Out beyond the safety of village walls dwell the witches of the swamps whose magic can confound and corrupt.
—The Letters of Włodzimierz
Her footsteps were bloody against the fallen snow. It was too bright, and shielding her eyes did no good. She wasn’t alone, but all she could see was a blinding white.
“Hello, child,” someone said. Nadya had never heard this voice, yet she recognized it. “It has taken a long time to get you to a point where you could hear me.”
She closed her eyes, searching. “Am I dead?”
“Yes.”
She blinked rapidly, a sudden onslaught of tears forcing her eyes open. Her knees went watery, but she remained standing. This fate had been waiting to catch up to her for so long. No clerics surpassed what they were meant for; all ended in an early death. Nadya was no different; why should she escape something no one else ever had? But she wasn’t ready. There was so much that could be saved still.
And what she’d felt as she’d fallen … Maybe it was fitting. He had lived and she had died. A particular twist of irony. They had squandered any chance at happiness by spending their short time alive trying their hardest to tear each other down.
“That’s it, then?”
Whoever she was speaking to laughed. Nadya’s vision grew sharper, like she was seeing more. Something itched at her forehead.
There were two of them. Similar, yet different, and impossible to look at for more than a second at a time. Light and dark and the agony of eternity twisting them beyond reason, beyond coherence. Were horns sprouting from the one’s head? Antlers from the other? Neither or both? She couldn’t tell. And while she saw them, the instant their features changed she forgot what they had been before. Transience in continuity.
Alena and Myesta. Goddesses who did not speak to mortals, ever. So why were they talking to Nadya?
“You can hear the rest, but you couldn’t hear us. Not yet,” Myesta said. “Your mortal mind is not attuned to the particular torment of our voices. Too old, you see. But it could be.”
“You brought me here?” Nadya asked.
“That blade did not have to meet your flesh. Veceslav watches still, and this all makes him so upset. He’s soft.”
“Iron must be tested,” Nadya said.
“Your iron was tested a long time ago.”
“And its measure found wanting.”
“Was that the conclusion?” Alena asked. She had granted power to Nadya in the past, unlike Myesta, but Nadya had never heard her voice. It wasn’t what she expected. It was lighter, musical, yet with a dangerous sharpness.
Nadya shrugged hopelessly. “That was Marzenya’s conclusion.”
If the goddesses had faces to track, she would’ve sworn they exchanged the equivalent of a dry glance.
“I thought that was what everyone else thought, too,” Nadya continued. “Because no one talks to me anymore.”
“You don’t want to listen.” Myesta shrugged. “And, for a time, you were unable. That Vulture is trouble. But Marzenya was afraid of you. I think we have a lot to talk about, don’t you?”
Nadya frowned and sat at the feet of the goddesses. “Why tell me now?”
“You weren’t ready before. You would have balked at the well of magic, at what you are, at what you could be. You may still, but things have changed. Your enemy is so much greater than a country of heretics,” Myesta said. “Marzenya wanted to keep you quiet, small, and that worked for her, for a time. She knew what you were capable of and how it could shake the world to its very foundation if you decided to go against her.”
“But I did what she asked. I chose her.”
“Did you?”
Did she?
“You don’t seem particularly troubled by her death,” Nadya noted.
“We die. Sometimes our deaths are quiet; sometimes not,” Alena said. “Marzenya is a goddess of rebirth. She’ll find her way back to us in time.”
A terrifying thought.
“Sometimes those of us we thought were dead come rising to the surface. The oldest of us, long since turned away from the world, deciding they want a piece of it once more.”
Nadya frowned. “The fallen gods?”
“An annoyance. Peloyin and Marzenya cast them out for a reason,” Myesta said, waving a hand.
“I never knew about Peloyin,” Nadya said. He had never spoken to her.
Again, that weird feeling of the goddesses exchanging a glance. Sometimes they had limbs—almost human—but mostly not. Nadya saw every animal in creation shifting within their depths.
“No, we speak of older than even them.”
“Chyrnog?”
