Epilogue
There was a chamber at the heart of Prideful Leap, one that only Maura had ever been inside.
It was small, no bigger than a large wardrobe, and the walls were painted white, so that it more closely resembled the outside of her sanctum.
On a small wooden plinth there were three yellowed skulls, each of them less than complete.
The smallest was broken clean in half, a scattering of teeth—painstakingly collected from the rubble—placed neatly next to it. This was all she had left of them.
Maura knelt in front of the skulls. She took the largest into her hands and turned it over and over, as she had done many times before. Despite her power, despite her godhood, when she reached for their souls, they did not reach back.
‘This should be enough,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve done everything I planned to do. The old lion is dead, I have his power, so why isn’t this working ?’
She placed the skull back in its spot and stood, turning around to find herself on a grey shoreline, a churning sea spreading out in front of her.
A sun the colour of old bones hung high in the sky, and several strange objects protruded from the surf.
One in particular caught at her heart and drew her to it, as heedless as a moth to an oil lamp.
It was a bear carved from wood and painted with bright colours, standing on its rear legs, but the pearl buttons she knew made up its eyes were missing, and in comparison to the other objects it was dreary somehow, without its own interior glow.
Maura reached out and ran her finger along its snout. Incomplete.
‘You are unfinished, Mother.’
She spun at the sound of the voice, her white hair falling forward over her shoulders. A fox sat watching her from the sand, his coat all the colours of autumn.
‘You.’ Maura felt the white-hot heat of her hatred gathering in her chest, fuelling her power. She raised a single hand, an orb of boiling magic gathering there. ‘This is your doing.’
‘Please,’ said Tisk. He paused to scratch his ear with a back foot, eyes half shut with pleasure. ‘All this you have brought upon yourself. It has nothing at all to do with me. And if you’re going to be one of us now, Mother, you have to play by our rules. We do not fight in the sacred places.’
Against her will, the power faded from her hand as quickly as it had arrived.
‘Why are you here?’ she spat. ‘Why have you involved yourself in this at all?’
Tisk flicked his tail, the foxy equivalent of a shrug.
‘I gave you all the gifts I could give, Mother, and you threw them all away. Some would call that wasteful. Insulting. And still I was prepared to forget about you. Until I stumbled upon the strands of your plan. The patronage of two gods really wasn’t enough for you, Mother? ’
‘You know it wasn’t. And you know why.’
‘They won’t be pleased.’ He twitched his tail in the direction of the other gods’ avatars. ‘How do you think these ancient beings will react, Mother, when a mortal takes the place of one of the Twelve? They will try and stop you.’
‘Let them. I have nothing to lose.’
‘On the contrary, you have gained an awful lot. And has it brought you everything you ever wanted?’
‘If I have to burn every god to the ground, if I have to see every child in Tlevrae die to have mine returned to me, I will do it.’
‘Do you hear yourself? You sound like a mad woman.’ Tisk sniffed with something like amusement, but Maura thought she could sense fear underneath it. She was something new, something the gods hadn’t dealt with before, and they were right to fear her. ‘And you dare name yourself Mother .’
When she didn’t reply to that, the fox began to fade from view, a shadow thing cast into nothingness by the light from an ivory sun. Maura watched him go, then stared at the patch of sand where he had been for a long, long time.
She was thinking of Lucian, his heart filled with a power that rightfully belonged to her. He was a mage with no master, a half god trapped in the body of a mortal.
He shouldn’t be too hard to find.