Chapter 67 Emory
CORNUS CLOVER GAVE A POLITE smile, seeming pleased with himself that someone recognized him. “Excellent, we can skip the introductions, then.”
“How is this possible?” Vera asked with wide eyes as she took in her supposed ancestor.
Clover looked no older than his midtwenties. But he’d existed two hundred years ago. He should have been dead, not looking like that, alive in the here and now.
“Good genes,” Clover said with a shrug and a slanted smile, “and a bit of luck. Time in the godsworld doesn’t flow quite the same.”
“The godsworld?” Romie repeated. “All this time, you were in the sea of ash?”
Clover’s eyes fell on Romie, then Aspen, then Tol. “You must be the heroes of the story I’ve been waiting for. Scholar. Witch. Warrior… and the Tidecaller who tore down the door that kept us apart.”
He spoke that last title like a prayer as he looked at Emory. She remembered that Clover himself was believed to have been a Tidecaller—that he was, in fact, her own flesh and blood.
Someone like her.
Someone who understood her power.
The same thoughts seemed to be echoed in Clover’s gaze.
“You look so very much like someone I knew,” he said, an emotion she couldn’t place in his voice.
But he seemed to remember himself and squared his shoulders, smoothing his suit.
“Shall we get on with it?” At their blank stares, he motioned to the door.
“Saving the worlds. Restoring the balance of things. Is that not what you came here for? What you were called here to help fix?”
“Wait, back up,” Romie said with a confused expression. “How are you even here?”
“You already know the story. The scholar on the shores who travels through worlds and gets himself stuck in the sea of ash at the last, doomed alongside his otherworldly comrades to oversee the damned in the Deep.” Clover motioned to himself with a sad flourish, his mouth twisting in a frown.
“I am that scholar. But my comrades from other worlds… they didn’t make it.
I’ve been trapped alone in the godsworld for so long, waiting for the next set of keys to be called.
And here you are. Together, we can replenish the fountain of the gods and stop this blight on the worlds. ”
“He’s lying.”
Sidraeus’s ecliptic eyes, intent on Clover, flared dangerously. Clover turned to him like he hadn’t noticed him before. His expression darkened, the power in his veins rippling black and silver and gold as if in answer to Sidraeus’s own godly power.
“I sense magic in you.” Clover squinted as if he were trying to see who hid beneath Keiran’s mortal face. “Who are you?”
“I am the Shadow you once worshipped. The deity your Tidecaller magic comes from.”
“So we’re all here, then.” Clover sounded delighted. “The splintered parts of Atheia and the runaway soul of Sidraeus. I wondered why I couldn’t sense you in the sleeping realm.”
“What do you want?” Sidraeus seethed.
Clover raised a brow. “The same thing you do: to bring Atheia back. Is that not how you’ll be able to regain your true form? The gods and their sense of humor, ensuring balance would always be kept.”
Emory frowned, trying to make sense of Clover’s words. “What is he talking about?”
Sidraeus avoided her eye.
Clover looked between the two of them. “He didn’t tell you?
The only way Sidraeus can regain his true form is if the pieces of Atheia are brought back together again.
Of course, the gods failed to imagine the doors would ever be reopened, so they never thought you would get this close to being truly freed from your prison in the sleeping realm. ”
“How do you know all this?” Sidraeus asked.
“I’ve been in a cage of my own for these past centuries. But the godsworld proved fruitful at least. An opportunity to gain both knowledge and power through the fountain of divine magic that flows there. Well, flowed.”
Replenish the fountain, he’d said. Meaning it had dried up. All its magic depleted.
Emory’s thoughts raced as she watched the power rippling from Clover in odd bursts and clouds. Power, she realized, that echoed each of the living realms.
Power he might have drawn from the keys and kept for himself.
Emory took a step backward. “You’re the one at the root of all this sickness spreading through worlds, aren’t you? The reason the ley lines are corrupted. Because you took all the magic from the fountain and corrupted it for the rest of us.”
Clover squared his shoulders. “I did what Sidraeus and Atheia failed to do. I took power from the gods and made myself into divinity.”
