‘They are possibilities,’ Soren said to Zaifyr. ‘They are fate. They are all of its potentials, its promises, and its fears.’
‘Why can I touch it?’ He turned to the man who had been Anguish, the man whose cold, white-skinned hand had brought him back to the sphere he floated in. ‘Tell me why if all of time exists together, if there is no past, present and future, why does it look like this?’
‘Because that is how you comprehend it.’ Soren released him. ‘This is your creation. You have made it.’
‘And you?’
‘I told you that I was a deceit when we first met,’ he said. ‘But I am not your deceit. I am just one small soul woven into fate by the Wanderer. He saw that I was born and ensured that Se’Saera would make me again. He left me a message to give to you, but it was not until I lay in the field of paradise that I could put aside Anguish and recall that.’
‘Why don’t they speak, then? Why must they use you?’ Zaifyr waved at the shifting colours around him, at the waves that twisted into trees, into waterfalls, into a whole he was only beginning to comprehend. Around his hand, the blue strands from earlier streamed out, as if caught in a wind. ‘Or are you telling me that I made them as well?’
‘What you sense is all that remains of the gods’ divinity. They have given you the ability to create this in their last moments. They have used what remains of their power and left themselves exposed so that you can influence what happens next.’
‘That’s what the Wanderer told you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then he lied to you,’ Zaifyr said. He raised his hand with the blue stems. ‘I have seen the future. We do not win. It is Se’Saera’s.’
‘What you saw was just one possibility.’ The dead painter reached out for the threads on his hand. They moved from his grasp, twisting away, ballooning, then shrinking. ‘It is all a possibility,’ he said, looking up at Zaifyr, ‘but none of it is real until you leave. All of fate is contained within this sphere. Here, everything is real, and everything is not. Where we stand now there is field that I lie in, but there is also not. There is no tower in Heüala, but there is. There is no Heüala. There is no Glafanr. There is no River of the Dead. But there is. There is nothing and there is everything. We stand within creation itself.’
‘To do what?’
‘To create.’
‘A fate?’
‘Yes.’
Overwhelmed, Zaifyr glanced around him. ‘How could I even begin to do that? When I put my hand against those strands, I felt millions and millions of souls. To create a fate is to ask the impossible. It would take me thousands and thousands of years to make a single moment.’
‘You should not be afraid.’ Soren looked up into the colours and shapes above him. ‘You are creation.’
The sphere was a skull, he understood suddenly. It contained all the colour that Zaifyr saw. He realized that they were not waves, or trees, but thoughts, twisting and merging, blending together, to a single whole. What he saw was a mind.
‘It is Se’Saera,’ Soren said quietly, staring up into the coloured shapes. ‘She is binding fate within her. She is making it singular. She has drawn what is left of the gods here. Soon, they will all be part of her, and cease to exist.’
‘Look in the centre,’ Zaifyr said. There, dark blue threads etched with red blossomed. Each of the strands he saw was like the ones in his hand. They were, he knew, Se’Saera’s future, the future he had seen outside the crooked tower. ‘Tell me, is she creating her fate?’ he asked. ‘Or is fate creating her?’
‘All the gods are creations of fate. Se’Saera is no different than those she seeks to replace.’ Soren laughed, and in that laugh, Zaifyr heard the pain and bitterness Anguish had laughed with. ‘Fate creates. It is all fate does. There is no purpose, no structure. The gods themselves make that. How many thoughts do you think the gods had before this moment? How many thoughts that became threads that split fate into futures that ended differently for both us? Only numbers that don’t exist could count it. Se’Saera was meant to end that splitting. She was fate’s creation against its creations. It is why the old gods tried to starve her out of existence, but once that failed, it was why they were forced to create possibilities to stop her. It is why they tried to trap our souls. Why the Leviathan kept Lor Jix’s crew. Why the Wanderer trapped them in his staff. Why Meina is here. Why I am here. Why you are here as well, Zaifyr.’
