Chapter 59 Emory
“AS WITH MOST STORIES, THIS one begins with the gods.”
The Shadow—Sidraeus—sat up straight as he settled into his story.
“The place you refer to as the Deep is the realm of gods, paradise locked behind a divine gate. It’s where the moon, the earth, the sun, and the air convene as gods.
And while this godsworld is the seat of their power, the center of the universe from which all magic flows, each god watches over a world of their own. A world they created in their image.
“There is a fifth god who reigns supreme over the others.
The god of balance. His domain is the space between worlds—the sleepscape, as you call it.
He was made to keep the balance between all things, and that meant keeping each world separate, never allowed to blend into one another despite the shared magic that coursed through them.
The gods could rarely be bothered to leave their godsworld, and so they created messengers to do their bidding.
Divine beings to help them keep this great balance between worlds.
“The first messenger was Atheia. She answered to the four gods who watched over the lunar, earth, solar, and air worlds—the realms of the living. Atheia’s task was that of creation. She was a visionary, an artist who molded magic in ways not even the gods themselves had imagined possible.
“The second messenger was Sidraeus, who served the fifth god, and so his domain was the sleepscape.
The realm of dreams, death, and everything in between.
He was tasked with ferrying the souls of the dead across the sleepscape and into the godsworld.
He was not allowed into the godsworld proper, nor was Atheia, and so he did not know what awaited these souls.
His job was to alleviate their fears as he brought them to this final resting place.
“Atheia and Sidraeus could only exist in the realms they were created for. This meant that Atheia could not come into the sleeping realm—at least not physically, though her magic did allow her to access it in dreams, visions, and the like—while Sidraeus could not go into the four living worlds. There was one exception to this: the only way Atheia could jump from one world to the next was with Sidraeus’s assistance crossing the space between said worlds.
This was possible only when all four worlds were in perfect alignment.
When the same eclipse happened at the same time in each world, which, back then, happened once every year.
“Time does not flow for gods the same way it does for mortals.
Atheia and Sidraeus lived like this for centuries, millennia, but for them it felt like a few years only.
They were young, and with youth came rebellion.
Seeing each other once a year was at once a curse and a blessing as they tried to make sense of their respective existences.
“Atheia grew tired of being lesser than the gods, forced to follow all these rigid rules the gods themselves didn’t abide by.
She saw herself as worthy of their godlike status.
After all, she was the hand of these four gods she served, a conduit for their power.
Magic existed in each world because of her; she was the one to shape it in her gods’ images, to share it with the people of each world.
They worshipped her. She was the saint that would answer their prayers, the divine breath that allowed them to use magic.
They called her many things: The Tides. The Sculptress.
The Forger. The Celestials. Whatever shape she took, Atheia was seen as a creator, a dreamer. A giver of life and possibility.
“Sidraeus, on the other hand, was never allowed to dream or create. He ruled over endings and fear and death, the antithesis to dreaming and possibility, which is the very fabric of magic, of life itself. Sidraeus watched Atheia create and interact with these humans in the prime of their lives, and felt so alone in the sleepscape, so burdened by the rigid constraints he was made to live within by his own god and by this heavy task he had of ferrying the dead to their final resting place. He wanted to know what it was like to be out there, in the world of the living, and be part of something more than sleep and death. He wanted to create his own kind of magic, to carve a new path for himself, to be something more than what he’d been made for.
“This, Atheia and Sidraeus realized, was something they had in common: a desire to go beyond their station—and to discover each other’s worlds.
To exist together in them. What started out as curiosity for each other became something more, a visceral need to know each other for more than the fleeting moments they were allowed to spend together. They fell in love.”
There was no warmth to his voice, only a chilling sort of distance. As if he were recounting someone else’s life instead of his own. Sidraeus blinked as if realizing this. He stared off into the middle distance, a small line creasing his brow.
