“Lore.”
Her name came like a wheeze of dying breath; she whipped her head around to Gabriel. He looked at her with a completely whited-out eye, no color at all where blue had been. His lips pulled back from his teeth, his cheeks sunken in, skin molded to the skull below. “You said you wanted to help,” he rasped, “so help.”
The air still smelled sour. Her feet still felt wobbly. Anton was still knitting Mortem into some unfathomable tangle, shaping it in a way Lore didn’t understand. But Gabe was right, and it was clear from the pathetic wisps of Mortem curling up from the leak that the Presque Mort wouldn’t be able to channel all of this away on their own.
So Lore raised her hands, closed her eyes. Held her breath, let the world go black-and-white, and called death into her.
Her vision grayed out, but something was different. She could see the knot Anton had made, pulsing in the air above the leak. Lore tried to avoid it as she reeled in threads of death, but she wasn’t sophisticated enough for that, hadn’t learned how to be careful.
As she pulled in Mortem, Anton’s knot unraveled, the dark threads curling free into the stagnant air.
She anticipated him shouting at her, doing something to stop her, trying to gather up that magic into its tangle again. But the Priest Exalted merely stepped aside, the corona of white light around him turning to face her.
Lore tried to stop, but the instinct was too strong now, and she was caught in its current like sand in the tide. The threads of Mortem that Anton had altered flowed to her hands, breached her skin, found her heart.
It felt different. Stronger, somehow, slithering through her veins in a torrent. And it didn’t come back out.
Panicking, Lore planted her feet and flexed her fingers, trying to hold up against the onslaught—
That’s when the screaming started.
Her body wouldn’t obey when Lore tried to close her hands, frozen like the corpse she undoubtedly resembled. Everything in her was cold, a deep, numbing wave coursing from her outstretched fingers and all the way down her spine, her heart stopped and stilled as if a giant fist had closed around it.
And still, the screaming. The screaming that, somehow, was her fault.
But it was hard to hear over the voice in her head.
This isn’t something you can escape. Haven’t you figured that out by now?
It echoed in every one of her bones, danced on every icy nerve. The voice was alien and familiar at once, and sounded strange, like two throats twined together and speaking as one, harmonizing with itself.
One of those voices sounded like Lore’s.
Every day, it grows stronger. Growing in you like rot as you come nearer to ascension. The voice felt like oil poured over the grooves of her brain, slipping into every empty surface. It reminded her of the voice that had told her to use her power, that day in the square with Horse, but stronger, more sure. You can’t flee from what you are, daughter of the dark. Death is the one thing that will always find you, and you are its heir. The seed of the apocalypse, end-times walking. You are the wildfire necessary for the forest to grow, the destruction that brings rebirth.
Lore felt death clenching at her lungs, her heart, every organ that was ripe and vital turning shriveled and dry. She hadn’t been able to channel any Mortem out, only draw it in. It wasn’t killing her—that’d be too simple—but it was doing something.
Changing her. Taking her capacity for power and burrowing into it, making it wider, so it might swallow her up. Hollowing her out to be filled again by something vast, something dark.
Her eyes wouldn’t open, as if her lids had been sutured together. Lore bared her teeth, pulling up strength she didn’t know she had. With a roar, she forced the Mortem out of her, through veins that felt like they might burst, through bones that wanted to break against the pressure.
The rock beneath her feet was too brittle already, but Lore could feel the life surrounding her the same way she could feel death—the two of them inverted, different streams from the same source. She felt the heaving bodies of the terrified horses, the fear-curdled heartbeats of the other Presque Mort. The placid, unthinking life of the garden, still green and blooming, and beyond that, the farmland.
There was too much Mortem to direct it with any kind of finesse. So Lore let it loose into both, funneling death into living roots both close by and far away, the death in her veins guiding her to life.
Law of Opposites, she thought distantly. Death and life strengthening each other, death and life entwined.
Spiritum fled every bloom and leaf in the garden, replaced not by death, but by stasis, freezing them in time. Mortem wove into the aura of every scrap of life both seen and unseen—cocooning tiny bugs, larvae, the aphids invisible to the naked eye. Then it went deeper, spearing through the cobblestones of the road, turning to rock the tiny shoots of grass that tried to find cracks of sun, the earthworms waiting for rain, the bulbs of fall-blooming flowers that hadn’t yet broken the surface. Then the farmlands: wheat turning to spears of thin rock, roots becoming intricate statues beneath the earth. She managed to spare the livestock, but only just; the panicked lowing of cattle came loud enough to hear, a deeper counterpoint to the human screams.