55. Where Even the Damned Cannot Reach
Where Even the Damned Cannot Reach
SORVA
Istruck the shoreline hard enough to knock the air from my lungs, skidding through the sand until I caught myself. Heat scraped across my palms, grains wedging beneath my nails as I lifted my glare toward the port and fought the urge to scream.
Of course, she had channeled through her daughter to call upon that godsdamned pest of a general.
Sea churning, dark water surged violently against the pilings as though the ocean itself had risen in just as much defense.
I should have expected as much. A mother’s desperation was painfully predictable, but knowing that did little to ease the humiliation of being thrown from the docks like some common nuisance.
Pushing myself onto one knee, I was already considering how to best deal with the arrival of both Ellira’s and Elaros’s right-hand soldiers.
Before I could fully stand, power erupted across the shore.
It struck with enough force that the air trembled, and the millennia of prior weakness assaulted my recollection.
Not again.
Attention snapping to where Rohen and Caspian stood, centuries' worth of snuffed-out abilities surged to the forefront. Their parents’ magic was irrefutable, but beneath it there was something darker, something beyond control that carried both threat and promise—their potential.
They were destined to serve as my demise, the ebb and flow of their existences primed to deconstruct the realm and everything I’d built.
That fact wasn’t something I was unfamiliar with, which is why I’d done everything possible to ensure it never happened. To ensure this didn’t happen.
As if delighted to mock me, another plume of ancient mysticism meshed with the fated Mizani, belonging to none other than the God of Luck and War.
It meshed with the other two streams of divinity, each separate current weaving together until I could no longer distinguish where one ended and another began.
Rolling outward in a violent wave, their fusion rattled the boardwalk and sent sand whispering across the beach, but it was the sudden tearing sensation beneath my ribs that made my anger falter.
For centuries, the veil stood between them, constructed to remain indecipherable. It had muted their essences, burying their connection beneath layer upon layer of sacrificed Divari and locked sigils designed to keep the scattered Children of the Damned exactly as I intended them to be.
Alone.
Now, three of the five Divari stood together, and the mirror dividing the two continents had cracked.
Its fracture rippled through my magic with sickening clarity, spreading farther than it should have before I managed to brace against it.
Through those splintered places, their power reached beyond the boundaries I had created, searching instinctively for what had been hidden from them all this time.
Their counterparts, the Divari of their parents’ other halves.
A slow breath passed through my teeth as I rose, brushing the dark granules from my palms while I studied the two responsible for splitting a wall I’d designed impenetrable, the third far beyond my line of sight.
I had spent decades upon decades keeping them separated.
Decades of ensuring they remained ignorant of one another, scattered far enough apart that none of them could discover what they were capable of together.
Undoing the damage they had just caused would take time I did not have and energy I had intended to spend elsewhere, and even then, I could not be certain the veil would ever settle over them quite as cleanly again.
That irritated me far more than being hurled from the docks.
Glower shifting from the Divari to the two generals who’d devoted themselves to the very gods I loathed, I clenched my jaw tight enough that it popped.
Heat soared through my veins, threatening to devour the sanity I’d worked to maintain.
The logic that had guided everything to this very moment.
And yet, each lap of the restless sea taunted me further, my humiliation hardening into something far colder.
Ellira had interfered. Her Daughter had interfered. Elaros had aided, and so had his pitiful Son, and now the Damned had clawed their way through something they did not even understand.
Sure, I could repair the veil and strengthen what remained, burying the fractures beneath new layers of magic, but the damage had already been done. For however brief a moment, the barrier between them had failed, and far beyond Serevalen, the others might have felt it.
Might have felt them.
I ground my teeth harder at the thought.
What an extraordinary fucking inconvenience.
My eyes honed in on the Mizani once more, and somewhere beneath the rage still simmering through me, another solution began to take shape.
Perhaps I had been approaching this all wrong.
The veil had served its purpose when distance was enough to keep the Divari ignorant of one another, but now that the five wandering the lands of Wraelira had found each other—now that three of their combined essence had proven capable of cracking through it all—repairing it would only delay the inevitable.
They would do it again. Push against it.
Search for those they had felt or been told lived beyond it, and eventually, one fracture would become another until there was nothing left to mend.
That was, unless I removed the problem entirely.
My gaze danced to the Daughter of Ellira, then to the Son of Elaros, who stood faithfully beside her.
Both remained tethered to powers far greater than their own, surrounded by a world that allowed those bonds to endure no matter the obstacle thrust between them.
The sea would always reach for her Daughter here, just as death would always linger close to his Son, and as long as they remained within this realm, their parents would continue to intervene.
With the bind.
With their dampened soul tie.
With their fates I had curated.
But there were places even gods struggled to reach.
A smile threatened at the corner of my mouth as I raised one hand, allowing my abilities to slip through my fingers and consume the air around us.
The space behind them distorted. The horizon bent strangely, as though heat had risen from the sand, before a thin black fracture split through the center.
It widened beneath the pressure of my magic, peeling the world apart as darkness bled through the opening.
Shadows spilled across the shore and stretched toward them, swallowing the building fires as the pocket grew.
The waters Ellira loved so dearly disappeared from the space beyond, then the sky, then every trace of the world they knew, until only the endless landscape of my realm waited on the other side.
There.
No sea to rise in her defense. No familiar darkness for him to mistake for his father’s protection.
No friends, no ocean to sail, no comforting little pieces of the lives they had built to remind them of where they belonged.
For I did not need to rebuild the walls around them if I could simply drag them to where the walls were mine.
My realm would swallow them whole and close behind them, severing every bond I could not control and stretching the remaining ones across a distance even their precious parents would struggle to cross.
Even knowing the power they currently commanded would follow—a force that would undeniably transform them into a fraction of the gods they would become—they would have to contend with mine.
They would have to fight and survive on ground shaped by my hand and governed by my will.
There they would be isolated. Disoriented.
Cut away from everything that had taught them who they were, and everything they believed would come whenever they called upon the celestial entities I’d already destroyed once.
Perhaps stripping the Damned of their Children would prove the most damaging, destroying the fragments of hope they continued to cling to because of the prophecy they’d curated out of the belief that those who walked alongside me, myself included, would bow to their rule.
There was never a chance that a balance would exist between my home and theirs, and with their Children trapped in the Other Realm, they would become mine to contain.
And maybe, just maybe, they would become the very thing to destroy their parents before their minds were further tainted by their falsified love and bullshit sanctity.
With the portal swelling behind them and their focus wholly fixated on whatever feigned reassurance their parents provided, darkness rolled forward as though my realm itself had caught their scent.
I felt its hunger answer mine, reaching through the opening with an eagerness that sent a quiet thrill through my blood.
Let the gods search for their Children. Let them claw at the boundaries between realms until their fingers bled. Because once their most valuable crossed into mine, I would choose what reached them.
Just as I would control what never would.