“The world eater,” Myesta said, a musing hum. “He’s not the only one, but he is the one who has claimed a mortal and thus can move against your world.”
“Why are you telling me if I’m dead?”
Alena laughed. “I forgot how dense mortals are.”
Nadya had forgotten how circuitous talking to gods could be.
“Marzenya was afraid of you because you and the world eater are made from the same stuff,” Myesta said blandly, as if giving Nadya a benign piece of information she already knew.
Nadya suspected that if she wasn’t already dead, she would feel like the world was falling out from underneath her.
“A mortal child born with the blood of the gods. Her power twisted down and carefully molded so that it was only used when Marzenya would allow it.”
“What am I?”
Alena shrugged—if it were possible for her to shrug. “You are an enigma. A problem. A child. You are not the first to be born this way, there have been other clerics like you, but those never set their power free. The others never spilled their divine blood for magic.”
There was no distaste in her words. Like the goddess cared little for the heresies of the Tranavians. Nadya had thought all the gods cared so much about blood magic and it being an abomination. Even here, dead, her hand was monstrous.
“Why are you telling me this?” Nadya whispered.
“Because if entropy is not stopped, there will be nothing left. We can fight him in our realm, but he will merely call upon his siblings, as old and terrible as he, and we will be lost. If our world falls, so too will yours. If your world falls, we will not last long after.”
How was Nadya supposed to stop an old god? She hadn’t been able to stop Serefin from setting a fallen god free. She had set a fallen god free from his prison, starting it all. She wasn’t the one to save the world. She was the one to ruin it.
“Daughter of death, you have come so far,” Myesta said. “You may fail at this.”
“Also, I’m dead.”
That was ignored.
“But why not give you the chance? You cannot do this alone; you will need help. Luckily, there are plenty of you mortals running around, blood tainted with the divine.”
Nadya frowned. “But what about everything else? The war? Tranavia?”
“Do you think I care about Tranavia and their mistakes? Do you think I care what the Akolans do with the blood they spill across the sands? Do you think I care what the Gentle Hands do to the mages of Česke Zin and Rumenovać? What those people do with our bones? You mortals and your magic are your own problems. It is all insignificant,” Alena snapped.
“Then why did Marzenya care so much? And the other gods?”
“Because we act in reflection,” Myesta said simply. As if it were obvious.
Her answer left Nadya unmoored and reeling. But it didn’t matter; she could not change how Kalyazin saw the gods, how Tranavia saw them. To Kalyazin, they were a comfort, their priests and churches stable footholds in a world of chaos. But Tranavians saw it all as stifling. Forcing them to see would change nothing, just as showing Kalyazin that the gods they worshipped were as monstrous as the abominations the Tranavians called the Vultures would change nothing.
She buried her face in her hands. She wasn’t ready to go. This was all useless, merely information in hindsight; all that she had been unable to unearth on her own. A reminder of her failures.
It was silly to think the goddesses couldn’t hear her thoughts.
“Failures, certainly,” Alena said. “But that’s what we expect of mortals. It’s the failures that make it all so infinitely fascinating.”
“The rest of the gods would disagree with you,” Nadya muttered.
“They’re young yet. Their ideals are still being formed.”
“If Chyrnog has his way, your world will be devoured,” Myesta said, returning to the task at hand. “It’s as simple as that. He has been waiting a very long time for this. Waiting a long time to devour Alena.”
“But he isn’t the only old god?”
She gave what could almost be read as a shrug. “There were others. They faded, died, went away. There were others far more terrible, and there were those full of light. None of them matter.”
“Because Chyrnog is the current problem?” Nadya asked.
“Precisely.”
Nadya swallowed. “Or, whoever is left deals with him, I guess.”
Myesta laughed and Nadya cringed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. The goddess moved, fingers brushing against Nadya’s forehead. Exquisite pain.
“Will that be a blessing or a curse?” Alena asked, lightly disapproving.
“Likely both,” Myesta replied.
If they said more, Nadya didn’t hear it. Everything fell into a heavy, crushing black around her.