everything he had suffered through as Thames—even after trying so desperately to stop Clover as his reincarnated self—Farran still found it in him to be there for Clover in the end.
“Forgive me,” Clover breathed, looking up at the sky.
Whether he meant the words for Thames or Cordelia or Luce or all the world, no one would ever know.
Clover disintegrated to dust. Like a manuscript burnt to ashes, all of its words and thoughts and stories forever lost to the flame.
Swept away on a breeze, never to return.
Any trace of the magic he had stolen—from the keys, from the gods, from the souls he had bound to him—returned to the fountain in a murmuration of bright specks, free from their captor at last.
Everyone stood still as the gods breathed in their recovered power, appearing more solid than ever with their full divinity returned to them.
The silence that lingered was punctuated by the soft, teary words Emory and Luce were exchanging as they clung to each other, their clothes soaked through with blood.
At Baz’s side, Romie watched the tender scene with shining eyes, though something like remorse shadowed her features.
Baz turned to look at Kai but found the Nightmare Weaver hovering over Farran. Farran looked entirely stunned, kneeling in the ash where Clover had been. Tentatively, as if fighting against his better judgment, Kai rested a hand on Farran’s shoulder.
“He’s gone,” Kai said in a voice so soft Baz almost didn’t hear him. “It’s over now.”
Farran slowly lifted his face up to Kai, eyes red-rimmed and haunted.
He looked once more at the empty spot beside him, his breathing labored, his lip trembling, as if he were only now realizing that Clover had been defeated.
That this person who’d been such a fixture in not one of his lives, but two, was gone.
Not a person anymore, Baz reminded himself bitterly. A monstrous, soulless god who had wrought unspeakable destruction.
Farran seemed to come to the same conclusion. He nodded as if to convince himself, took hold of the hand Kai extended to him, and rose to his feet.
“If it’s over,” Farran said to no one in particular, “then why doesn’t it feel like it?”
He was right. The sea of ash was as quiet and desolate and ominous as ever. Clover was gone, but there was an evil that persisted, a feeling of decay that gnawed at the edges of Baz’s senses.
The ground beneath them lurched. A hole opened in the ash to reveal an endless darkness full of stars.
In the distance, a tear in the air itself through which they could see a battering sea and rotten vines and storms trying to claw their way into the godsworld.
It was like the godsworld was disintegrating before their eyes, pieces of the living realms and the sleeping realm breaking through.
Baz could see the familiar outline of Aldryn College through one of these openings—and the many faces pressed in windowpanes as students peered, wide-eyed, into the sea of ash.
“What’s happening?” Baz exclaimed. “I thought getting rid of Clover would fix everything!”
Even the gods looked stunned. The goddess of the moon leaned over the fountain, where the souls that had been appeased by Emory swirled and swirled, nearly overflowing past the lip of the fountain.
The goddess’s face paled. “It’s the fountain. It may have been replenished with Clover’s power, but it hasn’t been restored to its former glory.”
“That can’t be,” Luce said weakly as her daughter helped her to her feet. “Clover’s dead.”
“And I severed his link to the restless souls he was fueling himself with,” Emory added. “I healed them all, put them to rest.”
“Yet they remain stagnant in the fountain,” the goddess said. “They aren’t being reincarnated, and so the worlds aren’t being replenished with pure magic like they should.”
They had all thought that killing Clover would heal the worlds, return magic to its people. That it would make everything as it should be. But it didn’t. Clover’s death had fixed nothing.
The worlds seemed to be crumbling faster now, all fated to become ash. Almost as if Clover had put a curse on everyone: that if he should meet his end, then everything else must too.
Baz paused time just as the wave of chaos was about to hit them.
The vastness of this power made him falter with the threads of time, had him scrambling to contain more and more and more.
The tears in the fabric of the universe—the sleepscape sinkhole that had opened up at their feet and the dark pockets in the air through which the rest of the world poked through—they were all trying to expand, to consume the godsworld whole.
It was as if the universe itself were trying to shatter around them, water pushing against a dam, and Baz couldn’t hold it back, not as more and more force built behind the flood wall, threatening to burst.
“Clocks, this escalated quicker than I anticipated.”
Equilibris’s voice startled everyone as he sauntered up to them, looking for all the world like he was late for nothing more than a tea party.
This was not the energetic, frenzied god Baz had come to know, but someone who seemed to have given up entirely.
It was rather shocking, the difference between him and the other gods.
