Chapter 43 Emory
EMORY KNEW THE TRAIL OF blood wouldn’t lead the knights to the Night Bringer. At first she wasn’t sure how she knew this, but as she moved away from her friends, she felt it. A tug inside her, calling her forth. A sense of calm in the chaos.
There was also blood on the floor leading away from the more obvious trail left by the ursus magnus.
It led to a dark, damp cellar, the door to which was ajar.
Emory slipped inside, and there was the demon, as she suspected.
Hiding in plain sight after duping the knights into believing he had left.
What his plan might have been, Emory didn’t know.
He looked like an injured animal come to die, slumped as he was against the wall, his hand clutching the bloody wound in his middle, his face drawn and pale.
Still, he managed to give her a withering stare. “If you’ve come to finish me off, I’d rather we get on with it.”
Emory hovered by the door, keeping a careful distance even though she was fairly certain he couldn’t hurt her in this state. “Tell me who you are.”
He laughed, a wet, sinister sound. “Did you not hear them clamoring for my head? I am the villain they made me. The Night Bringer that darkens their world.”
“But that’s not all you are, is it? You said you had many names once.”
“And I said I did not wish to recall them.” He coughed up blood, wincing in pain.
Emory pushed off the door. “Fine. I was going to offer to heal you, but never mind. I hope that body rots with you inside it.”
“Wait.” Keiran studied her. “Why do you insist on this when I suspect you already know the answer?”
Because it was impossible, she thought. Because she needed to hear him confirm what had already taken root in her, what felt inevitable now that she’d seen the influence he had on her magic, the way every dark thing in her quieted in his presence.
The words he’d told her when she’d first fainted echoed in the chambers of her mind: I am that which dwells in the dark between stars. Words she’d pondered ever since.
And as the demon looked at her now with Keiran’s face and those unnatural eyes, she knew her suspicion had to be true. Black and silver and gold. They were the eyes of the Sculptress’s demonic counterpart, of the Night Bringer who’d destroyed the Sun Forger.
Of the first eclipse to shadow the world and bring the Tides to their ruin.
“You’re the Shadow,” she said.
His head tilted back against the wall as a faint, knowing smile played on his lips. “In the flesh.” A wince of pain. “Well, not quite.”
Emory’s heart raced. All this time, she’d had it wrong. He was no demon. He was divinity. The first Eclipse-born to ever walk the earth. The deity she owed her very magic to.
“How can this be?” she asked. “You’re supposed to have been sent to the Deep—the sea of ash. Wherever our souls go when we die.”
A storm brewed in his eyes. “No. I was imprisoned in the sleeping realm, banished to the seams between worlds with no way out. Severed from my own body, my true form. Then this empty vessel came along,” he said, motioning to Keiran’s failing, bleeding body, “dead and useless to me until life was breathed into him again as if by some miracle. In his body, I could disguise my way out of the sleeping realm. So I seized my chance and slipped from my prison back into the world of the living.” He coughed up blood again, pressing a hand to his wound.
“If you’re the Shadow,” Emory said, “why are you so…”
“Fragile?” he provided with a gruff laugh. “I forgot how useless mortal bodies are.”
“Could you not jump into another body—a stronger one?”
One that didn’t stir such complicated feelings in her.
“What a brilliant idea I couldn’t possibly have considered already,” he said wryly. “Let me muster up all the power at my disposal and saunter into another vessel like it’s nothing.”
A bloody cough drove his point home.
“I’m assuming that means you also can’t vanish into shadows or travel through that liminal space of yours?” Emory asked, unable to keep the gloating out of her voice.
He glared at her. “So long as I wear your dead lover’s vulnerable skin, I am doomed to remain half myself, my abilities fading with his strength.” At her visible flinch, a cruel smile lifted his mouth. “Did I hit a nerve?”
Emory didn’t give him the satisfaction of a reply.
It was ironic, she thought, that the thing Keiran hated most should be what possessed his body.
He had wanted to make Emory a vessel for the Tides to bring about the destruction of all Eclipse-born, only for him to be made a vessel for the one who had created Eclipse-born in the first place.
She didn’t want to imagine what the full might of the Shadow’s power would be if he were in his true form. Clearly, Keiran’s body didn’t care for the divinity inhabiting it.
“Now, I believe you mentioned healing me.”
Emory considered him. How weak he appeared, not the demon or the deity or even the once-confident boy whose face he wore, but a revenant.
She wondered how long the Reanimator’s magic would last—if perhaps there was an expiration date to this reanimated corpse slowly deteriorating with the Shadow trapped inside it.
“Maybe I should leave you here to die,” she said. “You tried to kill my friends, after all.” Even though he’d saved her.
“Friends,” he repeated gruffly. “If you knew what those friends of yours carry, what she did to your kind, you might not be so quick to protect them.”
“She?”
“The Tides. The Sculptress. The Forger. The Celestials. If I have many names, then she has more. Like me, she is but one deity echoed across worlds. But when she splintered herself into pieces to keep her magic alive, those pieces of her lived on in those marked by her favor. Blood, bones, heart, soul. Always yearning to be put back together. That is what lives on in your friends.”
