“Where are we going now?” she asked as he opened the door across the hall.
“To carve a space out of time.”
They arrived at the empty room he’d discovered earlier. Whatever purpose the room had been intended for, Creation was sure this wasn’t it. He walked to the center of the room, stopping when her hand fell from his grip.
“Are you sure about this?” Destruction asked softly.
“Are you?” Creation felt a twinge of disappointment when she nodded in affirmation.
“Then it’s what we’ll do, what I’ll do, for you. Or us, for this world.” Words were becoming hard. Longing for her was already beginning to overwhelm him and she wasn’t even yet gone.
“Thank you.” Two words, barely more than a breath. Two arms, wrapping around him, holding him tightly—two more holding her back. Two kisses—one on his mouth, and one on hers.
Then, it was time for her very essence to become two as well.
“Be ready to capture my magic when I split, channel it to destroy the world, use the magic of that destruction—I’m sure you’ll feel it as I do—and rebuild everything, and find me again.”
“I will. I will not rest until I’ve found you again.”
Destruction nodded, took a breath, leaned back, and unleashed her raw essence.
It didn’t look painful. She looked almost serene. The center of her chest stretched upward and, then, as if a thread fraying, began to unravel. Magic poured from her in dark tendrils, stringing off and breaking free from the cage of her physical body. Creation watched every splitting of her body up until the moment her face broke apart into a continuous, shapeless, ribbon of pure magic.
Creation held up the box to that swirling mass of raw power. It seemed to rush in, as if it were looking for a place of refuge, as ifshewas commanding it. The box shuddered closed.
With the box resting in one palm, Creation lifted the other. Pointing his finger downward, he turned in place, drawing a circle in the stone floor. It shone with light before dimming into obsidian. The line created a barrier between him and time itself and the thickness of a warped atmosphere surrounded him.
Time to destroy the world.
Wrangling Destruction’s power was nearly an impossible task. It bucked and resisted; yet, at the same time, it seemed eager to be at his behest. Creation pushed it outward, unleashing it past the barrier, into the world.
He shouted. His body was being torn apart and reborn again, like he was immolating on a cold flame—freezing and burning at the same time. What he was doing was the antithesis to all he was, yet it came almost like a dangerous second-nature.
The world unraveled just as she did. The pillars that Light had built against Oblivion’s darkness shook and crumbled, tumbling, bringing the divine down with them. He witnessed the death of time itself, mourning it like an old friend, before seeing it reborn again, his own magic insistently—and finally—kicking in.
Such destruction was not what he was meant for. With an inaudible scream, his own magic fired off the fumes of a dying world. It rose like a phoenix, bringing a new age with it.She had not been lying about the magic created from the destruction of a world. He imagined mountains and valleys. He imagined the people and places he had been born with knowledge of but he hadn’t yet seen. He pictured a perfect utopia filled with magic and every race.
Every race except for the gods.
Like a band stretched thin, his own magic jostled back into his body. Creation collapsed in his circle, panting.And he had thought making Hunt’s arrow had been difficult. Magic radiated off him like the primordial afterbirth of a new world.
Blinking, Creation looked out the window—the roof had fallen in. Moss now grew in a room that looked like a hundred years had passed. Perhaps that much time had slipped by around him . . . Or, perhaps his temple still sat in ruin because there was no god for it.
Slow footsteps up the stairs interrupted his thought.
Creation turned, heart still racing. Surely, there was only one woman who would go in search of him. There was only one mortal who could know what this place was in this world without gods. He leaned back onto his heels, keenly feeling each footstep rumbling his very core. Would she look the same? But no matter what form she took, he would recognize her. He would know his Destruction without hesitation.
But it was not her. In fact, she was not a woman at all, but ademigod. A demigod that should be dead with the rest of the gods he’d blinked out of existence but wasn’t.
“You must be Creation.” Chaos’s first words to him.
“You—” he doubled over, collapsing onto his hands and knees. “You should be dead.”
“Funny thing, that.” She hummed, twirling a finger in her long viridian hair. The asymmetrical ruffles of her skirts swayed as she approached leisurely, stopping at the edge of the circle. “Your plan was clever, I’ll give you that. To think of splitting her and then rebuilding the world. To think that if she was gone, I’d have nothing to cling with and I’d justpoofout of existence with the rest of them.” She clapped slowly. “Not many divine would sacrifice all of their brethren for the world. How very . . .Oblivionof you.”
She crouched on her hands and knees, leaning forward and tilting her head so her cheek was pressed against the floor by his forehead.
“But here’s the thing you didn’t think about—or she didn’t, since it was her plan, wasn’t it?” the demigod whispered to him like a lover across the pillow. “She was already half of a whole, a whole that won’t die if only one part does. So if your plot was to rid the world of me just by splitting her and making her mortal, you failed. If your goal was just to destroy the world for entertainment, then you did a miraculous job of that.”
