Chapter Fifty-One • Gilded • Lillith
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My entire body screams in pain. My soul feels as if it’s been scrubbed raw and bleeding. As my eyes creak open, I find myself almost disappointed that I’m not actually dead. Death would be a relief. Death would mean there isn’t more pain to be had.
I reach for my magic. It’s usually right there—right where I need it. Like a familiar friend. Like a song whose lyrics I could never forget. But there’s nothing there—no warm curl into the palm of my hand.
I watch my blanched fingers twitch faintly.
They lay in a bed of dull, black hair. My hair, I realize.
I look past the tangle of my lifeless tresses, finding gold railing no more than a foot away.
I follow the trajectory of each golden bar with my eyes, watch them tangle in an ornamental swirl of filigree before arcing to meet overhead.
I’m in an enormous birdcage.
Or I’ve been shrunken to fit down inside of one.
“Rise.”
The command rings in my ears. Uncomfortable, like the buzz of tinnitus. My throat closes, but I’m just too tired. I’m too exhausted to obey.
“Where is the rest?” my captor snarls. “You’ve given it to someone. You disgusting thing. Who is it? The Golden Boy? The Oracle?”
The raw ache inside of me eases one tiny bit.
That’s right. Damien. He’s got just a bit of it.
I bled to be sure of it. And there’s some comfort in knowing the piece of magic inside him will never make its way back to this abhorrent monster.
He’s so devoid of his own humanity that he probably can’t even fathom the idea of giving it to a lowly mortal.
I can feel the candle of my life flickering, and before it snuffs out, I want to know some things. I force myself to lift my torso with trembling arms and torn, failing muscle.
Gods, it hurts. Everything hurts so horribly. But I’ll rest soon. And there’s a comfort in knowing that.
Once I’m sitting up, it’s only a matter of dragging myself a few more feet to lean against the back of my gilded cage.
I face the monster outside. He sits, eerily illuminated in the blackness of his void.
His strange eyes mark a waning crescent and more gore spiderwebs between his black-velveted antlers.
Something settles in, as unpleasant as a knife beneath my sternum. A grim understanding of what he is.
“How?” I croak.
He blinks his inhuman eyes and tilts his head. “How what?”
“You know what,” I say, weak.
He was so enraged when I thought of him as a perversion of the gods. But he’s not really that, is he? What did he say? A correction. A birthright.
Bastion, Wren and myself... To my knowledge, our families have the strongest links to magic out of all the families in The Buried City.
The rest of the magic in the town belongs to bloodlines that tangle with our family trees in one way or another.
Sure, there are some loose threads, like Daisy’s home in some distant realm, and the fae who’ve come to call The Buried City home.
But part of why Bastion’s been so disheartened about me ending my own bloodline is that magic has been dwindling for decades.
I always assumed it just happens over time. I assumed that, because of the reduced attention to, and belief in, magic, it would naturally meander toward its end. Like the obsolescence of the appendix, or humanity’s vestigial tailbone. Just a natural result of evolution.
But what if... What if it’s because someone has been eating the magic? What if it’s because someone ate the source of all magic?
That’s what he said, before he tore my magic out of me. That he was ravenous.
“You... You ate them,” I say, my voice soft despite the horror. “You ate The Lady Moon and The Stag.”
“Too clever,” the monster rumbles, his expression blank and strange.
“But how?” I ask again. “How is it even possible?”
He watches me, and the waning crescents in his eyes vanish, leaving them fully black again. “I’m going to kill you anyway. I suppose it won’t hurt to share.”
“I was once a devotee of The Great Stag. Back in days of yore, when gods were little more than venerated spirits and guardians of the land they lived on. There were so many back then, you know. So many tiny little gods, thought up by minds and hearts, made offerings until their forms became corporeal. I’d always been connected to the land.
I’d always had a penchant for finding the little creatures in their burrows and hovels and gardens.
And with time, I became a good friend to The Stag God.
“I helped him understand the minds of mortals.
Helped him give the blessings required to keep the mortals happy.
They sang him songs, and fashioned him gifts; dedicated days to his pursuit of his love.
Each year, I consoled him as the wheel turned and brought a new death.
Each year, I aided in his courtship of his love, The Lady Moon.
“He granted me immortality for this devotion.
But over time, I grew resentful. I grew bored.
Every year, I watched him meet his maiden, bring new life into the world with their love, and find the relief of death.
All the while, I toiled with nothing to show for it but the clothes on my back and bark soup in the cauldron.
“So, one year, when Patrick came to the land to spread his ridiculous religion—the one with the virgin mother and the sacrificial son—I stopped coming when he called.
I went to the place where he met The Lady Moon each year.
And I introduced myself to her instead. I courted her.
I charmed her. But when the wheel turned to the time we would lie together, and get her with child, she denied me.
