Chapter 57
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
My consciousness slipped away like an ebbing tide. When I forced my eyes open, I was collapsed against Septimus, and his voice was in my ear, whispering, “Stay, lyri. Stay.”
He could barely speak. His blood rose and fell around us with every rattling breath. I wanted to echo those words to him: Stay. Witness what you have done.
But the two of us were fading quickly. Septimus’s arms encircled me in one final embrace. His hand wound around mine, squeezing tight. He pushed something metal into my grasp.
No, two things:
One was the silver bolt I had used to strike Nyaxia.
And the other, Zefiah.
Reminders of our promises to each other. That I would end him, and him me, once it was all over.
{Rest soon, Kyrene,} Zefiah murmured, with the gentleness of a mother’s reaching hand. {You have fought well.}
Tears burned behind my eyes. Death was so close. My exhaustion was suddenly unbearable, as if, now that my task had been completed, my body simply fell apart. Every blink was a little longer than the last.
It had been a long time since I had really slept.
And gods, I could sleep now.
I could sleep.
“Not yet,” Septimus said. “Not yet.”
Above, Nyaxia railed against her blessed chains. Acaeja now stood before her, great wings outstretched. And perhaps those wings made me hesitate, made me cling to consciousness a little harder, an odd confusion stirring in my chest.
Because Acaeja’s wings did not depict a world without meddling gods. They did not depict a world of peace.
They depicted deserted ruin.
Unfamiliar buildings crafted of gold and platinum, reaching up to a blank white sky. Statues rising to the heavens, arms outstretched, crafted in gold—all of them of her, I realized, bearing six wings. And all this grandeur, all this splendor, rising from a world on fire.
“I warned you once that this would be how we next met, cousin,” Acaeja said. Her voice echoed, as if rising from the earth and falling from the heavens at once. Greater, even, than it was when I had last met her. “But you did not listen.”
Nyaxia fought her chains. Her fury was beginning to shift to panic, the whites of her eyes now visible as galaxies receded. I was struck by how mortal, how human, of an emotion it was.
“Acaeja,” she hissed. “Puppet master of fate herself, come to gloat.”
Acaeja cocked her head. “Gloat. Is that what you think I am doing here? No, Nyaxia. Perhaps that is what you would have done if you stood in my place. But I am not here for something so uselessly petty. I am here to strip you of the power you have wielded so carelessly.”
A flicker over Nyaxia’s face. Fear. Then, anger.
“Strip me of it?” she snarled. “As if you can do such a thing. My power is not yours to take. It was Alarus’s before you let the White Pantheon murder him. And now it belongs to me. You do not get to dictate what I do with my rage.”
Acaeja stared with white, unblinking eyes. It struck me, with an odd chill, that she was so ceaselessly unemotional. What had seemed before to be the calm of an all-knowing being now seemed like the detached logic of a predator.
She simply said, “Do not bother attempting to free yourself. The chains were created for you. Each link drinks from another aspect of your power. The design is highly specific. It cannot be broken.”
I blinked hard. Wondered if I misunderstood.
Nyaxia’s expression flickered. As if she too, heard what I did. “You know quite a lot about this leash created for me.”
Acaeja was silent, stoic. But the silence was answer enough.
My conversation with Acaeja echoed in my memories, so close now as I slipped in and out of consciousness.
Who helped him? I had asked her.
And her answer had been so carefully worded: There are many gods who would be interested in killing Nyaxia.
Acaeja merely said, “You were out of control. Even then. Someone had to act.”
Nyaxia sucked in a breath.
That movement startled me, because it was so human. So mortal. That one involuntary inhale. Like a holdover from the being she was before she ascended to major divinity.
It had been Acaeja who had helped Thastias. Not any of the other gods of the White Pantheon. Acaeja had been the one to help build this cage, two thousand years ago.
Hurt flashed across Nyaxia’s face, like she had been struck.
“You,” she breathed. “Atroxus or Shiket, I could understand. But you.”
She spat that word. Sharp as a blade.
“Atroxus lacked intelligence. Shiket lacked patience. Both are key qualities in a ruler.” Acaeja’s face remained blank. “Does it shock you?” She asked this question as if she was genuinely curious—albeit in a detached, disinterested way.
Nyaxia’s jaw tightened. Sparks raged across her eyes, the final embers of fading stars. “You were Alarus’s friend. The greatest friend he had among the White Pantheon.”
“Death and fate go hand in hand. One always leads to the other. The only certainties in an uncertain world. Is that a friendship, or a partnership?”
Acaeja stepped closer. The images in her wings evolved, shapes slowly defining from nothingness, like an army encroaching through a distant fog.
“Alarus, more than any of them, should have understood the consequences of introducing such chaos into the Threads. And you, Nyaxia, from the very beginning, were chaos. You tangled fate from that single broken point. That tear, where Alarus chose you.”