He tried to respond, but pain erupted in his chest.
It was not the same as he felt when Se’Saera was returning him to his body. It was not poisoned sea water lodged in his lungs, not air trying to push it out. Instead, it felt as if a part of his soul was being attacked, that the very fabric of his being was under assault.
Zaifyr fell into the middle of the sphere and, as he did, a smoking, unformed head rose up from the darkness beneath, from the unconsciousness of Se’Saera.
Angrily, instinctively, he reached with all his energy for the dead in Heüala. His power flowed from the centre of his being, as pure as it had ever been, and he felt it spread through Queila Meina and Steel, felt it spear through the ancient killers from the Plateau. He felt the exultation as it slipped into the dead that had been in the Wanderer’s staff.
Then something grasped not him, but his power. It took hold with a startling ferocity and wrenched it from his control.
The dead did not spear into Se’Saera’s form below him, but burst upwards, to the thoughts she had. It was not Zaifyr’s command: he felt hollow as if he had become a conduit. As the dead continued to spear into Se’Saera, the sphere around him began to break apart. Against the darkness, they were like stars falling through the night sky. Barely able to move, Zaifyr watched as the combined thoughts of the gods spiked and burst, as if they were a storm, the last of their consciousness bursting in a fury he could not comprehend, a fury that sought to break apart and devour the blue that had been Se’Saera’s fate.
The light of their thoughts brightened, turning into a nova that began to fill the sphere, obliterating not just the blue, but the green, the red, the shades of each, the combinations that had birthed so much difference. Zaifyr’s own sense of self was breaking apart as it did. He could no longer sense—
Soren thrust him away as he disintegrated into the light.
He pushed him down to the bottom of the sphere, into the darkness of the skull where there were no thoughts of the old gods, where only the new waited.
His action broke the latent command of the Wanderer over Zaifyr’s power, over what had once been the god’s power, and it broke the control the god had over the dead. The brightness above Zaifyr stilled and, as he fell further and further into the darkness, the smoking head of Se’Saera rose. But it was not him that she wanted, he knew. Not now. She cared not to rend or tear him apart.
She wanted the parts of her fate that still clung to him, the blue strands in his hand. The strands from which she could rebuild her future. The future where he would sit in front of Aelyn outside the crumbling tower of his prison. Where he gazed at the sky. Where the dark shapes of remade souls passed and he could hear his sister speaking.
The dead speared through him in silver shafts, purging the thoughts that were Se’Saera’s fate from Zaifyr. His power ran through them, entirely his own, his fury and anger at not just the new god, but at all the gods destroying the command of the Wanderer.
Below him, the unformed head of Se’Saera broke apart. He heard screams, not just around him in the darkness of the sphere, but in the field, where a child with dark wings stumbled backwards, and in the cathedral room, where she dug her fingers into Zaifyr’s arms. He could feel the pain of that, but he ordered the dead to rip away what remained of Se’Saera’s fate in him again. But this time, as the silver light burst through him, he directed it up into the blue and green and red of the old gods’ thoughts. Fuelled by his fury, the dead ripped at the threads of fates. They tore at what had been made. At the thoughts that bound a world together, that shaped it.
Zaifyr would leave them nothing. He would not leave the divine a single thought to force fate into a future, into a past, into a present. He poured more and more of his power into not rebuilding fate, or giving it structure, but into breaking it. He did it not just for himself, but for Anguish, for the people who had been turned into haunts for thousands of years, for Jae’le, Tinh Tu, Eidan, Aelyn, and for Ayae. He did it for all those he had known and loved and hated. He tore at the structures that dictated those relationships. He ripped at what had built them. He let the dead enact the fury that had been lurking in their hearts for over ten thousand years, let it combine with the anger that had been seething through his veins since he had seen his first man die by a roadside in Kakar.
With all the power and all the emotion he had, Zaifyr tore apart fate until there was no single colour, no skull, no Soren, no old gods, no new.
Until he could sense not even himself.