Chapter 64
Mariah stood in an endless, ethereal plane. The opalescent ground shimmered, stalks of glowing tendrils swaying on a nonexistent breeze.
“Welcome, Mariah.”
Mariah whirled. Her lungs filled with the strange air of this place, skin prickling with a chaotic, curious energy.
“Qhohena,” Mariah said, relief washing through her. “Zadione. You’re here.”
“Of course, we’re here.” Zadione huffed, tossing her long silver hair over her shoulder. Animal bones clinked, their chime eerie in this bright, breathless place. “This is the only place we can be anymore.”
“Sister,” Qhohena scolded. “We agreed. This was always the plan. She is not responsible for the results of our decisions.”
Zadione’s silver eyes gleamed with a strange emotion. “My anger is not for Mariah, Qhohena. It is always for myself.”
“What’s going on?” Mariah’s gaze bounced between the goddesses. “Is this—” She glanced around. “Is this the gods’ plane?”
“That is a simple way to describe it. But yes.” Zadione’s shape shimmered.
Mariah remembered her conversation with Rulene in the goddess’s rainbow-gilded temple. After everything that had happened since, it felt like an age had passed since then. “You’re trapped here. Because of me.”
The goddesses exchanged a glance, their expressions veiled by endless secrets. “We are. But it is not your fault. Not entirely.”
“Then whose? Why did you give me your grace in the first place?” Mariah couldn’t keep the waiver from her voice. “What does this all mean for me?”
“One day,” Zadione said softly, “those questions will be answered for you. But you are not yet ready for them.”
Frustration rumbled through Mariah. “I am ready. Please. I have to know what this all means. I have to know what you meant for me to do—”
Qhohena lifted a hand, silencing Mariah. Both she and Zadione went rigid, the light haloing their bodies dimming.
“They come,” Qhohena whispered.
Mariah scanned the endless, luminous plane. “Who?”
“We are sorry it has come to this,” Zadione murmured. “Remember your strength, Ginnelevé. You will need it.”
“What—”
The shimmering ground beneath Mariah’s feet was ripped away, sending her plummeting into a dark, consuming void.
She might have screamed. She thought she did. But no sound ripped past her ears, nothing but endless, pulsating silence.
Her body ignited as she was yanked through space and time. Every inch of her mortal flesh burned in agony. She reached out, clawing desperately for something, anything, to halt her descent into this empty, maddening vacuum.
A voice—neither male nor female, neither old nor young—rumbled from the ether.
“See.”
Her eyes—which she hadn’t realized she’d closed—snapped open. She felt like she was falling through nothing, but her vision was no longer empty.
Images sparkled up from the void. Moving pictures, almost like watching a memory that wasn’t hers.
Two teenaged girls—too different in appearance to be blood but holding each other like sisters—stood in a simple hall before a handsome man and a dark-haired boy who could be his son.
The man’s expression was grim, and there was something commanding about his presence.
Like he was a lord, or even an early king, before time advanced the comforts of the world.
Something about them tickled the back of Mariah’s mind, though she was sure she’d never seen either before.
The boy—the prince—stepped forward. The blonde-haired girl bowed low, offering her hand to the prince while the other watched. The boy took the golden girl’s hand, smiling kindly.
Though his eyes strayed to the other.
The image shifted, vanishing into a strange mist before reforming. It was the same prince as before, though it looked like a few years had passed. He stood beneath the boughs of a draping willow tree, a beautifully adoring smile stretched across his face.
But he was not looking at the golden girl. The other girl stood with him, her umber skin radiant as fireflies danced around them. This was a secret moment, soft and stolen, when their pretenses could fall away and truth could find them instead.
Of course, those moments didn’t last forever.
The golden girl burst through the swaying willow branches, her blue eyes widening in shock. The prince and the girl he so obviously loved whirled, clutching tight to each other.
The image shifted again. Something tugged in Mariah’s chest as it vanished into smoke.
She had a feeling those two never found peace again.
The picture reformed. The golden girl was alone. She knelt before an obelisk of black stone veined with something that could be lunestair. Tears streaked her beautiful face, her fine dress muddied.
“I swear it,” she whispered through her sobs. Mariah’s skin prickled.
“She did not know the oath she swore.” That voice was back, the one that had commanded Mariah to see.
The golden girl pulled a small dagger from the folds of her gown, biting back a whimper as she sliced the delicate skin of her palm.
