Baz’s hands went slack.
“Power like that,” his father continued, “it has the capacity to corrupt, sure enough, to turn us evil, but not always. Jae is proof one can use that power for good. So are you.”
“I haven’t Collapsed,” Baz gritted out, anger rising in him now. “I can’t have. You were the one trying to stop those people from hurting Jae. You were the one whose magic blasted the printing press apart.”
“I was trying to push your power down, Basil. To nullify it, keep it contained.”
Something about those words made Baz think of what he’d done for Emory in the caves. How he’d stopped her from Collapsing. He looked at his father’s branded hand. His father the Nullifier. The same kind of magic used to dampen Eclipse powers in the silver cuffs and the Unhallowed Seal itself.
“You stopped time trying to save Jae, and it was too much for you.” Again, Theodore frowned in bemusement, a note of desperation now in his voice as he asked, “Don’t you remember?”
All Baz remembered was Theodore screaming at everyone to stop, and then…
With sudden aching clarity, he recalled the sense of deep, unsettling urgency he’d felt at seeing those people threaten Jae. The strange presentiment he’d gotten that he’d never see Jae again if they were taken away.
Please stop, Baz had begged everyone around him, and when no one listened, time answered his plea.
The ensuing blast of silver light…
It hadn’t come from his father, he realized with a start. It had come from himself.
Silver veins on his own small hands, his father’s large ones unmarred as his arms wound viselike around Baz—not to protect him, but to contain him.
To try to stop Baz from Collapsing.
It all came back to him now. The blast of light that tore from him. Power thrumming through his fingers. A pit in his stomach, a plunge deep within, pulling everything up and up and up. His father tried desperately to stop him, to save Baz from himself as that power slowly drained everything from him. Darkness gathered around Baz’s vision, pulling him under, and when he came to again, he felt that power receding somewhere deep, somewhere he could lock it up forever.
And then—his father at his side, silver veins rippling on his skin, while Baz’s own skin was clear.
But it was an illusion. A pale imitation of the real thing.
He remembered Jae standing behind Theodore, devastation and determination warring with each other on their face. They were the one who’d wrought the illusion, a secret in silver blood.
It’s all right. Everything will be all right.
The Regulators took Theodore away without ever suspecting. They tried him thinking he’d Collapsed, and Theodore confessed to it. The blast of power was his. He was the one who’d lost control, killed those people caught in the rubble.
He took the fall for everything, and Baz believed him. Believed the illusion that Jae and his father had constructed. Everyone did. He believed his father was the one to Collapse, and Baz never gave another thought to the power he felt in his own veins. Never prodded into this vast well within him for fear of drawing on too much power and suffering his Collapsing like his father had.
An unfounded fear, in the end, for he’d already had his Collapsing.
He was the one who Collapsed that day, not his father.
Those deaths were on his hands, not Theodore’s.
Baz looked at him now through angry, disbelieving tears. “Why? Why did you take the fall?”
The Regulators had stripped Theodore of his magic, and for what? For nothing other than trying to protect his son.
A sad smile from his father. “To give you a chance.” He reached for Baz’s tattooed hand, held it in his own. “I don’t regret it for one second, Baz. Your magic? It’s a gift, and I would have laid my very life down time and time again to prevent you ending up here.”
His grip tightened, urgency lining his voice. “But you have to be careful. They want our raw power, and for that they need more of us to Collapse. They need us in here. And if they knew of the power you and Jae have… I don’t want to imagine what they’d do to you. We’re all pawns in their game, son.”
“I don’t understand…”
There was a sudden commotion outside the door, raised voices and sounds of a scuttle.
“You can’t do this to me!” someone screamed, a voice made of velvet and cold night air. “Get your hands off me—”
We’re all pawns in whatever fucked-up game they’re playing.
Fresh horror sluiced down Baz’s back as the pieces started falling into place.
“Dad—what is it they do to us, exactly?”
Theodore’s face was bone white. “They take away our magic. Every last drop of it.”
Baz knew he wasn’t talking about the Unhallowed Seal. This was something much worse, the reason those who’d Collapsed had such hollow nightmares, the reason they were brought to that surgical room, the reason the power surged in such odd ways at whatever happened in that room.
The very room they were bringing Kai to now.
He needed to get to him—quickly.
Theodore saw the grim determination on his face, the way he reached for the door and hesitated. His father nodded. “Go. There’s nothing they can do to me I haven’t already weathered.”
Baz pushed the door open. “I’ll come back for you, Dad.”
Outside, he caught a glimpse of dark hair as two Regulators dragged Kai around the corner. The exit was in the opposite direction, but Baz followed the sound of Kai’s screaming and swearing, his heart beating so erratically he thought he might faint.
A door clicking shut. Kai’s voice waning to nothing but muffled whimpers behind it as power surged all through the building.
Baz barged in to find the Nightmare Weaver strapped to a chair. A Regulator was drawing blood from him—silver blood, power and magic. Kai’s pleading gaze found Baz’s. He could see the light dimming behind his eyes, his very power, his life…
Baz reached for the threads of time.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” someone said behind him.
A whack on the back of his head. Faint stars swam in his eyes, and then everything went dark.
SONG OF THE DROWNED GODS
PART V:
THE DAMNED IN THE DEEP
There is a world at the center of all things where nothing ever grows.
Ash rains down from colorless skies and blankets the world in colorless grays. No wind blows, and so the ash amasses—a mere semblance of growth, for only that which is living can grow, and ash is the domain of death. It forms into piles and mounds, mountains that claw for the heavens （if such a thing exists）， precarious peaks that might topple at the barest flutter of breath like waves cresting and breaking into naught but foam.
It is a burial ground. A netherworld. A delicate prison for indelicate souls damned to a timeless existence, gods and monsters and all manner of vicious beasts trapped in this sea of ash and dust and nothingness.
We have seen this place before through the eyes of our scholar. He has not yet found his way back, though he has traversed many worlds in search of it and the gods in its midst, which he seeks to set free. The skies still hold their breath to see him succeed, expectant, hopeful. Sorrowful, too, for they know what awaits the scholar once he breathes the right words, opens the right portal.