Chapter 30
Chapter 30
Moseus—Ruin—stands on the top of the tower, his gaunt face peering west to the nearly sunken sun. He is clothed only in black shadows and smoke, and that gaping hole in his torso spews darkness like the fog machines spew mist. It rolls off him in a bubbling dress, cascading off the sides of the tower like the acetic silver wall. His eyes, the same noncolor as the void at the tower door, sit atop sunken sockets. His cheeks and throat are hollow. The whiteness of his skin has rotted to a splotchy, ashen gray, as has his hair. A cool breeze stirs it, tossing tangled locks over his sharp shoulders. Whether overexertion or the nearness of night caused his transformation, I’m not sure. The fog lifts, revealing the bold colors of sunset.
As Maglon steps through the portal, Moseus says, “I’m impressed, Pelnophe.” His voice sounds like the scratching of a dozen hands down a slate, folding over one another in broken harmony. “But it’s too late.”
I lift two fingers at my side as I stand on the protrusion, the encased branch of Machine Five. Maglon pauses before moving into Moseus’s sight. His jaw tenses at the rolling darkness. Finding a handhold, he climbs up and southward. Moseus faces west.
I need to keep Moseus talking, but I don’t want to show my hand. Guess it’s time to see if I learned anything about lying. “I don’t understand, Moseus. What’s happened to you? I ... Let me help you. You’re hurt.”
He turns and grins. He actually holds my gaze and grins. A shiver courses down from my neck to the backs of my knees at those empty, lifeless eyes. “Watch, and you will see.”
He raises his arms as orange rays of sun dim against the sky—I’d have to move to the end of the protrusion to see the setting star myself, but I don’t dare move. Twenty minutes ... Hues of periwinkle and indigo swirl through the sky. That slip of sun is a mere candle against Ruin’s power.
A shadow shifts to Moseus’s left. Maglon.
“Where is Heartwood?” My voice shakes. I hope he reads it as worry or awe.
A dark cacophony with the semblance of a chuckle emanates from that gaping hole in his torso. “You are an empty fool, Pelnophe of Emgarden.”
I grit my teeth. “Moseus, come down. Let me help—”
A sound like a snuffed fire issues from the void god’s mouth as Maglon’s hands connect with his shoulders, shoving him toward the lip of the tower. Toward the five-story drop.
It happens in a blink.
Moseus teeters. The darkness at his center pulses, gushes. He grabs Maglon by the throat as he falls and twists, landing on the protrusion between me and the portal. The god’s rotation continues, and as he releases Maglon, the barkeeper’s skin turns to ashen dust, just like those wickwood trees. Just like Hagthor’s.
“No!”I scream, reaching for Maglon, but his body falls into the stretching shadows, puffing into ash when it hits the ground.
A commotion rises; the others are still down there, waiting for our signal. Waiting to help. Will they flood the tower in an angry rampage, or cower at the death of one of our own?
“He is nothing to you!” I scream, wiping my eyes. I need to see. I have to be able to see. The portal ripples. I watch Moseus’s dead eyes as I reach behind me, where I folded over my shirt inside my waistband. My hands form tight fists. I desperately try to breathe through the shaking of my shoulders.
“It is all nothing to me,” Moseus hisses, his skin growing more hale. Tone lower, echoing, hateful. He steps toward me. I raise my chin and ignore my trembling knees. “I will enjoy devouring you, Pelnophe.” That sneer returns, and he looks past my shoulder at the falling night. “My time has come.”
A tear slides down my cheek as I nod. To Moseus, it would look like capitulation. To Salki, it’s a signal.
She charges forward, my lantern in her hands, its frame perfectly matching the dimensions of the hole composing Moseus’s middle. She shoves it into him, spilling more darkness over the protrusion.
Moseus grunts and spins, and I’m ready. I pull the iron cuff from the folds of my shirt and leap onto him, clamping it around his neck. I’ve no lock to bind it, but when the poison touches his skin, he hisses and whips toward me, throwing me off with a great sweep of his arm. I roll across the protrusion, clambering for a hold—
Salki twists the middle of the lantern.
The machine burns a brilliant white, powered by as many emilies as she could shove into it while Arthen and I raced for the mountains.