While the four gods of the living had an aura of divinity to them now that their power had been restored, Equilibris had never looked so human, as if his power were still dwindling—had been since fate was broken and the worlds were fused together.
He took one look at the chaos Baz was keeping frozen in time and shook his head with a mournful look, mouth downturned. “A pity it had to come to this.”
The god of the air narrowed their eyes at him. “And where have you been all this time, while we tried to stop it?”
“Languishing in his workshop, no doubt,” the sun god said gruffly. “Leaving us to suffer as always.”
Equilibris lifted a brow at the four of them. “Centuries we haven’t seen each other, and this is the reception I get?”
“You threw us into the abyss.”
“To keep you safe from Clover, yes. We’ve been over this before. It was never meant to be permanent. And here you stand, back in the godsworld with your power restored.”
“So what is this, then?” The goddess of the earth gestured to the fountain, to the sea of ash breaking at the seams. “Why is nothing fixed?”
“Because the magic that was in Clover has been twisted and tainted by being inside him. It may have been returned to the fountain, but it is no longer a pure source of power like it once was. The darkness from this magic will continue to spread across realms as it has.” Equilibris sighed.
“I told you all it would come to this. The chaos is too great to be defeated by anyone.”
“But you’re a god,” Baz spat. “Can’t you do anything?”
Equilibris met his gaze square on, something playing behind his eyes that Baz couldn’t decipher. “I told you you’d be begging me to reset the worlds in the end, didn’t I?”
The one thing the god of balance had always been designed to do: wipe clean the board should it ever come to this point. Restart the whole tapestry from scratch and pray that fate would be kinder the next time around.
“No,” Baz breathed. “There has to be another way.” He’d broken fate, damn it; he was not letting everything happen the way he had seen it play out.
“I have to agree with the boy,” the god of the sun grumbled. “To have gone through so much only to reach the same inevitable outcome as before…”
“Perhaps that is exactly why we should let Equilibris wipe clean the board,” the goddess of the moon said with bitter resignation.
“If eliminating Clover couldn’t restore our realms to their former glory, then starting anew may well be our only choice.
” She fixed Emory with a predatory stare.
“Of course, the Tidecaller would first need to die.”
The last remaining failsafe preventing Equilibris from resetting the worlds.
“That’s not going to happen,” Sidraeus seethed, moving in front of Emory. “There has to be another way to fix things.”
“There is,” Equilibris said slowly, “but it is not something we gods can do.” He motioned to all the dark rifts around them, these cracks of impossible power that Baz was trying to hold back.
“This chaos will spill across the realms of the living and sleeping until death and creation become so at odds with each other that they obliterate us all in a wink. Unless the magic that flows through the fountain is fixed. It needs to be purged of its darkness for it to flow properly again, and that darkness needs to be taken far away from here, to a place where things go to be unmade.”
The void.
The place beyond the abyss that was oblivion itself.
“But… how would that even be possible?” Baz asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” the god said with a gruff laugh. “You wrote the words yourself, Timespinner. Blood and bones and heart and soul, combined to keep chaos and death from spilling across all worlds.”
Baz blanched at the words from Song of the Drowned Gods.
The scholar, the witch, the warrior, and the guardian had become the drowned gods, joining forces to face this darkness at the center of all things, just as the gods before them had done for centuries.
A life for a life. The cycle starting anew.
The sea of ash needed its keepers to guard the deadly beast within.
Blood and bones and heart and soul, combined to keep chaos and death from spilling across worlds.
His gaze snapped to Sidraeus, who was frowning at the fountain as if he were slowly putting the pieces together; then to his sister—Atheia’s vessel—whose brown eyes were open wide, her mouth agape, as she understood.
The god of balance confirmed Baz’s inkling when he said: “The only ones who can contain such chaos are the two beings who were made for such a thing. Sidraeus, the ferrier of souls, embodiment of sleep and death—and Atheia, who embodies life and healing.”
As above, so below.
There was no way to properly restore the realms, to undo the chaos spilling across them, so the two deities had to take it with them into the void, the dark beyond stars.
Jumping into the void would unmake them. But it would also unmake the chaos. Restore balance. Wipe clean the slate without actually obliterating the worlds and everyone in them, as the god was compelled to do.
“So,” the god said, clapping his hands together. “These are your options. You either fix this mess by taking the chaos out of here and into the void, thus restoring balance… or the Tidecaller has to die so I can reset the clock, so to speak, and start everything anew.”
An impossible decision, here at the end of all things.