If there’s one thing Horz would never do, it’s hide away the stars he’s so very proud of.
—Fragment from the personal journals of Leonid Barentsev
When she died, Nadya had always thought Marzenya would be waiting for her. But Marzenya was dead and Veceslav was … occupied. Still, she figured one from her pantheon would greet her.
Honestly, she should have known better.
Nadya kicked her legs out over the wide cavernous expanse. A few small spiders ran up and past where her hands were resting. She did her best not to flinch.
“You’ve done all you were meant to, daughter of darkness. Chyrnog’s daughter, Marzenya’s daughter, mortal, but so much more, so much stronger. Are you ready to shed all that is holding you down?”
Nadya tilted her head back, closing her eyes. She felt a ripple in herself, a stone dropped in the ocean of dark water.
“I set Chyrnog free,” she murmured.
“Clever little thing.”
“I did it so Malachiasz would live, but that didn’t happen, did it?”
Of course not. The four had fallen and Chyrnog would never be chained again.
“Now, you only have to set me free,” Nyrokosha said, a gentle prod. “It would be easy; my chains are not bound nearly so tight.”
Nadya made a soft sound of assent.
She had known what cutting Chyrnog’s threads from Malachiasz would do. She wondered, though, if anyone would realize. What had Malachiasz said once? Betrayal serves itself. But she hadn’t been serving herself, she’d been thinking of Malachiasz. Of the boy from Tranavia with blood on his hands, who loved art and magic, who was so much more than anyone knew.
She had been selfish.
It was strange, at the end of everything, at the threshold of death and oblivion, to feel so calm. Nadezhda Lapteva, the savior of Kalyazin, had set its destruction upon it. It was strange to feel no regret.
The pieces were finally lining up, the nonsensical riddles, the countless nonanswers. She was a girl whose magic had come from the dark and been threaded with light. It was everything and nothing.
That crystal jar strung with teeth, found in that place beyond the well of blood, had been her own essence. She who had taken the stars out of the sky—maybe that had been Horz, maybe Nadya had done it herself all along. She held out her hands before her, finally opening her eyes, ignoring Nyrokosha’s cruel whispers.
One hand pale, her fingernails worn down, her palm worn with callouses. The other stained with long, ugly claws digging from her nail beds. One pale, thin wrist and arm, the other changed. Magic lit in her palms, a simple thing. A drop of water in an ocean. It had been withheld from her because of fear, because those in power—mortal and divine—had feared. What she might do if she realized that the world didn’t turn in the way that they wished it to. What might happen if she learned magic was a road that went in a thousand directions.
What might happen if she listened to a Tranavian explain why his way of life was so deeply important to him, even if it was very different from her own.
They had feared.
It was time for the world to change. She had spurred it on in terrible ways, she knew. Sometimes it took a terrible thing for those in power to realize something was very wrong. The death of a god. The birth of an eldritch power.
“I could let all this go,” she said.
“Yes,” Nyrokosha whispered from the depths.
“I could crack this world into pieces and shape it anew. No more war. No more suffering.”
Malachiasz, bloodstained in a ravaged village, beseeching her to help him finish this. His hair tangled and his form monstrous, but still the boy she had fallen in love with, the one she so desperately wanted to help. But he had died, hadn’t he? And Serefin with him. And gentle, cunning Parijahan who didn’t deserve to be dragged into their chaos.
Maybe their lives were worthy sacrifices.
Maybe that was how it was to be. They were to die here, these four, and change would finally come.
It was poetic. It was the stuff that her books of martyrs were made of. Necessary sacrifice. A dawning of a new age. One less cruel, less cold, a little less bloody. No blood magic, no more clerics, nothing but vast new avenues of power that still had to be forged and discovered.
Nadya could take this mantle of godhood and fix so much more that way.
She didn’t realize that she was making the decision in her heart.
She didn’t realize—until the legs of a massive spider started to slam out from the depths. Nadya scrambled away from the ledge, something snapping within her.
What am I doing?
She didn’t want this.
She wanted to dig into the dirt and the blood and the chaos and bring something good and beautiful back into the nightmare she had helped create.
She wanted Malachiasz’s hand cradling the back of her head. Wanted him to lean over her shoulder to scoff at her Codex. To see the intense look on his face when he was curled over his spell book, the look that she now knew meant he was sketching.
She wanted to spend another afternoon in a library with Serefin, him spending the first hour complaining that every book he picked up was too dry before one finally caught his attention, and his wine, for once, went unattended to.
She wanted another evening with Parijahan, drinking tea while she braided Nadya’s hair, cajoling Rashid to tell them stories if he insisted on hanging around.
Quiet moments of humanity with those she loved so dearly. Power wasn’t worth losing that.
There were bones rattling off the spider’s legs as she hauled herself up the crevice. Nadya backed away. She hadn’t meant to do this. She hadn’t taken the divinity.
She turned and ran, making her final choice.