The curls of his tentacles within the dark ocean creep ever closer to the surface and when Zvezdan finally breaks, the world will drown in saltwater.
—The Books of Innokentiy
The silence was unnerving.
The cult left them in the odd chapel room, unlocking Kacper and Serefin’s chains, but not Malachiasz’s, and locking the door behind them. Malachiasz immediately darted to the shadows. His skin was ashen and sweat beaded at his temples.
Kacper looked ill. “Where is this going?” he asked sotto voce.
“I don’t know,” Serefin replied. The man on—in?—the tree hadn’t moved, but Serefin could feel power radiating off him in cool waves.
Kacper glanced to where Malachiasz was curled in the corner, his eyes locked on the man. “And what’s wrong with him?”
“Everything. I’m going to try to help him.”
“Bad idea,” Kacper said.
“I know.”
“He tried to have you killed.” Kacper’s gaze fell to the scar along Serefin’s neck. “Not tried,” he muttered.
“And I murdered him for it. We’re even.”
“That’s not how this works at all.”
“We’re pretty far outside the realm of knowing how this works, I’d say.”
Kacper scowled. Serefin kissed his cheek.
“We’re here because of him,” he grumbled. “He doesn’t deserve your help.”
Serefin let out a breath of a laugh. “He absolutely doesn’t. But who does?”
Kacper rolled his eyes.
Serefin moved over to Malachiasz, who did not stir as he sat down next to him.
“Can you hear it?” Malachiasz asked in a toneless drone.
Serefin tensed. “No.”
“The singing. He’s singing.”
There was no singing. There was nothing but the soft sound of chains as Kacper carefully shed his and sat down, leaning against the opposite wall.
What’s wrong with him? Serefin asked Velyos.
“The awakened one will drive him mad.”
What? What does that mean?
“The need, the call. Chyrnog is entropy; he consumes. Power, flesh, it’s all the same.”
“I’m going to hurt him,” Malachiasz said, his voice small. His pale eyes were glassy with tears.
“That doesn’t seem like something that would particularly bother you,” Serefin replied.
Malachiasz swallowed hard. “You’d think not, huh?”
Serefin’s eye narrowed. What did this cult really want with Malachiasz?
“It’s so loud, how do you not hear it?”
“I can’t hear anything.”
What is he going to do? he asked Velyos frantically. What is about to break?
“I shouldn’t be here,” Malachiasz whispered. “I’m not strong enough to stop this. I thought I could fight him, but I can’t. I’m—I’m so hungry.”
“Everything,” Velyos said simply.
A drop of rain fell against Nadya’s cheek and a part of her was surprised to find only water, not blood.
The city rallied quickly, thanks to the tsarevna. The boyar couldn’t exactly tell her no, especially when she had the cleric to wave around as proof of something wrong. But Nadya couldn’t shake the feeling this was all a distraction from something bigger.
Nadya kept her concerns to herself. For once, she wanted to leave this battle to the soldiers who were trained for it, even if it wouldn’t be that easy. She knew what was expected of her. She was the good little soldier to be used for mass destruction whenever Kalyazin wished it. That was her fate.
It took everything in her not to turn and walk away.
Darkness fell quickly, blanketing the world, smothering. How clear it was that this was magic-borne and unnatural. Even as torches were lit along the wall, facing the swamps, it wasn’t enough. Nothing would be enough.
“Tell me what’s about to happen,” Katya said as she came up beside Nadya on the wall.
“Zlatana was banished and she wants her domain returned,” Nadya said.
“Using swamp witches.”
Nadya nodded.
“They should be easily dealt with.”
“Possibly, if we didn’t also have an army of corpses to contend with,” Nadya pointed out.
Rashid arrived in time to hear this and made a small noise of distress. “I had been so hoping the corpses weren’t going to be involved.”
“No such luck,” Nadya said. “What happens if they can’t be cut down without magic?”
Katya shot her a sidelong look. “Then it will be good we have you.”