The angle of the protrusion protects me from toppling off its end; I grab its welded lip to steady myself. Moseus screams, scraping at his middle as his stolen form disintegrates around the light. The emptiness of his eyes spreads into his brow, cheeks, chin. Salki hurries back, falling once before catching herself just outside the portal.
Moseus screams something in a thousand clashing voices. Something in a tongue older than Cas’s. He collapses to his knees and claws toward me with the stubs of his fingers.
I pull myself up. “I remember everything, you ripe bastard,” I sneer. “This is for Cas.”
A violent shriek like thunder tears from his throat as he reaches for me, bubbling and twisting, spewing darkness against the dimming light of the setting sun. Then, with one barely corporeal hand, he grabs the frame of the lantern and rips it out.
Cold blood retreats from my skin. No. Oh gods, no. I didn’t think he’d be able to—
The poisoned cuff, loosened from the tussle, falls to the protrusion. Standing, teetering, Moseus crushes the lantern in his malformed hand. He’s still humanoid, still something, but there is so little of Moseus left in him. He—it—is a leaning, bleeding monster, a swirl of black and violet and colorless emptiness that my mind cannot piece together. My skull throbs with the effort to understand.
Foul words in a tongue I don’t recognize drip from his lips as he moves for me, slow and uneven, reaching that hideous, murderous hand toward my neck, just as he did with Maglon. I don’t even try to hold my ground this time; I saw what it did to my dear friend. I retreat, my steps unsure, nearly sliding off the side of the protrusion.
“Run,” I croak to Salki, never taking my eyes off Moseus. I don’t know what good it will do. Stupid of me, to think a flower-powered lantern would quell the Devourer when it required the stilling of an entire planet to manage it before. In his weakened state, I thought—
Twilight climbs up the eastern sky.
Moseus says nothing. Nothing about how he should have killed me the first time, or how weak I am. No gloating about my failure or his restoration. He merely stumbles forward, his hand reaching, reaching—
I pull away. Run out of machine to stand on.
The void god’s lips crack as my balance breaks. My hands fly out, but there’s nothing to catch me. I fall backward, gut lurching with the sudden weightlessness. Cool air whistling by my ears fills in the gaps between heartbeats as I plummet. My eyes take in the growing tendrils of violet in the sky, and in the back of my mind, I’m relieved. Relieved that I’ll die like this, beside Maglon, but with my soul intact.
The tower floors whip by. I notice their slowing before I feel the pressure around my waist, like a serpent coiling. My neck pops as my head whips back at the sudden deceleration. I can’t see what’s beneath me, but I haven’t hit.
Suddenly the serpent pushes me upward with a sound like clicking and stretching and digging. It twists, setting me upright, and only then do I see the green of the coil—not a snake at all, but an enormous verdant vine. A massive fairy wisp, of all things.
My heart drops into my pelvis and springs back as the plant releases me onto the crest of the tower, right beside ... not Moseus, nor Salki, but a being who hovers a hand’s breadth above the stone.
I recognize Heartwood, yet I don’t. It might be the adrenaline, which courses like hot oil through my limbs. My pulse thunders in my ears. His back hunches with the pain of his burns, but his vivid eyes are resolute, his skin radiant, his presence ... intense. He is not himself, no, but he is more than he was.
I realize the moment he speaks that the lantern wasn’t a complete failure. It hurt Moseus, forcing him to release part of what he stole.
Moseus, alone on the protrusion, looks at us with dead eyes.
And laughs.
The laughter echoes in that gaping hole. More heavy darkness spills from it. “You’re too late,” he says simply, his voice so other I can barely understand it.
Only the tip of the sun’s crown remains above the horizon.
“An army of gods couldn’t stop me.” Moseus staggers forward. “And neither will you. You’re only a fraction of what you were.”
Heartwood’s brows draw together. “So are you, my friend.”
Moseus hisses. Darkness curls out of him, growing, growing—
Heartwood turns to me. Grabs my shoulders. “Hide, Nophe.”
Words jumble up in my throat. “But—”
“There is no time.”
Heartwood leaps, and immediately the colorless, dark streak of Moseus collides with him, knocking him off the tower. A scream rips up my throat, but they don’t fall. Even broken, they are not bound by the world the way mortals are.
