Chapter 36
He had never seen such a glorious goddess as his love. Jessamine walked through the crowds of people, and he could feel her magic burning in the air. The heat of it—the golden energy that surrounded her—had truly been something to witness, no matter how much it also made him wince.
Because he had watched what she had done to the Many-Faced Goddess.
It had taken so little of her magic to slice right through his sister, to shred her mortal body and release the goddess within her.
That goddess was now banished. He wasn’t sure where god energy went when they died, but he had also not seen anyone kill a god other than the coven who had sacrificed itself to do so.
She was something that should not exist. His nightmare, gliding through the crowds of people on their bellies, begging for help from a god who had never, and would never, help them.
Golden light radiated off her in a beautiful wave, rolling down from her shoulders and pooling on the ground as she walked.
It created a blanket made of light, gently covering each and every person who had been feeding his brother’s power, and he could feel that connection between them and Ajax sever.
Their moans quieted. Their desperate pleas for someone to help them all stopped. Some of them rolled over in shock. Perhaps they stared up at the sun in the hopes that it might provide some kind of guidance for what they were meant to do next. But many of them looked at her.
At his love. His goddess.
And deep in his chest, Elric knew what they were thinking. A goddess like this hadn’t been seen walking the realm in a millennium. Even the old gods had been fickle. Often they were hard to find, and even when they deigned to walk among the humans, they would never touch one.
But Jessamine did. She reached for their hands when they offered them, letting their dirty fingers leave streaks of mud on her palms and arms even as she moved past. Those streaks were a badge of honor, proof that she wasn’t the kind of goddess they were used to.
Every single one of the people she freed from Ajax’s curse took energy away from him. The closer they got to the pantheon, the more Elric could feel it. The spell his brother had used, the one that was putting gods back in mortal bodies, it faltered. Then quaked.
A sound of sheer rage filled the clearing. The voice was familiar, and he was certain that was the Huntress yet again. His sister had been denied so many times the freedom of a new form, and it seemed she would have to endure it once again.
They reached the crowd that surrounded the pantheon, and he felt his brother’s curse swell again. Every person who was clamoring for his attention suddenly fell to their knees. Even Elric felt it, but he gritted his teeth through the pain and continued forward with Jessamine at his side.
“You dare?” Ajax hissed. “Clearly, the two of you don’t know when to quit!”
Three people stood next to him, each of them familiar. The Crone. The Sun God. And the Mistress of Night.
Each of them had been intimidating in their own way. Already Jessamine and Elric had come across the Crone’s blood magic. But the Sun God was an interesting choice.
“Who are they?” Jessamine asked.
“You know the Crone, but the Sun God works in pleasure. He feeds off sexual energy, and he’s quite good at granting…
” Elric paused, not sure how to say it without sounding crude.
“Fixing masculine issues so that children can be achieved. And then the Mistress of Night, my sister, who deals in dreams and illusions.”
Already he could see her conjuring a spell.
The dreaming world was always her domain, but she could bring it into the realm of reality.
Dark magic sparkling with energy coiled around her fingers, ready to cast illusions that would be nearly impossible to pick through.
He had seen them many times. Serpents that held him in place, his mind already feeding him the truth of their venom without her ever needing to suggest it.
“Cute,” Jessamine said. “You all seem to think that just because the gods are back, we should all be afraid. But I do not fear you.”
“You should, mortal,” the Sun God said. His chest puffed up with pride, and Elric knew he was about to blow some of his magic upon her. The smoke that exhaled from his lungs at any time was an aphrodisiac.
“I am no mortal,” Jessamine hissed, before she lifted her hands and those strings of molten gold already coiled around her. “But you certainly are.”
They all ran at each other, six gods who were about to change the world. A great crack of thunder echoed the moment they met. His sister darted for him first, and the other three went for Jessamine. Their magic sizzled in the air, suddenly so hot that sweat dripped down his brow.
Elric trusted Jessamine. Her new abilities were great and they would guide her. Now, he just had to keep his gaze on his sister.