“She told tale of meeting The Stag God by happenstance. Called that wretch her soul mate. How she had fallen for him. She begged my forgiveness. I refused her. And I took what I had earned. What I had worked toward for hundreds of years.”
“You raped her,” I accuse.
“Do you know the origins of that silly word?” he asks, not waiting for an answer before he continues.
“It means to take. To carry off. It used to be a crime against the father of a woman. The theft of his property, which is why it was such a heinous offense. The Lady Moon had no father. She had no owner. I had done the sowing and the tending, and I was reaping my harvest, just as The Stag did, year after year, with my. Help.”
I shake my head, surprised when I feel a tear cut a path down my face.
“I had her. And she wilted. Vanishing until she was naught but a seed in my hand. So enraged was I, that she would spurn me so by disappearing herself. How dare she? So, I devoured her. I swallowed the moon like a piece of stewed barley.”
He sighs and yawns, like he’s bored. “Of course, that is when The Stag found me. He was so sorrowful at the death of his Lady Moon that he begged me to devour him too, so he could be with his love. I was more than happy to oblige him, you see. Because I’d watched him squander the power he held every year.
I watched him give it to oracles and hedge witches and little sprites. What a waste.”
“And you’ve been this way ever since,” I say.
“More or less,” he says. “I joined the church after. Hunted witches and faelings and forest spirits. Devouring their magic, one by one, little by little. Taking back what should have never been freely given. And I was almost done, you know. I’d nearly devoured all of it, when your ancestors created that infuriating realm and buried it beneath the ground.
“But with your power cleaved from the wards there, I will be able to eke my way in. I will just have to find which of them you’ve shared your power with first. They can’t hide underground forever, can they?
Then when that is done, I’ll find my way to where the Fae fled.
And the Vampires. And everything else. And eventually, it will all be mine. It will all belong to me again.”
And humanity would perish. A blip in the history of the universe. The hopeless result of two powerful beings daring to be in love and refuse to lose one another.
I could relate.
All the same, I couldn’t bring myself to feel guilty for my choice.
In many ways, choosing to save Damien has doomed the world.
There was no reason to believe that this monster would be content to stop at consuming all of the magic in the world—the seed of all life here was magic, after all.
No matter what you believed—the Big Bang, creationism, a deity crying a tear from which all life sprang—all of it is magic in some way or another.
And when this thing devoured all the magic and still found his soul empty and devoid of meaning, he would just keep glutting on the rest of the world until all that remained was this creature on a lonely mound of deadened earth.
My despair is overwhelming.
“Curious,” the aberration says, his head jerking in an unnerving tilt.
“What?”
He blinks. “Quiet.”
For a moment I think it’s a command, so I go still. But then his brows twitch with... worry? Anger? Some mix of the two?
“How can you do that? I’ve all but stripped you of your magic. How has your mind quieted so?”
I... I don’t know? I’m still thinking; my mind is anything but quiet. And he’s right about my magic. It’s absence is still a raw and open wound on my soul. So, I don’t think it’s something I’m doing without intention.
A voice sounds against the tired recesses of my mind. Clear and close as my own thoughts. An unfamiliar voice.
“Weak...” it says, deep and masculine. “Too weak to hold me.”
I blink, doing my best to school my expression as my telepathic visitor sighs. The sound of its exhale cuts off abruptly, and for just a flash of a moment, a lush forest appears in my mind’s eye, so vivid I can smell the loam beneath my feet.
A majestic, fallow stag stills in my mind, the golden tines of his antlers stretching across the curve of his skull, forming a halo-like crown where they meet. He looks off to the distance, like he’s heard something.
That voice echoes as it fades. “A passable vessel approaches.”
When my eyes are mine again, the Aberrant creakily rises to his feet, staring at a door that, before his attention on it, had faded in the dusk of the room around us. A few more of those heavy breaths rush out of his nose and I look between him and the door, wondering what he’s seeing.
The door bursts open with a violent slam. It reveals Wren, standing on the other side of it. For a moment, my heart soars. I’m not alone here. I’m not. Alone.
Her eyes find mine, flitting over me and making a quick assessment of my state. I see the moment her anger flares. I’m floored by the raw power coming off her in white-hot waves as her fury focuses on The Aberrant. It’s like I’m standing next to the sun.
As if I put the idea in her head, she holds her hands out, fingers extended, and a ball of blinding light gathers there, spinning and popping like an actual star in her palms.
“Wren, NO!” Aemon cries, appearing from somewhere behind her in the darkness. But it’s too late. I can tell by looking at Wren’s beautiful, wrathful face.
“Back the fuck off from my best friend,” she snarls, loosing the ball of blistering heat.
The floor falls out from under all of us. I hear The Aberrant’s laughter as we all plummet through the endless void.