Valyashreva waits to rake her plague back over the land. One misstep and she will consume us all. There is no record of her death or containment.
—The Volokhtaznikon
Oh, I’ve been here before. Snow and ash and bloody footprints and songs and music and moths and stars. Serefin knew this place. He had never wanted to return.
“Dead again?”
“Dead again!” Velyos said. “It’s becoming almost comical!”
“Huh.” Serefin had known following Malachiasz into that temple was a bad idea, but he hadn’t expected it to be that bad. “Well, that’s less than ideal.”
“Walk with me,” Velyos said amiably, and Serefin, who had resisted this god—not a god—for so long, fell in step beside him. The tall cloaked figure with his deer skull head.
“You chose to cross over by going into that temple,” Velyos said.
“Ah.”
“Thought you might like that cleared up.”
“So, Malachiasz is dead as well?”
“Oh, most likely. He’ll have a choice just as you’ll have a choice. Let’s make it a lofty one. One of big ideals and kingly necessity. Barely a king, you are, but it’s never too early or too late to start making the messy decisions.”
Serefin didn’t like the sound of that at all.
“There were four songs and I wanted all four songs; it would have been so easy with four songs. A quick break, for me, for those locked away, but perhaps not for Chyrnog, but who can say, I can’t see the future! I can only guess and predict how you predictable mortals will act. And you do always seem to act as I suspect.”
“There need to be four of us to bind Chyrnog back into the earth,” Serefin said.
“That will be more difficult now that he’s broken free of the boy.”
That hit Serefin like a punch to the stomach. Somehow it had felt survivable when the old god was locked inside his brother’s head. Even when he thought about giving up, Malachiasz was still fighting. Serefin hadn’t had, well, hope exactly, but he’d thought maybe they would have a chance.
“What will happen?” Serefin asked softly.
“Why ask when you already know? Those friends of yours will be the first to go.”
Kacper. Serefin’s heart clenched. No, he told Kacper he was going to return. He wasn’t going to die.
He was … already dead.
“Then, the rest of the world! And the next one! The gods will fall, Alena will be eaten, and the sun will go dark! Chyrnog will finally have the total destruction that has been his due since the beginning of time.”
Serefin closed his eye. “What is my choice?”
“Do you want the power to stop the old god? Stop all of this in its tracks?”
Serefin froze.
Velyos walked a few paces more before he looked back. “Seemed a simple enough statement. Are you denser than I thought?” The skull tilted.
Finish … everything? Have the power to save his kingdom? It was too much, too good, it was …
“What would that entail?”
“Ah, ah.” Velyos tapped a spindly finger against the side of his skull. “That’s not the way this works. You have two paths and must choose the one to walk.”
Serefin didn’t trust the gods. That he would be given the means to stop Chyrnog didn’t seem possible. As sweet as it sounded, as good as it seemed.
He wanted to know with utter certainty that Kacper was safe. That Ostyia and Żaneta were safe. That he might go to Katya’s father and entreat him to begin the arduous process of coming together with Serefin to prepare a peace treaty. He wanted to know that his kingdom would have peace in his lifetime.
He had seen so much death.
He had killed so many.
It wasn’t something that he ever truly allowed himself to dwell on, because he knew if he did, he would drown in it.
Could Tranavia have a king like him? One so stained with blood? One who was battered with the echoes of the front every single day? One who woke each night from the death of a friend being played out in his nightmares? This would be how he lived for the rest of his life. Serefin Meleski of the scars and trauma and decorated military jacket.
Was it an impossible choice, truly? How much he would love to wipe away everything he had done and everything he still had to account for; how easy it would be to turn the world away from the wartime sins of his people.
How thrilling to be the one to finally stop this damn war on sheer power alone.
But he didn’t like the catch that he didn’t know. The gods would ask for something in return that he would not want to give.
Serefin shook his head. “No,” he said softly. “I want to stay me.”
“You, godstouched, with your moths and stars and broken mind?” Velyos asked skeptically. “That could be fixed, easily. Your eye, too. You’ve kept such good track of it. We know exactly where to fetch it from.”
Oh, it was tempting. But he didn’t know who he was without the scarred mess. Without the war trauma and the nightmares. They had been with him for so long, they were part of him. And that was trite, it was cavalier, but he couldn’t imagine a reality for himself like the one Velyos was describing.
“If you choose the mortal path, it is very likely that everyone you love will die,” Velyos warned.
“Likely,” Serefin repeated. “But not a guarantee?”
“Nothing in your world or mine is truly a guarantee,” Velyos replied.
Serefin nodded slowly. “Then we fight back. Mortal and broken, as we are.”
“Very well,” he said. “What a choice you have made.” And Serefin could have sworn that, somehow, Velyos was smiling.