CHAPTER 19
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BEX HIT THE WHITE WATERFALL of quintessence like a missile.
She wasn’t thinking, wasn’t listening to the increasingly dire warnings Drox was yelling through her skull, wasn’t paying attention to anything except her burning need to finish this.
Gilgamesh was almost defeated. She’d seen how shriveled Adrian’s attacks had made him, felt his weakening strength with her own hands.
Just a little bit more and he’d be dead for good.
If he reloaded on magic, though, the fight would start over from the beginning, and unlike the quintessence-fueled king, Bex didn’t have a second wind waiting to pick her up again.
If they were ever going to beat him, it had to be now, so she dove into the gushing quintessence without a second thought. She could still see Gilgamesh’s golden boots in front of her, but the moment her flaming body entered the river, the entire world changed.
It felt like she’d been dropped into Limbo, only instead of a big gray nothing, all she saw was white.
Endless, formless, relentless white that poured through her eyeballs and into her skull, filling her mind with a light so bright it burned away her thoughts, leaving her empty.
For one blissful second, she floated in nothingness, a nameless ripple floating in an endless sea of light.
Then something inside her freshly emptied brain seized up, and a chorus of thoughts exploded where Bex’s own should have been.
So many voices were talking at once that it was impossible to tell what they were actually saying.
Bex wasn’t even sure they were speaking a language she understood, but while the overlapping words sounded like gibberish, the feelings inside them were as plain as day.
The voices were envious, fearful, hateful, and sad.
They were lustful, warlike, greedy, and proud. Most of all, though, they were angry.
Their furious shouts ripped through Bex like spears, tearing her apart with the intensity of their rage.
Their righteous, well-deserved wrath at being imprisoned, tortured, and bled for power at the pinnacle of what was once their kingdom.
How dare that traitor show his face among them again?
But he would pay. One of their best weapons had just fallen back into their possession.
Ishtar’s Executioning Blade had returned.
The only reason she wasn’t already swinging at their enemy was because too many divine hands were fighting for control.
They squabbled like gulls over the right to wield her, and as the fighting consumed their attention, Bex finally managed to wrest back control.
“No!” she roared, driving back the blinding white ocean with a wave of red-hot fire. “I am not your sword anymore! I am Bex the Bonfire, sword of my people! I’m killing Gilgamesh for their sake, not yours! The demons of the Riverlands are slaves no more! We are through with you!”
Her defiant words echoed through the emptiness, and then a screech came back so loud it whited out her thoughts again.
But when the hands returned to try to take advantage of her lapse, Bex flared her fire even brighter, burning them away with a river of her own wrath, because if there was anything worth being angry about, it was this bullshit.
The gods had lost. They were nothing but disembodied voices howling in an empty white room, and they thought they could take her over?
Make her fight their battles for the prize of being their fawning servant again?
Hells no! Bex was never bowing a damn centimeter to any of them ever again.
She was building a new future where demons lowered their horns to no one.
That was her burning purpose, the meaning behind her new name, and the moment Bex embraced it, all the grasping hands fled, leaving her floating alone in a pool of what felt like glowing white paint.
It was so thick that Bex could barely move her arms through it.
She could still hear the voices howling, but the sound was in her ears now instead of her head, which made it easier to ignore.
The bad part was that she still couldn’t see anything.
She knew Gilgamesh had to be in front of her somewhere, but the liquid quintessence was as thick as glue and as bright as a spotlight.
It was also still, more like a pool than a waterfall, which meant she must’ve fallen into the tank at the bottom of the sliced pipe.
That was bad. Her six horns had made her much stronger, but Bex still needed to breathe.
She had to get back to the surface, but when she pushed her hands through the thick liquid to start swimming in the direction she was pretty sure was up, her grasping fingers bumped into something that felt an awful lot like a metal boot.
Bex couldn’t believe her luck. She forgot all about breathing and lurched forward, wrapping her arms around the two kicking legs that had to be Gilgamesh’s.
She climbed his body next, working her way up his armored chest like a lemur climbing a golden tree.
She didn’t have a plan other than to keep him from escaping, but when she reached up to grab his helmet, she felt the too-fast, almost-painless pressure of his impossibly sharp sword slicing through her left arm.
The moment she felt it, Bex knew the limb was gone.
She could use her fire to regrow it, but she was too focused on the arm she still had as she frantically called Drox out of his ring.
She still couldn’t see anything but blinding white sludge, but the overwhelming pain that was finally spreading through her severed shoulder painted a perfect picture of where the sword strike had come from.
She only had a second before Gilgamesh moved on, so Bex ignored everything else and swung Drox in that direction, feeding him with her fire so her sword could launch the glowing whip he’d used to slice through Havok.
The result was a line so bright Bex could see it even through the quintessence’s glow. She couldn’t hear anything over the gods screaming in her ears, but she felt Gilgamesh’s kicking legs go still in her grasp, and she knew—knew—she’d hit him.
Her body moved on instinct after that. Bex let go of Gilgamesh and blasted herself forward, spending the last of the fire she’d gotten from her anger at the gods to regrow her left arm in an instant.
Her hand had just finished reforming when her bare fingers bumped into something hard, metal, and sharp—so sharp that merely touching it sliced a deep gouge into her new palm.
The pain was a present, though, because when Bex finally blasted herself out of the quintessence lake she’d fallen into, she was holding Gilgamesh’s white sword in her newly-formed hand.
“Give it back!”
The order hit her like a physical force, sending waves of quintessence washing over her head as Gilgamesh rose from the white pool like a figure from legend.
They were down in the tank the chopped pipe had connected to, but it could’ve been the waters of creation from the way Gilgamesh set his golden boot upon the waves and glared down at Bex with silver-mirrored eyes that were no longer clouded by age.
He actually looked younger now than he had when they arrived, more like Adrian’s brother than his father.
Even his battle scars were healed, leaving his skin practically glowing with health under the dripping sheen of quintessence that coated him from head to foot.
The new Gilgamesh was a terrifying, beautiful sight, as close to a god as someone born mortal could possibly become.
Bex, meanwhile, looked every inch the demon with her black blood leaking out into the flawless white of the gods.
At least, that was what the dead gods themselves were whispering in her ear before she shook their voices away, clutching her stolen sword even tighter as she glared up at her enemy.
“I must congratulate you,” Gilgamesh said as he walked over the surface of the choppy pool of quintessence toward her.
“You and that brat Adrian forced me to take the plunge I’d been avoiding for five thousand years.
I’ve always felt that a human king should remain human in order to understand his subjects, yet despite my best intentions, here I am. ”
He spread his dripping arms with a shake of his handsome new head, but Bex wasn’t buying a word of it.
“If you wanted to be a good king, you should’ve tried killing fewer of your subjects,” she snarled. “You’ve been a horrible ruler and an even worse father, and I will drown in this pool with the gods before I let you win.”
“So be it,” Gilgamesh replied, raising his golden fist. “That sword wasn’t made by the gods.
They have no claim over its creation, so if it sinks with your corpse, I can easily retrieve it.
Quintessence holds no risk for me now that you’ve forced my hand, so have it your way, Queen of Failure, and die. ”
He swung his fist as he spoke. The pool of quintessence followed the motion, surging toward Bex in a great white wave.
She didn’t know what would happen when it hit her, and she didn’t wait around to find out.
As soon as Gilgamesh moved to hit her, she struck back, swinging the white sword in front of her in an arc just like she’d seen him do when he cut the Wheel from the sky.