But Moseus is about to become far more than Heartwood can manage. The Devourer will swallow him, and us, and all of Tampere, and that will only be the beginning.
I have to do something. I can’t let Cas and the others’ sacrifices be for nothing. My skin tingles at the thought. Nothing. That’s my only chance, if I can move quickly enough.
Running for the protrusion, I jump down, then throw myself through the portal into the fifth floor. I collide with Salki.
“You’re still here?” I grab her and push her toward Machine Four. “Go, Salki! Go!”
She doesn’t question me. With the speed of a far younger woman, she climbs onto the head of Machine Four and starts scaling her way down, breathing hard. The entire tower shakes; not from the movement of the freed Serpent, but from the battle of gods overhead.
I turn back to the acetic silver. It’s the only weapon I have. It hurt Cas’raneah and Heartwood; it’ll hurt Moseus, too. I shove my hands into it, trying to cup the airy-feeling liquid, but it slips through my fingers like my hands are sieves. No matter how tightly I press them together, I can only get a coin’s worth in my palms. I need a bucket, a syringe, something—
The tower screeches as something slams into it, knocking me forward. I catch my hands on Machine Five but can’t stop my momentum. My forehead smacks against a truss. Pain bursts between my brows.
Had my hands not been gripping the machine, I would have been whipped away with the top of the tower when it blew off.
I can’t hear my own shriek over the sound of the breaking and the torrent that follows. Sky dark as a bruise—nearly dark enough—swirls overhead, highlighting the bodies of the two weakened gods hurling themselves at one another again and again. Orienting myself, I take in my surroundings and the seconds I have left. I need a bucket. I need—
A bucket.
The tower walls curve around me, the floor firm beneath my feet. A bucket.
Blinking sweat and blood from my eyes, I bolt halfway down Machine Four. Press my body against it and reach between its beams, fumbling for the lever that rotates its body. I pull it. Jump to my feet and run up its length as the behemoth turns. I stumble, barely catching my balance, and dive into Machine Five’s chamber just before Machine Four seals it off.
Grabbing my tools, I duck beneath the acetic silver and drop to my knees. Memories restored, my hands work with the practiced efficiency of decades as they remove bolts and nuts and plating. I know exactly where the fountain is, how it works, how to dismantle it. A wrench, a turnscrew, a twist, and I break the thing myself.
The fall of silver recedes and seeps out from the base of the machine, pooling on the floor. I shift a lever to close off the intake in the floor, and the silver begins to climb my legs. Grabbing the machine, I heave myself up and climb to its top, blinking blood from my vision. Heartwood has Moseus pinned to the broken lip of the tower but struggles to hold him. The creature’s corporeality fades with the light. Any second now, he will be the Devourer in full.
I race along the top of Machine Five, over the protrusion. Heartwood looks up.
And I realize there’s only one way to do this. But we’ve all sacrificed something, haven’t we? I suppose it might as well be my turn.
Let him go,I mouth.
Heartwood does.
Moseus shoves the forest god away, reaching both hands for the night sky—
And I embrace him from behind, holding on to everything left, digging my hands into his empty middle to chain us together. Wrenching us both backward, we fall back into floor five, where the machine has dribbled out the last of its acetic silver into a pool a meter deep.
I hold my breath on instinct, but the floor knocks half of it from my lungs. The silver swallows us, muffling Moseus’s screams as it eats away at him. He writhes and claws, and I lock my legs around him and pull, forcing him against me. Holding him under the surface of the god-searing silver.
I feel his body burn. Feel the way it liquefies and seeps into my nose and mouth, strangling me from the inside. Slides under the cut in my forehead and tears. Slickness dives into my ears and shouts into my brain, burying every thought but hold him, hold him, hold him. Moseus squeezes my lungs, ripping away my last traces of air, ravaging every part of me he can find, fighting me, hurting me, violating me.
But I am the Devourer’s prison now, and even in death, I will not let go.
His efforts begin to lose strength, but I do not relent. My body spasms, mind darkens, chest blazes, soul hurts. I have just enough of myself left to realize the faint sweetness amidst the bitter—that there is still something of Heartwood in the evil I hold.
At least I’ll die embracing him.