43. APOSTATE #3
They all felt it. With monstrous force, the psychic aftershock shuddered through the canyon. Only massive, sudden devastation would be felt like this so far from Zivora.
It worked.
Neri cried out as though wounded. Akkani sagged against the crates, her face bone-white. And Nines screamed into Jacen’s mind, WHAT DID YOU DO?
Take over with Seth, he ordered her. No time. JACEN WHAT DID YOU DO
He shut her out. There was no fucking time.
Once Akkani had gotten hold of herself, she did not fight—she ran. As Neri stared in shock, Jacen ran after her. He staggered up a hewn stone stair, out onto the roof beneath the spires.
The platform at the tower’s apex was polished obsidian, smooth and mirror-bright.
In it, Jacen saw his own blurred reflection and the corona of the eclipse.
Wind whipped across the expanse, creating strange music as it wove between the spires.
The air was so thin this high up, the world seemed to tilt and swing on its axis when he looked down across the canyon.
Vertigo assailed him. But he forced himself to look nonetheless.
In the distance, from the sleeping beast that was Zivora, smoke rose.
At first, Jacen saw only a trickle, belying whatever destruction had already occurred. It made him doubt his senses, with a surge of terrible hope. But then there came a silent burst of dust from the Cathedral’s northmost tower.
That tower held the kitchens. A few stories above sat the aviary, where Jacen had spent so many hours as a boy, feeding the pigeons.
His old dormitory lay below it, underground—perhaps already nothing but rubble.
Had the acolytes within had time to realize what was happening?
With nowhere to run, the sheer terror they must have felt—their final moments, the summation of their entire short lives—
It brought Jacen to his knees.
With a boom that echoed across the Scar, the tower collapsed.
The trickle of smoke became a torrent, then a cloud, engulfing the Citadel.
A rumble, from deep within the earth itself, grew into a thunderous roar.
Such was the force that shook the city, it seemed the world might break open and swallow it whole.
Even when he could no longer see, Jacen remained rooted in place. He bore witness until the smoke began to clear and the waves of psychic anguish grew so powerful, he could almost hear the screams.
Akkani paced to the ledge. The dread in her stare turned to horror.
Her black hair hung in a loose tangle around her shoulders.
“What have you done?” She wrung her hands, muttering something panicked. She did not sound like herself. She sounded as if some profound and essential part of her had snapped clean in two. “Oh, gods above, what have you done?”
On shaky legs, Jacen stood. He took a step toward Akkani. She raised a hand. “No. No. I will hear no more from you. I will not wait to see how this ends.”
She backed away from him.
He invoked the language of demons and said to her, “Be still.”
He seized hold of Akkani’s vital functions.
He drove her to her knees like a puppet, and where his consciousness blurred into hers, he sensed two things: First, that fear.
Second . . . the truth of how she felt, not only for him but for every acolyte and novitiate she had ever trained. Everyone he had just murdered.
And this shattered him, because blended with that grief and terror was love.
Deep in her mind where she could not lie, she loved her Church.
Everything she had said to Jacen was true.
They had both lived their lives in search of a higher, subtler truth, unconstrained by ordinary faith.
She understood his lifelong struggle, even as her own had been in vain, and she had made him what he was.
She loved him, and still she had done this to him.
Jacen’s legs trembled. A hollow noise escaped him, and he found he could not continue.
All his life, he had been taught to walk by faith, never knowing what that meant until now. With a twist like a knife in his heart, he finally knew.
Faith was a leap over the dark chasm between mystery and truth, and such a leap required resolve. Faith was the will to do even the unspeakable—for the sake of a dream, for the promise of peace, for the shadow of a hope of a better future.
Jacen had, after all, summoned that will for the Church of the Black Sun. He had summoned it every Harvest season for the last fifteen years.
Was this faith, then? As smoke rose from the ruins of the White Cathedral . . . was this all that he’d sought, all his life?
Is this all? Is this all?
But there was no time. No time to wonder, no time to mourn, no time to weep until there was nothing left inside him.
He had made his choice, and now he had to finish this.
To make this sacrifice mean something. Faith was a choice from which he could never turn back, because he had staked everything on it.
Akkani looked at the eclipse once more, as the wind dried the tears on her face. She closed her eyes.
She stepped off the ledge.
There was nothing he could have done to stop her, and she fell without a sound.