Zvezdan’s power still hot within her, Nadya wondered what would come of her spilling her own blood—how much power could she gather? It wasn’t worth the risk, not in Kalyazin, but the idea was tempting.
Deep in the swamps something screamed.
Rashid shifted on his feet next to Nadya.
“Where’s Parj?” she asked.
“On the other side of the wall with Ostyia.”
Another scream. Soul-wrenching and wailing, it tore jagged edges into the night. There was a movement at the border of the swamps. She caught power in her palms, hot light spilling through her fingers.
“Why are we here, Nadya?” Rashid asked, his voice pitched low.
She gazed into his terror-stricken eyes, and whispered, “I don’t know.”
It was beautiful, eternal, transient, unending unending unending and if he did not stop the singing, he would die.
It was flipping itself back and starting over and it was driving him mad. Or maybe when he had woken up in the snow, careful, quiet, the life slowly returning to his limbs, his mind had not come with the rest. Maybe this was normal. So cold. So hungry.
And the singing, the singing, it was taking him apart. He knew this feeling. It was the forest as it had shredded Malachiasz’s mind and tried its hardest to consume the parts that remained. But he hadn’t been consumed—he had been consumed. He would consume.
It was distant. Everything was distant. He was on his feet and halfway across the room. Very far off he heard Serefin trying to get him to come back. But all that mattered was the person in the tree. All that mattered was tasting the power tearing them apart.
Malachiasz needed it. It belonged to him. It would be so easy. There were only the roots of the tree and the worm-eaten flowers and the thrum of power. He needed to stop the singing. If he didn’t, the singing was going to kill him. His mouth flooded with saliva, teeth sharpening to iron nails.
Fingers grasped at his sleeve. He shrugged them off.
He rested at the edge of a precipice. He could hear his name and tried to reach for it. If he lost his name, there would be no coming back. He squeezed his eyes shut. He had no control; he’d never had control. He wasn’t strong enough to fight back. He didn’t want to.
He wanted the singing to stop. He wanted to taste the poison of power.
At the end of everything, Serefin would remember that he had tried. He had done all he thought possible, but nothing reached his brother’s ears. He was dimly aware of Kacper pulling him back, and he let him, not wanting to be near what was to come.
Malachiasz had shrugged off the chains binding him and was at the tree. There was nothing human in the way Malachiasz moved. A monster preparing to strike, tension coiled in every line of his body.
Ivan’s eyes opened. Malachiasz grabbed his head, claws digging into his skin, and kissed him, hard.
There was blood. So much blood. Serefin couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Kacper made a low moan, turning and pressing his face against Serefin’s neck.
But Serefin did not look away. When Malachiasz slit the man’s throat with his teeth, Serefin did not blink. When he did exactly what a god of entropy would wish of him, Serefin made himself watch. Someone needed to bear witness to this desecration.
It’s not Malachiasz, he thought.
But he wasn’t entirely certain that was true.
The number of corpses that crawled out of the swamps overwhelmed them. They didn’t have an army to protect the city, and an army was what emerged from the darkness. Rashid had let out a horrified breath and Nadya had gripped her voryens a little tighter.
After, it all fell apart so quickly.
The corpses swarmed the city walls, keeping the soldiers distracted as the swamp witches struck. Nadya had been in battle before. Her hands had been stained with enemy blood. She had fought Vultures and survived. But this was different. Something here was at work against the Kalyazi, against her.
She and Rashid left the walls on Katya’s order to take care of the witches or get somewhere safe. The latter was hardly an option, so go after the witches who had breached the city walls they would.
They were in an alleyway, the dirt road muddy and thick beneath their boots as it rained. Vines sprouted, abrupt and sharp with thorns, from the walls, cutting off their path.
Fire. She needed fire. But Krsnik would never respond to one of her prayers again.
So she pulled it from herself, and hoped it would not kill her.
There was a bewildering feeling of being torn apart, of having her insides rearranged. With a spark, her hands went up in flames.