It hadn’t made sense to her, why the rot would have set in so quickly when she opened the doors, if these same doors had been previously opened by Clover in the past. The doors being sealed by the gods might have limited magic, made it slowly die, but that didn’t explain why the ley lines felt corrupt.
Though if Clover had tainted it somehow…
if whatever meager power trickled from the fountain was not divine but monstrous…
“That power was never yours to take,” Sidraeus growled.
“You’re right. I suppose it was yours first, wasn’t it? And you would have oh so generously shared this power with mortals, or so you claim.”
“I wouldn’t have stolen it all for myself like you did.”
Clover dipped his chin in what looked like remorse.
“I can admit I made a mistake there. That’s why the power of the gods is festering in my body.
Why I need to replenish the fountain. I was foolish when I first traveled through worlds and didn’t know how to control myself on the ley line.
I took and took every last drop of power from the keys, unable to stop.
Constantly craving more.” He eyed Emory.
“You’re a Tidecaller. You’ve felt it, haven’t you, this unquenchable thirst inside you, the constant pull of Atheia’s power? ”
Emory stared at him, horrified. Was this what would have become of her if she’d kept hurting her friends by gorging herself on their magic?
“With the power of Atheia that I imbibed and the magic of Sidraeus coursing through my blood,” Clover continued, “I tapped into the fountain itself, using up all of the power of the gods until there was nothing left.”
That must be why he’d been able to tap into the fountain without burning out completely like Sidraeus’s Tidecallers had: if he’d leeched the magic from the original keys he’d traveled with, then he’d had both the power of life and death inside him.
Just like Emory did earlier when she blew the door open. Power to rival gods.
“But why?” Romie asked. “What do you want with that kind of power?”
Clover seemed to think about it. “You know, it started off as wanting to help my fellow Eclipse-born. To create more Tidecallers, so that everyone could know the kind of limitless power that we have access to. I believed the only way to do that was to bring back the Tides and the Shadow. To combine the magic of death and nightmares with that of creation and dreams. But as I crossed through worlds, I discovered they were both to blame for the closure of doors. That they’d been willing to sacrifice the Tidecallers to the gods.
Why would I bring back deities who could just as well decide I was not worth it?
Instead, I decided to take power for myself.
To take away the gods’ power for what they did to the Tidecallers.
I thought I could do a better job at ruling the worlds and keeping our kind safe than the gods ever did.
“But that kind of power… I’ve realized I am not limitless, as much as I would like to be.
Neither are the gods, clearly, if their fountain can be so easily diminished.
But Sidraeus and Atheia? Why do you think the gods kept them apart, confining one to the realm of the dead and the other to the realms of the living?
They knew that together they had power to rival their own.
” Clover’s gaze darkened. “And with it, I can finally make myself into a true god and ensure that this sickness that runs through the worlds is cured and never happens again.”
“If you think I’m going to let you use me to make yourself into a god,” Sidraeus said, “you’ve got me all wrong.”
Clover smiled indulgently at him, motioning to his neck. “I don’t believe you’re in a position to stop me.”
The magic damper around his neck.
Sidraeus met Emory’s gaze just as the idea formed in her mind. She drew on her Reaper magic and rusted the metal right off as she’d done before.
Sidraeus wasted no time. He lunged at Clover, more beast than man, and so lethally quick that Clover didn’t stand a chance against such a force.
But then, Clover was not exactly a man himself.
Before Sidraeus could reach him, Clover disappeared behind his strangely swirling clouds again. He clasped his hands together, and a great blast of power—lightning and water and fire and roots combined—hit Sidraeus with such a force, it sounded like an earsplitting, earth-shattering thunderclap.
Sidraeus shot backward, hitting the rocky cave wall.
For a second, or perhaps not even that, Sidraeus seemed to split into two: there was Keiran’s body splayed out on the ground, and a phantom shadow—an umbra crowned in obsidian—hovering over it.
As if Sidraeus’s spirit had been ejected from its vessel.
Emory thought she glimpsed fear and confusion and relief in those hazel eyes—Keiran’s eyes, burning with a humanity that was entirely his—before the phantom returned to the body, and all that was left in that gaze as it settled on Clover was a murderous hatred that was all Sidraeus’s.