Chapter 66 Emory
EMORY HAD JUST SAVED HER mother from the brink of death—could barely still believe how close she’d come to losing her—and now her best friend was talking about flinging herself into the void.
“I accept this fate in Atheia’s place,” Romie repeated in the wake of everyone’s dumbfounded silence. “If this is what’s needed to save everyone from oblivion, so be it. As Atheia’s vessel, I’ll do it. I accept.”
“No,” Baz breathed, shaking his head. Every muscle in him seemed to strain against the weight of the world, the chaos he was holding back as he slowed down time. “I can’t let you do this, Ro.” He looked at Emory with unshed tears. “I can’t see either of you die.”
Yet that was the choice Equilibris had presented them with, and Emory couldn’t see another way out of this mess. She wasn’t willing to die only for the worlds to be wiped clean, for everyone she loved to stop existing. What would be the point?
But the alternative was unthinkable. For the worlds and everyone in them to survive, two people she couldn’t fathom parting with needed to die.
She looked at Sidraeus, his features set in valiant determination, and knew his choice would echo Romie’s. He had just laid down his life for them all and had been spared by the runes on his skin, the bargain struck between him and the Tidecallers. No such bargain would save him now.
He met her gaze with such peaceful resignation, it speared through her heart like a knife. I am not afraid of death, Tidecaller, his voice echoed in her mind. There is peace in endings, and if mine allows for survival to flourish from it, then it must be done.
He accepted his fate. Atheia’s, too. And while Emory wanted to beg him not to, wanted selfishly to keep him here by her side, this deity who had been her tormentor, her ally, her friend—who had found her in the dark and shown her there was beauty in it—she knew there would be no convincing him.
It was his choice to make, and she understood it.
She accepted it, even though it broke her heart to do so.
But she would not accept such a fate for Romie.
Sidraeus looked at her as if he knew exactly what she was about to do. He stopped her roughly by the arm as she took a step forward.
“Don’t do this,” he said in that low voice of his. His eyes blared with the wild beauty of the eclipse.
Emory touched his face, smiling through the blur of tears. “You’ve sacrificed yourself for me time and time again. I’m not letting you do it again.” In her mind, she said, We’re accustomed to the dark, you and I. If you’re not afraid of it, neither am I.
His eyes closed, his cheek pressing into her hand. Accepting her choice just as she had his.
There was a great tremble around them as the chaos temporarily broke through Baz’s defenses. He struggled to keep it contained outside of time, to keep it frozen, but the strain on his face, the way he was leaning against Kai, so weak from holding back this impossible thing…
“Time is running out,” the god of balance said, looking between Emory, Sidraeus, and Romie. “What will it be?”
Without thinking twice on it, Emory reached for Romie, pulling her friend in a tight embrace. “I love you, Ro.”
Romie’s arms wrapped around her middle. “I love you, too. But you understand why I have to do this, right? You dying would accomplish nothing. But Atheia and Sidraeus…”
“I know.” Emory held her tighter, not willing to let go, not wanting Romie to see the tears in her eyes and guess her intentions. “They have to go. But that doesn’t mean you have to.”
“What—”
Romie gasped and sagged against Emory as magic rushed through them. She shoved out of Emory’s arms, confusion stark on her face. “What the hell are you doing?”
“It’s all right,” Emory whispered. “This is how it has to be.”
With the power of the previous keys still coursing through her, Emory sought to separate Atheia from her vessel.
Being her vessel should never have been Romie’s burden to bear, but Emory’s. That’s what Keiran had wanted from her from the start. That’s what Emory had expected for herself too. But Romie had been forced to take on that role instead.
Emory, Emory.
Romie, Romie.
Emory and Romie. Their names practically an anagram, as if their destinies had always been entwined. Interchangeable, in a way. Emory, who thought she’d be the Tides’ vessel. Romie, who had become just that. And Emory who would now take Romie’s place when it counted most.
She had sacrificed parts of herself to save Romie before, but this wasn’t the same.
This felt right. Because she knew, had suspected for some time now, ever since they’d come to her in a dream, that Aspen, Tol, and Orfeyi weren’t entirely dead.
There was a way to restore them, she was sure of it.
But not if Romie flung herself into the void, carrying them inside her—dooming them, unknowingly perhaps, to a truer death, one that could not be undone.
If Emory restored the keys and took Atheia’s essence into herself—made herself into the vessel she was always destined to become—then she would be saving four people she cared about, and an entire universe in the process.
