Chapter 15 #2
"Classy lady," I muttered sarcastically. "Really knows how to accessorize for world domination. I bet she gets her fashion advice from the same place she gets her moral guidance. Straight from the depths of hell. No offense," I told Aidon.
What made my stomach drop into my shoes wasn't the stolen artifacts, disturbing as they were. It was seeing the dozen other witches arranged around the chamber's perimeter. They had their hands raised as they channeled their power into Lyra's ritual. She wasn't acting alone anymore.
"Your children are conducting magical surveillance through the Earth itself,” Artemis blurted. “They're using the cleansed ley lines as a scrying network. It’s brilliant."
"It's not theoretically possible," Thalia murmured as she watched with awe.
I turned wide eyes from her to Artemis, but it was Nyx who replied. "Divine children don't follow normal rules," Nyx replied matter-of-factly. "Especially not when they're motivated by the need to protect their family."
"Great," I muttered. "I'm going to give birth to magical super-spies. That's going to make bedtime stories interesting."
The emotional feedback through the connection was nauseating.
It felt like swimming through someone else's psyche. It wasn’t my babies.
This one was full of broken glass and poisonous snakes.
Pure ambition mixed with decades of resentment was wrapped around a core of desperate loneliness.
Inexplicably, it made my chest ache with unexpected sympathy.
"She's terrified," I announced, surprised by the revelation. "Under all that power and rage, she's absolutely terrified of being alone again. It feels like she's a scared kid hiding behind a mask made of stolen magic."
"Don’t let that soften you. Fear makes people unpredictable," Nyx advised. "Although if we understand what she fears most, we can use that against her."
"What exactly does she fear most?" Artemis asked, leaning forward with obvious tactical interest.
With a shrug, I closed my eyes and let myself sink deeper into the emotional feedback.
It wasn’t easy because every instinct was screaming at me to disconnect from the psychic sewage flowing through the connection.
"All I can see is being left behind and forgotten.
Everyone she's ever cared about has either died or abandoned her, so now she's convinced that the only way to never be alone is to have enough power that she'll never need anyone again. "
"That is almost disappointing in how mundane it is," Asterion said with the kind of clinical detachment that came from millennia of observing human behavior at its worst. "She’s used emotional isolation as a defense mechanism against further loss."
"It doesn't excuse what she's doing," I said firmly, opening my eyes to glare at the projection. "Plenty of people have abandonment issues without deciding to steal magical power and murder innocent people."
"Agreed," Artemis said. "Her motivations excuse nothing."
The projection shifted again. The gods stepped back and sneered at the display like it had just grown fangs and started hissing. Lyra was transforming herself. Her human form was dissolving. She was being rebuilt into something that felt a little like a god. At least that was how the power felt.
"Oh, that's just wrong on so many levels," I said as I watched the transformation process. "She's trying to become a vessel for the original sisters. She is trying to merge them all into herself so she becomes a goddess."
"It’s the ultimate parasitic spell," Artemis said, her face pale with horror. "She's trying to become them while erasing them at the same time."
"This explains why she needs the artifacts," Asterion pointed out even as his expression grew increasingly disgusted. "She's using them as anchors to maintain coherence during the transformation. Without them, attempting to merge these magical essences would tear her apart from the inside."
"She's moving," I announced when I felt the shift through my bond with the babies. It was all I could do not to ask them to whisk me away to Olympus. The babies would be safe, but no one else would be. "And she's bringing her entire operation here."
"Here?" Jean-Marc squeaked, his voice going up about three octaves. "But why would she come here? This is literally the most heavily defended location on the continent."
Lyra wasn't just planning to force the eclipse. She was going to put me into labor. She was planning to use the birth itself as a power source. She was going to channel the magical energy released during delivery to fuel her transformation.
"She can’t become them without the moment I give birth to these babies," I said grimly, one hand protectively covering my belly.
"The instant when their power transitions from potential to active is the thing that will allow her to become a god.
That's when she transcends into her true glory. That’s her description. Not mine."
"Over my dead body," Aidon snarled. His power sharpened and gained enough weight to make the deck boards creak.
"That might be exactly what she's counting on," Artemis said, her silver eyes blazing. "She’s going to create an artificial eclipse, and with it comes the convergence of all possibilities. What happens in the next few hours will reshape the magical world."
"No pressure or anything," I muttered.
A low harmonic tone resonated through the Earth itself, making my bones vibrate. "She's almost here," I said simply. The parasitic bonds showed Lyra's floating sanctuary breaching the surface somewhere like some nightmarish island. "And she's brought friends."
"How long until she arrives?" Aidon asked as his power wrapped protectively around me and my kids.
"Maybe twenty minutes," Jean-Marc said, frantically calculating. "Thirty at the outside."
"The artificial eclipse will reach totality in half that time," Nyx announced as she looked up at the darkening sky. "After that, the barriers between dimensions will be tissue-thin."
"It's time to show this evil witch exactly what happens when you mess with our family," I snarled as I twined my fingers with Aidon’s.