“One day, Atheia found a way for me to come into the realm of the living, on the eclipse that saw our realms aligned. I could only come into this world as a nightmare version of myself, a creature of the sleeping realm given temporary form, which Atheia pulled from her dreaming.”
A smile played on his lips. He was no longer just telling the story, Emory thought; he was reliving it. And in that smile, she saw the boy he might have been once, the inquisitive young messenger to what sounded like loveless gods.
“I was enamored with this world,” Sidraeus said with affection.
“And though I couldn’t visit it as my full self, only as a being of shadow, I was corporeal enough that my presence created magic of my own.
A new strain of magic inspired by Atheia’s, something to act as a balance to what she’d created.
It was the missing piece this world needed to form a true masterpiece.
The kind of power that went beyond what Atheia had created in any of her worlds, because it combined both her power and mine into something entirely new. ”
“The Tidecallers,” Emory murmured. The very first Eclipse-born.
Sidraeus inclined his head. “We wanted to share this new strand of magic across realms, not just this one. We were still so limited, confined to our respective borders. Yes, I could come into the realms of the living, but not freely, not as myself, and only on eclipses. And now that I’d tasted a sliver of what the realms of the living could be like, I wanted to know them in full.
I wanted to create more than the Tidecallers.
I wanted to see other worlds and create something there too. ”
Emory lifted a brow. “That’s a lot of wanting for someone who called it a pathetic, mortal emotion.”
Wry amusement danced in Sidraeus’s eyes. “I never said I was impervious to it. My younger, more impressionable self certainly wasn’t.”
“How old are you now?” Emory asked tentatively, almost afraid to know the answer.
“In human years, I’m nearly as old as the worlds themselves.” He tilted his head, considering. “Though in terms of the divine, I suppose I wouldn’t be much older than you.”
The thought made Emory flustered. She was suddenly very aware of his gaze on her. Clearing her throat, she said, “So you and Atheia wanted to expand your freedom.”
“Yes. We knew the Tidecallers were the key to that dream, because they alone had the power to cross freely between worlds.
Unlike Atheia and me, the Tidecallers did not have to wait for eclipses to move between the realms of the living and the dead.
They were the eclipse itself. Through them, Atheia and I began to travel more often, a secret we kept from our gods.
We gathered the best and brightest to us, an order of humans with whom we shared our knowledge and power and desire to break through boundaries.
“But this ability to cross worlds was still limited to Tidecallers. We wanted everyone to be able to travel between realms; ourselves, yes, but mortals, too. An impossible goal that would threaten the gods’ divine balance.
This angered Atheia and me. If we were gods, we would share our power and make all mortals as limitless as the Tidecallers. ”
He seemed lost in his memories for a moment.
“I don’t know what changed. One day, Atheia suggested we stop, telling me I should return to the sleeping realm and take my Tidecallers with me.
She feared the gods were onto us. But I refused to abandon our goal.
I refused to return to the grim existence I’d been confined to, void of dreams and creation.
I wanted to fight back, take a stand, make the gods see that what we were striving for was just and right.
And if they wouldn’t listen, I was ready to wrest their very power from their hands. ”
His gaze grew dark, murderous. “Atheia betrayed me to the gods before I had the chance.
She played the remorseful sinner and painted me as the vengeful rogue that needed to be stopped.
The god of balance imprisoned me in the sleeping realm and stripped me of my true form, locking it away so that even in this realm that was mine, I was formless.
Just another umbra like those who have always dwelled there.
“When the gods learned of the Tidecallers’ existence, they saw their power as something that was never meant to exist, power that skewed the balance of the universe and threatened their own godhood.
The gods saw only one solution: to restore balance, they would have to seal the doors between worlds and wipe clean the magic that had created this imbalance in the first place.
And so, the gods killed all Tidecallers, sealing the doors with their spilled blood. ”
Emory felt the world tip beneath her, her own blood rushing to her head. Sidraeus didn’t give her the time to consider what it all meant.