The pieces of her he had tried to kill.
You deserved to be ripped apart, and I will ensure that you never be put whole again.
Emory stepped back from him as realization hit.
In the myth she knew, the Tides were said to have left their shores to trap the Shadow in the Deep after he sought to take power from them.
Whatever truth there was to the story—a story that existed across worlds, just told through a different lens, with differently named gods—it was clear the Shadow wanted revenge.
That he would stop at nothing to destroy the pieces of this multifaceted deity who had trapped him.
Pieces that called to each other through a song they alone could hear.
A song Emory no longer heard. At least, not in the same way that Romie and Aspen and Tol heard it.
All this time, they’d thought Emory was the scholar on the shores—the blood to Aspen’s bones and Tol’s heart and the guardian’s soul.
To Romie’s dreaming, that fifth part the epilogue mentioned.
Yet Romie was the one who shared an inexplicable bond with the other keys, not Emory.
Romie was the scholar on the shores who’d first heard the song to other worlds, not her.
And it was Romie who had true lunar magic—the power of Quies, the Waning Moon Tide, running through her veins—while Emory was a product of the eclipse. Of the Shadow.
“I don’t have a piece of her in me,” she said with bleak realization, more to herself than to the Shadow. “I’m not a key.”
“You’re a Tidecaller. That means you alone have the power to turn a key in its lock, and so much more you don’t yet know.”
Tidecaller, Tidethief.
But it wasn’t only the Tides Emory had stolen from. The magic that had called to her on the ley line had been the power of the Tides and the Sculptress and the Forger, pieces of a single deity entrenched in the friends whose life force she had gorged herself on.
She assessed the Shadow. “Is that why you saved me back there?” Because her magic made her his, perhaps a weapon he might use against his rival.
He seemed disgusted at the reminder. “A moment of weakness on my part, influenced by this miserable mortal’s lingering feelings for you.”
“I don’t believe you.” Whether a part of Keiran remained alive or not in there, she doubted he would have cared whether she lived. “You didn’t just take a sword for me. You saved me from myself—from what the ley line does to me. How?”
“Maybe I should have let you die, if only to save myself from these incessant questions.”
“You need me alive.” For what, she wasn’t sure yet.
“And it looks like you need me to control your magic. Heal me, and I might find it in myself to help you.”
And damn her, she considered it. He was the Eclipse god, after all—did she really want to make an enemy of the entity she owed her magic to?
He alone seemed to keep the darkness that came from her magic at bay.
He alone might help her understand her Tidecaller power and how it related to the keys.
The very keys whose magics she kept tapping into every time she stepped on the ley line.
Voices suddenly rose outside the cellar—too close for comfort. Emory held her breath as she listened.
“Sir, the blood trail was a decoy. We found the ursus magnus but not the Night Bringer.”
“Did you slay the beast?”
“Of course.”
“The Night Bringer can’t have gone far with that wound he suffered. Search the Chasm.”
It would be only a matter of time before someone spotted the blood that led to the cellar. Emory already had one foot out the door when the Shadow growled, “You cannot leave me here like this.”
She stopped, considered. She did need him. But she couldn’t trust him not to hurt her friends.
Nor could she stand to keep hurting them herself.
“Over here!”
A golden-armored knight had spotted her and was barreling toward the cellar, his sword at the ready. Emory made a dash for it, but not before sending a wave of healing magic toward the Shadow. The last she saw of him was his surprise as he glanced down at Keiran’s mending body.
He could deal with the knights on his own.
So long as he was alive, she could find him in the liminal space, get answers from him there. She could only hope he wouldn’t be able to get to her friends.
A dragon’s roar rent the tunnels, making the entire Chasm shake with the force of it.
Emory ran toward it, recognizing it as the direction Tol had said they were going.
She picked up the pace as she heard someone scream and knew it was one of her friends, suddenly hating herself for having left them behind in the first place.
She got to the dragon’s cell in time to glimpse white-hot flames spewing out of the dragon’s mouth, the heat nearly knocking her back.
The beast seemed larger than it was before, and she realized it was no longer chained to the walls.
The ceiling above it had come down, letting in a curtain of sunlight.
She spotted a glint of golden armor scurrying away from the flames.
Swords clashed as Tol fought the Knight Commander at the edge of the inferno.
The rest of her friends were nowhere in sight, and she feared they might have gotten caught in the dragon’s flames or trampled beneath its feet or stuck under the rubble from the collapsed ceiling.
“Emory!”
Relief and confusion swept through her. The voice came from the dragon’s back—where Romie, Aspen, Nisha, Virgil, and Vera all sat astride it.
It is time for us to go now.
Emory blinked incomprehensibly at the voice in her mind. Tol suddenly rushed to her side, sword still in hand, the Knight Commander knocked out on the floor behind him. “Don’t fight it!” he screamed.
Before Emory could make sense of his words, the dragon’s talons closed around her and Tol.
Then it jumped toward the skies, unfurling its wings to carry them off to freedom.