Chapter Thirty-Two

Neve

Foolish little queen.

She was only vaguely aware of her body as a physical thing, but still she flinched, trying to get away from this voice that battered her from every direction at once. The same voice she’d heard in the Serpent’s cairn, warning her of Solmir’s deceit, warning her of everything that was to come.

She hadn’t listened then. And though she’d made every decision that led her here—though she’d known, when she didn’t let Red lead her out of the Heart Tree, that the path might lead her here—Neve still wanted to curl up in a fetal ball, to hide away from Valchior’s voice and everything it meant.

Too late for that, Neverah. A chuckle snaked through her skull, friendly and warm and all the more chilling for it. You’re truly in it now.

She flinched.

Take heart, Shadow Queen. She hated how sincere he sounded. The game draws to a close, one way or another.

The power she’d taken from the Leviathan twisted and writhed through her veins, shadow like tentacles. More than anything she’d felt before, more than the power she’d used to open the way to the Heart Tree. It was right at the edge of overwhelming, balanced on the tipping point where she could either hold on to herself—hold on to her soul—or fall into the magic completely.

It had never been like this before. She’d seen Solmir struggle to hang on when shadowed magic threatened to overwhelm him, but she’d never housed enough to feel like she was slipping away, to feel like she had to latch onto herself with clawed fingers. Even when she’d first awoken and fear made her dredge magic up from the Shadowlands themselves, there’d been only pain. Not this… this sense of being lost. Of untethering.

Divinity is a hard thing to hold, Valchior murmured in her head.

“Shut up,” Neve replied, and didn’t realize she’d said it aloud until she felt the dried blood by her lips crack.

Awareness came slow. Her legs, first, tingling pins and needles, her middle, her arms. Neve kept her eyes closed, waiting to feel solid, to feel like her body was a fully knit-together thing. She kept her eyes closed, because she knew what she’d see when she opened them. Bones and Kings.

The Sanctum, where gods were pulled to die.

Neve took a deep breath. Then she opened her eyes.

Her mind could take in her surroundings only in fragments. First, the floor on which she lay—clean gray stone, perfectly circular. Then the walls—crafted from bones, colossal and misshapen, curved as if they’d been coiled into a hollow mountain. Closer, and it was clear the bones came from some kind of tail, starting small and growing larger as they traveled upward, fringed with sharp spikes.

Neve’s head tilted, following the twirl of monstrous bone. There, at the top of the Sanctum, like the bell at the apex of a tower—a huge skull, a snout and empty holes for reptilian eyes, a carriage-sized jaw still lined with teeth. The expression on its dead face, as much as dead gods could have expressions, might’ve been a sneer or a scream.

“The Dragon.” Not Valchior, not Calryes, but another a voice she didn’t recognize. It came out loud instead of in her head, low and graveled, like stones rubbed together. “The first of the Old Ones to fall. Drinking down its power felt like fire and tasted like smoke.”

Slowly, Neve looked away from the skull and faced the Kings in the flesh.

Or the stone, as it were.

At first, she wondered if she was hallucinating. There was no shadow, no handsome men flashing to decay in the blink of an eye, not like seeing the projections of Calryes and Valchior that they’d sent to the Serpent’s cairn. Instead, four huge shapes on four huge thrones, with a fifth standing empty.

The figures on the thrones were as tall as three of Solmir, utterly different from the illusions their shadows spun. All of them were swathed from head to toe in white gauze, covering limbs and faces. Each wore a spiked crown that pushed through the fabric in a way that made it seem as though the shards grew directly from the heads beneath. None of them could be differentiated, all wrought in identical rock.

Everything that made them human was gone. All they had left were souls, tied down into the foundations of the Shadowlands, sunk there by the constant calling up of dark power. And to look at them now, as they truly were, Neve could barely imagine them ever having been flesh and blood, could barely imagine Solmir ever being among their number.

Solmir.

She whirled, searching for him—she stood in the center of the circle of Kings, hemmed in on all sides by these statues that looked dead but were terribly, monstrously living. But there was no sign of Solmir, no flash of blue in all this gray.

“Where is he?” The steel in her tone surprised her. Neve’s voice seemed to echo and reverberate almost like the Kings’ did.

“Even here, she asks after your wayward son, Calryes.” Another voice she didn’t recognize, one of the other kings. “He always was able to turn heads, wasn’t he? A useful skill.” A low creak—one of the statues leaned forward, slowly, painfully, the sound of it aching in her ears. “You know what his intentions were, and yet you care for him still? That’s more than a death wish, Shadow Queen. That’s a wish for pain.”

“Leave her be, Malchrosite.” Calryes. His voice seemed to come from behind her, but when Neve whirled again, she couldn’t tell which of the stone monoliths was him. They all looked exactly the same. “Neverah deserves your respect, regardless of the foolish feelings she might harbor toward my disappointing son. She chose to return to us rather than go home, after all. Knowing what would happen.”

