Everything, stone, their lives frozen as Lore let herself be death’s causeway, let Mortem flow through her like water in a mill wheel. Gabe had told her this kind of channeling required care, but it came through her like chaos.
Lore didn’t realize her own screams had joined the rest until all the magic was gone.
They want your power, the voice said quietly, fading along with the Mortem as her body slowly clawed its way back to living, dwindling to nothing but the barest whisper. They’ll force you to be stronger, and then break you down. Reduce you to nothing but a womb for magic they can’t make. But only if you let them. Even when you ascend, you must remember that you are wholly your own.
Lore opened her eyes.
The leak was gone. That was good. But it hadn’t gone quietly. One of the Presque Mort, a man whose name she didn’t know, was now on the ground, staring at his foot. What had been his foot. Now it was only bone, the flesh eaten away, the muscle gone, and even the bones weren’t in the right shape—just a pile, a discarded jumble. They gleamed wet ivory in the sunlight, and he stared, and screamed and screamed and screamed.
Lore whipped around, searching for more casualties, but it appeared only the one man had been caught in the Mortem leak. So preoccupied was she with looking for more bony limbs that she didn’t notice at first the way all the other Presque Mort were looking at her.
With shock. With horror. With revulsion.
Anton stood at the front of the company, his face still blank. The knot of Mortem he’d made was gone. He watched her like someone might look at an animal they didn’t recognize, curious and wary, seeing what they might do.
Next to her, Gabe stood still, his one blue eye wide and staring at the fallen Presque Mort. He hadn’t moved away from her, but when Lore reached for him, desperate for something to hold on to, he flinched.
Her hand crumpled in on itself like a dying spider.
“Did I do that?” It came out small and fragile, almost childlike. Immediately, she wanted to swallow it back down, but she had to have an answer.
Gabe didn’t give her one.
The Mort on the ground had stopped screaming, and that was somehow worse. He just stared at the place where his foot had been, now only that mess of picked bones.
Her legs were unsteady. Her vision blurred—on everything, now, not just Gabe. The sour-empty smell of Mortem lay thick in the air, even though the leak was gone, and it drowned her with every gulping breath she took.
“Did I do it, Gabe?” she asked again, but the words were slurred, and she fell into the dark before she heard him try to answer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The body always knows.
—Eroccan proverb
Her mind felt sludgy, her mouth sour, her limbs leadened. Neither awake nor really asleep, but caught somewhere in between, where the air tasted stale and mineral, where there was nothing soft.
Lore knew she was dreaming—or something like it—but it didn’t stop the kick of fear against her ribs when she saw the tomb. It looked larger than she remembered, a block of obsidian gleaming night-sky dark. Looming like a slice of the earth itself, prepared to bury her beneath it, to crush her into itself and make her part of whatever waited inside.
She moved with the thick slowness of dreams, the float that didn’t acknowledge arms or legs, made her a mass of thought and weightless matter. Lore tried to back away from Nyxara’s tomb, thinking that she crawled crablike, but she felt no bite of shale into her palms, no rasp of fabric over floor. No matter how far she moved, though, the tomb stayed the same distance from her, as if it were a dog and she the leash. As if they were shackled together, her and the tomb, her and the goddess buried inside it.
Surfacing, just for a moment, her mouth breaking through black water long enough to breathe.
“She’s alive.” A voice she knew in her bones, one that made her think inexplicably of fire, of incense, of rage held tight and trees burning. “She’s alive, but she isn’t waking up.”
“She will.” The other voice she didn’t know, not like she knew the first. Low, muffled, speaking from far distance while the first had been chime-clear. “Give her time.”
“It’s been three days—”
“You saw what she did.” There was no real accusation in the tone, but the words still hung ax-bladed. “Something like that takes time to recover from.”
Silence from the other voice, the one she knew.
Lore went back under.
Time passed. She didn’t know how much. She was suspended in inky darkness and saw nothing, felt nothing.