Her blood hissed as it met the obelisk, soaking into the stone.
“But she changed the path of the world forever when she made it.”
The image changed again, yanking Mariah with it.
“We had always planned for seven,” the voice whispered in Mariah’s ear. “But with her bargain, what was meant to be seven became eight.”
Eight figures stood shoulder to shoulder, backs to Mariah. Their gazes were tipped back, staring at something above them—something Mariah couldn’t see. A few of them were familiar.
The golden girl who’d made an unknowing bargain. Her dark-skinned sister. The handsome prince who’d caused their rift.
Power swirled around the eight beings, swallowing them up.
Light burst across the field, all different colors: indigo and red and blue and green and silver and gold.
The eight figures were lifted up, up, up.
They faded away, until the only thing filling Mariah’s vision was the entity the eight figures had watched in that empty field.
She knew, without a moment of doubt, that this was now no long-forgotten memory held within the fabric of time.
It—they—floated in the ether above her, a swirling orb of wings and eyes and stars. Raw power pulsed from them, feeding the space surrounding her, beating in time with her heart in her chest. The beast in her chest whimpered, cowering in fear.
The being above her blinked, all thousand eyes closing and opening as one.
“Are you what we were promised?”
That voice thundered through her, louder than before. It burrowed into her bones, wormed into her soul.
“What… What are you?”
A thousand wings beat the air. “We are Endless. We are Eternal. We are the Creators, the First and the Last. Tell us, Desperate Daughter. Are you what we were promised?”
Creators. That word: it reminded Mariah of something. Something she’d heard the gods say, though they never explained it.
Crieré. It must mean creator. And this… This was it.
The creator of the gods.
“Not just the gods,” the voice whispered. “We created all. We are the forge of worlds, the masters of time. But creation has a price, and before she ascended the moon promised to pay it. So, we ask a third time: are you what we were promised?”
The beast beneath Mariah’s skin writhed in agony. She clenched her teeth, forcing herself to meet the Crieré’s thousand-eye stare.
“I don’t know.”
A million feathers rustled. “The severed power is fading,” the Crieré rumbled. “We will have our seven, even at the loss of eight. You come here, smelling of moonlight and drenched in the blood of a bargain. But you are not ready.”
“I am ready. I need to defeat Kol.”
The being tilted, as if cocking their head. “A strange desire,” they said. “A curious one.”
Mariah ground her teeth. Her initial shock was fading, impatience taking its place. She didn’t have time to deal with this being’s nonsensical words and cryptic messages. “Just give me my magic back. I won’t ask for any more help.”
“There is nothing to return. Your predicament is self-made, because you are not ready. But you will find that piece of yourself settled when you leave this place.”
As if in answer, Mariah’s magic rumbled in her chest. She glanced down, tugging on those familiar threads.
She held back a sob as silver-gold light swam to her fingers, winding around her wrists.
She’d spent more of her life without this magic than with it.
And yet, these months with it gone, she’d felt as though she was missing a limb.
A vital part of herself, cut off and forgotten.
It came to her now, as natural as breathing, as easily as it had that first day with Ryenne in the palace training room.
The broken shards of her soul could no longer be mended. But with this piece of her back, maybe they could be stitched, held together by shimmering silver-gold threads.
She tilted her gaze back up, the Crieré’s words still swirling.
“What am I not ready for?” she asked. She didn’t know why she bothered. She knew she wouldn’t get an answer.
But a part of her needed to know.
The Crieré blinked again. “If you are asking, then you have not yet learned. And it is not our role to teach. Only to create.”
Of course. “Then how do I learn?”
“In order to learn, you must fail. And fail you will, Desperate Daughter. We will be waiting for you when you do.”
The being was fading, dissipating back into the endless void.
“No—wait!” Mariah tried to lunge forward, but she couldn’t move. Nothingness surrounded her, trapping her in this plane of ether. She tried sending out her magic, light leaping from her fingers, but it dissolved into mist when it left her skin.
“Fail, Mariah Salis Ginnelevé. Fail, and you will be ready.”
Power cinched around her waist. Another scream ripped from her throat as she was dragged through voids of time, flashes of light, stars blinking to life and burning out.
The wavering, mirage-like expanse of the gods’ plane stuck to her as she was pulled through it, stalks of that raw magic clinging to her skin.
She slammed back into her body, still screaming. Magic crackled in her veins as her cries echoed off the ancient, lonely mountains, seven bonds of light within her roaring back to life.