“I didn’t know.” Neve didn’t mean to say it aloud. She shook her head. “I didn’t know what would happen.”

“But you knew it would bring you here.” A new voice this time. Old, with a quake in it that spoke of age or madness or maybe both. Byriand, must be, the oldest of the Kings, who’d been an elderly man when they ripped into the Shadowlands trying to steal back power. “You knew it would bring you to us. You and him both.”

“No one answered my question.” Neve turned in the center of the circle of Kings, addressing them all since she wasn’t sure which was which. Her thorn-wreathed hands crooked, magic ready in her palms. She didn’t know what she might do with it—faced with all of them, it was probably next to useless. But she kept the threat of it in her posture, in the snarl on her lips. “Where is Solmir?”

A low, rumbling sound, surrounding her so completely she didn’t know which of the shrouded figures started it. A laugh, all of them together, the sound of a rockslide.

“The traitor is where all traitors go,” Valchior said. “Even here, kingdoms have dungeons.”

Her fists clenched, magic surging down her veins, painting them black and raising spikes. “If you hurt him, I’ll kill you.”

A groan behind her—another monolith, leaning down, the King’s face level with hers. No eyes, but if they were lost in all that rock somewhere, they’d be looking directly at her.

“Neverah,” Valchior murmured. “Isn’t that precisely what you came here to do?” The stone head cocked to the side with a groan, obscenely slow. “Or, at least, what you think you came here to do?”

Dust from the Kings’ movements peppered the air, made a cough claw up Neve’s throat. How long had it been since they’d moved? She imagined centuries of sitting still, swallowing shadow and sinking deep into a rotten world, and suppressed a shudder.

She still held the shard of god-bone in her hand. The corpse of the Leviathan had no blood to stain it, so it gleamed white in the gray of the Sanctum, in the light filtering through the gaps of the massive skull above. All of them could see it, all of them knew she had it. And it didn’t appear to bother them at all.

That, more than anything else, made a numbing terror prickle between her shoulder blades.

“Vessels,” Valchior breathed. “You know a bit about them. When things changed at the Heart Tree—when Solmir gave you the magic—we felt it happen. We sent the Leviathan to collect you.” The stone effigy wasn’t capable of facial expression, but Neve sensed something like exasperation. “That didn’t exactly work out how we planned, of course.”

The Leviathan had decided to believe in her, instead of in the Kings. Neve’s hands curled, darkness staining her palms.

“So now you are faced with another choice, Neverah.” Valchior’s inhuman voice was calibrated for comfort, but it still rang cold. “Give up what the Leviathan gave you and join with us instead. Become the vessel you were meant to be, and finally find some of that control you so desperately want.”

The vessel she was meant to be. What Solmir had planned for her, before… before he decided he couldn’t kill her, for whatever reason. Reasons she couldn’t think of right now, didn’t have the time to look at, because that would require her to look at her own.

Valchior was asking her to become a vessel for the Kings’ souls. To be the vehicle that brought them to the surface.

To be part of the reign of terror they planned.

The key the Heart Tree had given her burned cold on the back of her neck. “And if I don’t?”

“If you don’t,” Calryes said, his voice sharper and less warm than Valchior’s, “Solmir will take your place. And we all know how poorly he copes with his own soul—I can’t imagine he’ll do well with four more.”

More rumbles of awful laughter, the deep sounds of cliffs collapsing and continents splitting.

It took her a moment to put it all together, how this was an answer to two questions. What would happen if she refused to be the vessel, and what Solmir had meant in the coral prison when he said there was another way.

Here was why he’d tried so hard to make a different plan work. Why he’d come to the surface, tethered to Arick, why he’d led them to make the shadow grove. A desperate attempt to hang on to himself, to write a different destiny where he could be saved.

If Neve wasn’t the vessel for the Kings’ souls, Solmir would be.

And then what would he become?

She didn’t realize she’d let go of the god-bone until she heard it clatter to the floor.

Another sound of groaning stone, a King leaning forward. “Perhaps this would be easier,” Valchior muttered in a voice of gravel and shale, “if we were face-to-face.”

He reached out, as slow-moving as the shift of a mountain. She could’ve run, but where would she go?

The giant stone hand touched Neve’s brow. She clenched her jaw against expectant pain, but there was none. A moment of rough-hewn fingers, then the hand on her forehead felt only like flesh, an illusion spun straight into her mind.

Neve opened her eyes to the man she’d seen in the cairn, bright-eyed and handsome. The image of him was stronger this time, less wavering, and the vision he crafted covered everything she could see. Instead of billowing shadows, there was only the Sanctum, empty of everyone except the two of them.

Valchior gave her a small, sad smile, bittersweetness shaped by perfect teeth. “Oh, Neverah,” he murmured. “What has our wayward brother done to you?”

