They’d punched straight through her throat.
21
Aidas was a Prince of Hel, Silene went on.
Bryce’s breath caught in her throat.
Using rare summoning salts that facilitated communication between worlds, his spies in Midgard had kept him well informed since the Asteri had failed to conquer his planet. Aidas had been assigned to hunt for the Asteri ever since. So their evil might never triumph again. On his world, or any other.
Hel was somehow the force for good in all this. How had Aidas been able to see past Theia’s atrocities? And more than that, to love her? It made no sense. Unless Aidas was just like Theia, a murdering hypocrite—
Long hours did my mother and Aidas speak through the portal, neither daring to cross into the other’s world. For many days afterward, in secret, they planned.
It soon became clear that we needed more troops. Any Fae that were loyal to us … and humans. The very enemies my mother had slaughtered and enslaved, she now needed. Their final stronghold lay at Parthos, where all the scholars and thinkers of their day had holed up in the great library. And so it was to Parthos we next went, winnowing under cover of darkness.
“Unbelievable,” Nesta seethed.
The white-stoned city rose like a dream from a vast, black-soiled river delta.
Parthos was more beautiful than any city currently on Midgard, adorned with elegant spires and columns, massive obelisks in the market squares, sparkling fountains and complex networks of aqueducts, and humans milling about in relative peace and ease, not fear.
At the edge of the city, overlooking the marshes to the north, sat a massive, columned building—no, a complex of several buildings.
The library of Parthos.
It hadn’t only been a place to hold books, Bryce knew. The compound had housed several academies for various fields of study—the arts, sciences, mathematics, philosophy—as well as the vast collection of books, a treasure trove of thousands of years’ worth of learning.
Bryce’s heart ached to see it—what had once been. What had been lost.
Crowded into an amphitheater in the center of the complex stood a mix of humans and Fae arguing—pointing and shouting.
The meetings did not go well, Silene said. But my mother stood firm. Explained what she had learned. What the humans had long known, though they had been ignorant of the details.
The arguing parties slowly sat on the stone benches, quietly listening to Theia.
And when she had finished, the humans revealed their own discovery—one that showed us our doom.
As a lone human woman stood from the crowd, Bryce reminded herself to keep breathing, to steady herself—
The Asteri had infected the water we consumed with a parasite. They’d poisoned the lakes and streams and oceans. The parasites burrowed their way into our bodies, warping our magic.
Holy gods.
The Asteri created a coming-of-age ritual for all magical creatures who had entered Midgard, and their descendants. A blast of magic would be released and then contained—and then fed to the Asteri. It was a greater, more concentrated dose than the seeds of power they’d sucked off us for years in the Tithe. They spun it into a near-religious experience, explained it away as a method to harness energy for fuel, and had been feeding off it ever since.
“The Drop,” Bryce whispered, dismay rocking through her. She knew Nesta and Azriel were staring at her, but she couldn’t look away from the memory.
Should anyone with power opt out of the ritual, the parasites would suck immortals dry until they withered away to nothing—like humans. It would be dismissed as old age. Lies were planted about the dangers of performing the ritual in any place other than one of the Asteri’s harvesting sites, where the power could be contained and filtered to them, and to their cities and their technology.
Bryce was going to be sick.
The Asteri’s hold on the people of her world wasn’t merely based in military and magical might. These parasites ensured that they fucking owned each person, their very power. Their tyranny had wormed itself into the blood of every being on Midgard.
The humans had learned this—the Asteri had been careless in spilling knowledge around them, because without magic, the humans were unaffected. And they’d watched in smug silence while we, their gleeful oppressors, had unwittingly become oppressed. With one sip of water from this world, we belonged to the Asteri. There was no undoing it.
The despair nearly broke us then and there.
At last, Bryce could truly relate. She’d gone somewhere far away from her body. Listened as if from a distance as the last acts of this damned history played out.