A churning, unending horror, pulling back in on himself as he feeds on whatever he can find, even his own body.
—The Volokhtaznikon
He couldn’t stop shaking. Try as he might, he couldn’t get warm, couldn’t stop the anxious tremors that had molded alongside a shivering hard enough to rattle his bones.
Taszni nem Malachiasz Czechowicz. Not again. Please, no more. He would do what he had to—anything.
He couldn’t escape the fact that he wanted to live and to hold onto a scrap of himself as he did. It didn’t need to be much—only a piece—and that god had threatened to rip everything away, more than he ever thought he had to lose. Strip away all that was Malachiasz until he was nothing but a soulless vessel.
It wouldn’t do. Malachiasz was a god in his own right, and he wouldn’t be controlled like this. If it took cooperation, so be it. He would suffer; he would survive. If he was alive, he could change things.
Of course, that had been his driving philosophy for ages, and nothing had changed. Tranavia and Kalyazin would be locked in this war forever, because that was what they knew. It was comfortable, even. Both sides would make demands the other would be unwilling to concede. He didn’t see a way forward.
Maybe once he would have considered Nadya a possibility. Someone who wanted to find a compromise. They believed in different things, but he was drawn to her, and she to him. Her company was a comfort he’d never had before. He liked being around her, liked arguing about theology and what that meant for the world. She made him consider things he never had, and as much as he might fight against that, he found it fascinating, he found her fascinating.
And it had been sufficiently demolished. She would only make things worse, not better, not as she was—who she was.
“Are you so confident in your knowledge of what that girl is?” the voice asked, sounding curious.
Malachiasz winced, but ultimately ignored him. Him? Was that right? Was that even possible? Was it so easy and simple to ascribe human traits to this being?
“No,” the voice said, amused. “But it doesn’t particularly matter either way to me.”
He had woken up in a sanctuary at the church, one claimed by the forest. Thick, poisonous-looking grasses grew up and around the remains of benches. Bones rested amidst the growth, maggots crawling in the underbrush, as if dead things, too, were scattered in this place. Malachiasz got to his feet, shuddering and flicking maggots off his skin.
He tugged a hand through his hair, fingers catching on beads and relics knotted in the strands, and he considered ripping the bones out—so much disaster from such small things—but he might have use of them yet, and it had cost him so much to get them.
His chest tightened and he coughed, the pain in his lungs—in a dark part of him—heightening for a heartbeat until it eased. He spat out a mouthful of blood. There was a shiver of eyes and teeth and bone, and then everything settled. Temporary peace.
All he wanted was to sleep and let the worms and maggots take him because that would be better than what he had left.
He supposed getting out of the forest was the first step; figuring out how to take down the rest of the pantheon without destroying himself could wait until he was free of this wood that kept trying to pry him open.
The last time he’d eaten or even had water was before he’d woken up on the mountain. He was constantly dizzy, light-headed. There wasn’t much he could do other than hope he came across a stream—when the sun went down and he was finally able to leave this damned place—that wasn’t poisoned and hope for the best. He wasn’t about to eat anything here. Everything was festering.
He tried not to panic at the thought of not feeling sunlight ever again.
Unsure what possessed him, he ventured down to the strange well in the basement. The pale flowers had wilted to withered grotesque husks. He found his jacket balled up in the corner and picked it up with a sigh, tugging it on. He didn’t want to think about when he’d first grabbed it in a panic the night he’d fled Tranavia.
Malachiasz hadn’t been particularly well liked among the Vultures. They underestimated him, assumed because he was anxious that he was useless—but eventually he’d earned their respect. That was what truly mattered in the cult. Rozá had tried to undermine him at every step, like he’d undermined Łucja until the day he had challenged and killed her. Except Rozá never would have openly challenged him. She wasn’t like him. The moment he’d taken Łucja’s head from her shoulders had been so very sweet.
Łucja, the last Black Vulture, had held the cult in her grip for a very long time, systematically destroying any Vulture who dared oppose her. She had been calculating and ruthless, but she had no ambition.
Tranavia had come to know Malachiasz as the most ruthless and calculating Black Vulture the cult had ever known. They would remember him; they would never remember her.
Hadn’t that been his goal? All those nights when he had planned, when he had stumbled in front of her, over and over, convincing her that he was weak and useless and only good for a punching bag. The more she saw him as a pathetic failure of a boy, barely a Vulture, the easier it would be to take her down. And he’d been correct.
He hadn’t done it for notoriety—though that was nice. He had done it because he wanted to change things. Because he was frustrated with his order’s passivity, with Tranavia’s—with the world’s—and could not abide Łucja’s inaction any longer.
He was surprised by his sudden yearning to be back on that damn throne and dealing with petty court matters. He hadn’t asked to become the monster that he was and for so long he had hated it. His fingers brushed the scars that lined his forearms. He didn’t know when his feelings had changed; when he’d embraced what he was.
He found himself at the edge of the pool of blood, eyeing the uncomfortably still surface. Had Nadya known what would happen when she stepped into the well? He held his hand out over the surface, not daring to touch it. Could he reverse what she had done?
It had to have been here. There were gaps. He didn’t know what had happened to her between the wall falling and arriving at the temple, but this was where something had been wrenched away.
He reached for his spell book. A beat of panic, constricting his chest, tugging at his lungs so hard he started coughing when his fingers found nothing. There was no way to get used to it. That spell book was his entire life and it was gone. A chronicle of every spell he had written, every sketch he had drawn of Nadya and his friends, everything. If he had it, there was a chance he could reverse what Nadya had done, or at least have a starting point to understanding. All he needed was something to start with. Anything broken could be fixed, he had to believe that.
If only for his own sake.