Her wings depicted Nyaxia and Alarus in the underworld, in their forbidden wedding. Intertwined in each other in a poppy field. Sitting under an obsidian tree, a dagger in his hands. Scenes of a couple falling in love.
It had never occurred to me that the gods could look at each other that way. Could feel that way. And when grief spasmed across Nyaxia’s face, it came with another expression, too, one I recognized more than I wished I did. Longing.
“Such a terrible crime it is to fall in love,” she spat. But the venom in her voice was weak.
“And look at all that love destroyed,” Acaeja said.
The images morphed now. From a kiss beneath a tree to that same tree withered and broken in a barren wasteland.
From a wedding in a poppy field to Nyaxia wailing over Alarus’s dismembered body.
From a lazy embrace in the grass to an army of vampires cresting a rolling hill.
“Because you killed him,” Nyaxia roared, spittle flying. “You killed him!”
“Enough,” Acaeja boomed. A clap of lightning arced overhead. Despite the volume of her voice, her tone remained perfectly calm. She stepped closer still, reaching out to Nyaxia in a cold caress.
“I should thank you, cousin,” she said. “It needed to be done. If we were so weak that you could break us, then we deserved to fall. I saw that then, two thousand years ago. And I have been so patient. I have given this world many chances at redemption. Over and over, it was squandered. When we came to this realm after the last world we created was destroyed, we promised ourselves this one would be different. But it is not.”
The images in Acaeja’s wings changed again, revealing blood red skies, buildings toppling from the horizon, great blasts of light burning through entire cities.
I choked a wordless sound of horror. Septimus clutched at me, his blood falling over my face like rain, barely clinging to his sanity. He saw what I did; he felt the same horror. But we could do nothing but watch.
I wanted to shout, Wait. I wanted to say, I don’t understand. But words were gummy in my mouth. They died in my throat. Every piece of my strength went to clinging to my consciousness.
“It must be dismantled,” Acaeja said. “It must be rebuilt. What good has freedom given these wayward souls? We are all better off without it. And at last, after two thousand years of waiting, I am in a position to reshape this realm. All who could have opposed me are now gone.”
In her wings, the imaged flitted by—Atroxus, Shiket, Ix, Kajmar, Srana, and now, finally, Nyaxia. All majestic in their greatest strength and splendor. And moments later, each falling into dust.
Acaeja boomed, “I have secured the ironclad loyalty of the greatest warriors this age has ever known.”
Now, in the mist, other figures emerged—not divine, but only a step from it.
The Nightborn king and queen, wings spread against the night sky, white fire at their blades.
The Deathborn rulers, who were part god themselves, leading a legion of wraiths.
Threads of ethereal light strung to their hands, their shoulders, as if binding them to fate itself.
Panic rose in my chest as I understood what I was witnessing. I looked up at Septimus. His head was sagging. Streaks of blood now dripped from his nose, from the corners of his eyes.
Nyaxia watched, lips parted, unguarded horror on her face. She looked so oddly young. She looked so mortal.
“Thank you, Nyaxia, for giving me such inspiration.” Acaeja leaned toward her captive, stroking her cheek. At last, a hint of emotion bled through her detached stoicism:
Pity.
“You will understand one day,” she said. “It is for the best.”
I heard the echo of a savior’s words:
It’s for the best.
No. No, we had made a terrible mistake. This was not what we had fought for. Not what we had bled for.
Acaeja lifted her hands, and the light across the temple burned with bright purple light.
“And thus, I damn you, Nyaxia.” Acaeja’s voice bellowed from the walls. “I strip you of your stolen divinity.”
“No!” Nyaxia threw herself against her chains, fruitlessly, like a fox failing to saw off her own leg.
“Though I cannot kill you, I sentence you to an eternity of imprisonment,” Acaeja went on. “I banish you to the deadlands.”
A chill down my spine. The place where Alarus had been murdered. The realm of Nyaxia’s greatest failure.
Her eyes widened. A flash of terror drowned out her rage. “No—”
“—to live out the rest of your eternal years reliving the mistakes of your past—”
“Acaeja, please!”
“—until this realm or the next takes your flesh and bones. You will live forever—”
“Please!”
“—in the dusk between realms. Forever powerless, for your unending existence.”
Acaeja lifted her hand. And for a moment, she hesitated. A faint flicker over her face.
“It is a shame, is it not?” she said. “If you were still a minor goddess, you would not have suffered so. But how greedy you were. That was not enough for you. And now, what a curse to be so deathless.”
Nyaxia’s lips opened, perhaps for one final plea or one final curse.
But Acaeja’s ten-fingered hand pressed to her forehead.
A blinding blast rocked the world.