The Mistress of Night had a reckoning coming, and he intended to make good on all the things she had done to him.
Their shadows met, both of them wielding dark magic.
But he had the benefit of worshippers. His coven had sacrificed to him time and time again.
And what did she have? A few minutes of half-hearted attempts at worship?
No, that wouldn’t do. There was no sacrifice in that, no magic that could ever stand up to all he had been gifted by women who believed in him.
An ear-piercing sound rocked throughout the clearing as his magic met hers. Dark purple sparkling mist met his shadows, and for a brief, terrifying moment, he thought it would break through. He thought, just like all the times before, she would get into his head.
But his shadows held. The darkness that he controlled seemed to vibrate with even more energy as he fed the shield so that she wouldn’t be able to even see where he was. Because that was the point of all of this, wasn’t it?
The Mistress of Night had trapped him in her nightmares for an entire year once.
She’d forced him to live every single nightmare that he’d been terrified of.
At the time, the other gods had said it was to toughen him up.
He was new. He had to understand that horrible things could happen to gods, too, and if he couldn’t withstand even a year of nightmares, then surely he didn’t deserve to be a god at all.
All of that old pain of knowing that a sister was supposed to look after their younger siblings, launched him around the shield.
The Mistress of Night never once questioned her strength.
She was staring at her own magic in certainty that it would hold, that he would not get through it, and instead… he did.
Her eyes widened at the same moment as he conjured an athame in his hand. He plunged it straight between her ribs, arcing it up into a heart that now beat just as his own did. She let out a little sound of displeasure.
“Elric, you know a knife cannot kill us,” she scolded him, like he had learned nothing from her.
“I know. But she can.” He tugged on his connection with Jessamine and could feel her come alive in his chest. Her magic poured down his arm, into the knife, and that electrical energy burst inside of his sister’s chest.
He watched as it burned through her. First in a glowing orb through the hole in her heart, and then up through her throat. She opened her mouth, the illumination showing every vertebra in her neck and chest before it suddenly speared out of her mouth. Light. Golden light.
All of it highlighted something else inside of her body, too. The actual goddess within it. He could see the darkness of her, the strange mist that was like a little worm writhing inside of this husk, hidden deep within the flesh and coiled among the muscles. But it was there. He could see it.
“Jessamine!” he shouted, holding his sister in place.
She wasn’t far. The Crone had her in her clutches, though, and the Sun God was still trying to catch her with the mist that was spewing from his mouth. Where was Ajax? His brother couldn’t be that far from all of this.
“What?” she shouted back, and magic speared out of her again. The Crone was caught up in those sharp shards, her voice hissing out.
“I can see their power. Kill the body, and I will contain the god.” He could do this.
The Mistress of Night laughed against the knife, twisting her body as she sawed through her own flesh, illuminated from the inside still. “You cannot contain a god, Deathless One!”
“But I can,” he hissed. Because he had contained the gravesingers. He had spent countless years learning how to capture supposedly endless beings, and all he had to do was the same thing to them.
He plunged his hand into her chest, feeling that wriggling energy against his palm. It really was like a worm. A parasite that lived inside the body it inhabited.
It was perhaps too easy to take that magic and slam it into his realm. The chains that were waiting there had been made out of years of frustration. Years of anger. Years of mistreatment by those who were meant to protect him.
He threw them around the image of his sister, giving her a form made out of shadows and darkness.
And even then, he looped more chains around her neck, her back, forcing her down onto her hands and knees in the water where they had all cursed him to live for centuries.
Because they had. Because they hadn’t tried to help him.
Not the first time the witches had sacrificed him, and not any of the times afterward. They left him here, alone, without ever trying to even give him company.
“Rot,” he snarled before going back to Jessamine.
She had somehow tied the Crone onto the ground, and his eldest sister was still rolling against the sharp shards of Jessamine’s spell, trying her best to get free while also slicing her new body to ribbons.
But his brother had successfully filled the entire clearing with so much smoke that it appeared many of the humans had broken free from Ajax’s curse to…