She could feel the magic working, powered not only by the three keys she’d taken into herself to defeat Clover—the original bone, heart, and soul—but her own mother’s blood, too, thus completing the four-part symphony that was Atheia, all four keys swirling inside her in an echo of the power that was inside Romie.
She knew, though, that by unbinding Romie, Aspen, Tol, and Orfeyi from Atheia’s essence, Atheia would die. She would go back to being a splintered thing, only this time, she would be gone for good.
Unless Emory took Atheia’s essence into herself. She was a Tidecaller, after all; her ability was to call on the Tides’ magic, to wield it as her own. And so she called on Atheia’s power, her very essence, and consumed it.
She drew in a sharp breath as it settled inside her. It was ice cold in her veins. It was strength in her bones. It was fire in her heart and a gentle wind blowing through her soul.
With that divine power, she gave the keys back their lives.
They had never been dead to begin with, had only been fused with Romie, kept tethered to her by their lifelines.
She could see them suddenly: all of them surrounding Romie, connected to her pulse points by shimmering threads.
Their lifelines tying them to the blood that coursed through everything like water.
So Emory called on her oldest magic and begged it to heal her friends.
Those threads shimmered brighter as Aspen, Tol, and Orfeyi solidified, going from translucent, ghostlike things, to flesh-and-bone living, breathing beings. And Romie—Romie’s eyes were a definitive brown once more, not a single trace left of the cruel deity she had housed.
The keys were no longer keys. They were human, entirely themselves and so very much alive. And the deity whose essence Emory had taken inside her raged, and cried, and finally quieted, molding herself to Emory’s insides.
For a terrible second, Emory heard Keiran’s voice in her mind, telling her she would become the Tides’ vessel and finally be rid of the Shadow’s stain inside her.
And she’d thought, perhaps, that taking Atheia’s essence into her would indeed unmake her identity.
She feared that she would lose being what she had now accepted she was: Eclipse-born, a Tidecaller, wielding the magic Sidraeus had created against all odds.
But no. She felt oddly complete, like this was what she’d been barreling toward all this time. And she didn’t feel any less Eclipse-born than she did before. If anything, Atheia’s magic transformed inside her to fit her identity.
The Tides. The Tidecaller.
Emory met Sidraeus’s gaze. The way he looked at her made it clear he saw her, not Atheia. He knew she was still the same. That she’d molded Atheia’s essence into her own, until Atheia was only another sort of magic pulsing through her veins, nothing more.
“Emory.” Her mother looked at her with utter devastation. “What have you done?”
The words to make her understand escaped Emory.
How could she tell her mother that this was, in a sense, her way of repaying Luce for the sacrifice she’d made all those years ago—leaving her child, interrupting her whole life to journey into the past and across worlds and into the pits of hell itself, all in an attempt to save not only Emory but all the worlds, too.
Now it was Emory’s turn to do so.
Heart fracturing around her resolve, Emory drew Luce in for a tight embrace. “I wish we’d had time to know each other better,” she whispered against her mother’s ear, inhaling the scent of her, committing everything about her to memory.
When Luce pulled back, holding Emory’s face in her hands, she didn’t argue, didn’t try to sway Emory from her decision; it was too late to do so anyway.
Through tears, Luce mustered a smile and said, “But I do know you, my brave, incredible girl. You’re everything I’d always imagined you’d be, and so much more. ”
Emory gave her a tearful smile of her own. “So are you. Take care of Henry, will you? Tell him—tell him I love him, and I’m sorry I had to leave him like this.”
Luce nodded. “I will.”
Her mother the sailor and her father the lighthouse keeper. In so many ways, Emory was the sea that had brought them back to each other. And now, like any tide, she would ebb outward again, leaving them both on a shore she wasn’t destined for.
Before her resolve could shatter, she turned away from her mother, meeting Equilibris’s gaze. Making it clear what choice she’d made.
The thought crossed Emory’s mind that she had done what Clover had tried to, in a sense.
She had imbibed the essence of a god. Did that make her a deity?
Perhaps, in another time, she would have let herself become drunk off this knowledge, would have let herself sink into this deep well of power inside her.
But she was changed. She didn’t want such power. She had never needed it.
Now it was only a burden to bear, at least until the void unmade her and this power inside her and the chaos that threatened to destroy all the worlds and those she loved.
It was her sacrifice to make.
But not hers alone.
As Sidraeus took her hand, the fear that had started to take root inside her receded. They would face the void together, and that made it bearable.