Rashid, hacking at the vines with his sword, stepped back so Nadya could plunge her hands into the tangle of thorns. They hissed in protest, the rain diminishing her efforts, but she pressed harder, focusing, until the vines became an inferno.
She glanced at Rashid and backtracked through the alley. The witch at work would make herself known soon.
As the noises of battle flared through the night, Nadya realized quickly that she was being toyed with. A chasm would open in the streets before her and Rashid, only to close behind them. They would go down an alley to find it swarming with rats. Everywhere they turned was something else, some magic, and no witch behind it.
The city had become a maze and they were trapped inside.
The sounds of a skirmish came from a few buildings down, and Nadya, frustrated, chased after it. She plunged face-first into darkness.
The rain was gone. The lights from the torches, gone. The screams and shouts and clash of iron, gone. An unreality so all-consuming that Nadya faltered.
A laugh rang, soft and playful, at the shell of her ear. She lashed out, blade catching on nothing.
Nadya closed her eyes, tried to slow the pounding of her heart in her throat, tried to reach for something within the nothing.
There was a shift. Nadya wavered on her feet, dizzy from a rush of power that was not hers and that was not the unreality around her. She shook her head. She knew this. She had shoved it away, forgotten, let it rot from disuse. Yet power flooded through the tether, impossible to ignore.
It couldn’t be.
He’s alive.
Someone was calling her name. She turned, trying to find the voice because it sounded like Rashid and where had he gone?
She could feel Malachiasz, near enough to touch. She didn’t want to press farther—there was no time, something brushed against her arm and pain flared all the way down to her hand. He was so terribly cold, panicked and scared and—and—
Nadya drew away, her stomach turning. She needed to press through the darkness, pull light from somewhere, and soon, but she didn’t know how to mold the amorphous threads of power into what she needed. Fire was easier, she turned to that instead, her palms sparking.
Another glancing brush, this time across her stomach. She doubled over in pain, warmth blooming across her middle. A laugh. A whisper of words she couldn’t understand and another flare of pain.
She was too warm and too cold all at once. A starburst of pain struck her back and she staggered. Something jagged and iron protruded from her chest. Distracting—she needed to focus on—she needed—
Nadya stumbled. The unreality fell and the sound of violence was deafening around her, until it wasn’t. Everything was tunneling back into darkness. She blinked hard and tried to focus, but it hurt, everything hurt. Someone was screaming her name, but she couldn’t—there wasn’t—
Her knees hit the ground. She was very cold. It was very dark. And the rain looked like blood.
Copper and iron and ashes. He had tasted power before; had tasted divinity, madness.
He had come to think that he could play this game the same as the gods. He had taken that kind of power into himself and survived. He had killed one of them. He would be feared.
He was in over his head and he was going to drown.
This was older, darker, and much more powerful. This was the roots of the trees buried deep within the earth. This was the depths of the water that had never been touched by mortals. This was the space between the stars that cascaded eternally and wound its way back to itself.
Malachiasz was only a boy.
He choked on blood and power. He lost his name and his control and everything that kept him Malachiasz and there was no one to pull him back.
The man hadn’t fought. He had been too numb with power he wasn’t used to touching. It had been so very easy.
His entire body shook with magic.
And if this was what Chyrnog wanted of Malachiasz, he could not parse whether he felt horror or exultation. Whether this was the power he had been searching for his whole life and finally had, or if it was too far, too much, not worth everything he would be destroying in the process.
(But what did he even want with this power? It wasn’t his to use and he knew that—he did—but it tasted so good and he had wanted it for so long.)
He didn’t care about the horror. The blood staining his teeth. The flesh underneath his fingernails. He knew that he should. He knew that he needed to.
He wasn’t strong enough to fight Chyrnog’s will, so why not enjoy it?
Then something snapped. Malachiasz was jerked back into the semblance of consciousness. Two words, devastating, lonely, repeating again and again and again through his mind:
She’s gone.