She wished she had an answer. She wished she knew what exactly had woven itself between her and Solmir, a complicated kind of caring that wasn’t quite friendship and wasn’t quite something more, but lived somewhere outside both, heated and strange and volatile.

Her lips stayed shut. Valchior didn’t deserve that explanation.

The King watched her through warm eyes, waiting. When it was clear she wouldn’t talk, he clasped his hands behind his back, began a slow meander around the falsely empty room. Circling her like a predator, though he spoke like protection. “Solmir has always been more in touch with his humanity than the rest of us, I’ll admit. Even before that whole debacle with my daughter, he didn’t sink into this as readily as we did.”

That whole debacle with his daughter. Valchior spoke of Gaya’s death so flippantly.

“So when we felt the Shadowlands begin to dissolve—long before Gaya’s whelp become the Wolf, long before he found your sister—we knew we would need a vessel, if we were to reenter our own world. If we were to escape the destruction of the prison we created.” He flashed a smile, crooked and endearing. “That’s why Solmir was so desperate for the Heart Tree to work with him and Gaya, why he tried to bring us through with the shadow grove when that failed. We would’ve been happy for either to work, but of course, they didn’t. He’s always been looking for an out, Neve.”

Her shortened name was a murmur as he reached toward her, his fingers—solid, and though she knew that was illusion, too, she still shuddered—slipping into her hair. They brushed her temple, the back of her neck, came to rest against the cold shape of the key she’d hidden there, still faintly beating with a pulse that wasn’t hers.

Neve’s spine locked. She didn’t breathe.

But the King didn’t yank the key out of her tangles. Instead, his grin widened as he withdrew his hand. “Between you and me,” he said, resuming his slow circling, “I don’t think it’s the loss of self that he’s most afraid of. I think he’s more afraid of becoming more like himself, with all of our souls subsumed into his. Solmir is not so far removed from monstrous godhood, and he knows it.”

He’d told her she was good, once. Standing by black water and washing themselves free of mud and blood. You are good, he’d said. That’s why it has to be you.

Because he was afraid of what would happen if it was him. He’d clawed his way free of the dark once and didn’t know if he could do it again.

“And yet, he was willing to face that fear for you.” Valchior chuckled. “Malchrosite said Solmir was always able to turn heads easily, but it means his head is also easily turned. He would make himself a monster for you, Neverah, but do you want that?”

She thought of him wreathed in dark and thorns, stalking toward her on that cracked desert plain. Fear had sparked in her, yes, but also recognition. The thorns in her seeing the thorns in him and knowing they were the same.

He’d made his decision at the Heart Tree, when he kissed her and passed power to her. Decided to become something terrible if it meant saving her life. But Neve had never been good at letting others’ decisions stand if she thought they were the wrong ones.

Almost unconsciously, Neve looked down at her hands, the black veins, the studding thorns. She kept forgetting they were there, forgetting how the magic Solmir gave her and the power she took from the Leviathan had wrought her into something dark and inhuman, brutal and beautiful.

Valchior gingerly picked up her hand. “It wouldn’t look much different than this,” he mused. “You wouldn’t become something terrible if you contained us, not like he would. You could use that power for good. Keep everyone you love safe.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Even him.”

She snatched her hand from his grip but didn’t speak. She didn’t know what to say.

“You’re so different from us, Neve, different in a way Solmir never could be.” He didn’t touch her again, but his eyes traced the angles of her face with such focus that it felt like he did. “Full of contradictions, full of love and anger in equal force, the two of them so tangled together, sometimes you can’t tell one from the other. You were cast in shadows long before he was ever part of your story, darkened from your endless need for control.”

Hot tears brimmed in her eyes, but Neve refused to let them fall. Refused to cry in front of a god.

“Think of this as a way to get all the control you’ve ever wanted,” Valchior murmured. His thumb skimmed her jawline, tilted up her chin. “You swallow the apocalypse and use the power of it to reshape the world. Isn’t that all you ever wanted to do, Neve? Make the world what you thought it should be?”

She didn’t move. His thumb beneath her chin held her still, kept her gaze locked on his.

“You’re stronger than him,” Valchior murmured. “Your soul can take it.”

You are good.

“Let me see him.” A whisper, a way to sidestep the answer the King wanted.

His lips pulled up into that crooked smile again. “A tragedy until the end.”

Slowly, his hand moved from her chin to her forehead. At the touch of his fingers to her brow, the illusion of his former self shattered. The pressure on her skin turned from warm flesh to rough, cold stone.

When Neve opened her eyes, Valchior’s monolithic true form was leaning back, once again a giant covered in a shroud. The spike of his crown was close enough for her to see its sharp edges, honed like blades.

“I’ll show you Solmir,” he rumbled. “And then you can tell us your decision.” A low laugh, like the earth cracking open. “You and your sister do have such tragic taste.”

The other Kings took up the laugh, until the Sanctum echoed with it, the sound of breaking rock and grinding stone and a world slowly dissolving.