Dimly, she heard the others calling out, but their voices melded together until she could not distinguish the speaker.
“Turn around!”
“Don’t look!”
“Step backwards!”
Laila tried to anchor her consciousness to one spot, to raise the hand she knew she must still have, but she was fraying by the second.
Ruslan grabbed Séverin by the back of his neck. “You won’t go without me! It’s mine too! I want to know. I need to see—”
The last thing Laila saw was Séverin closing his eyes, throwing his arms up to shield his face. Laila did not see the light behind her, but she saw it fall across Ruslan’s golden face.
Hide your face before God.
The metal of Ruslan’s face sank at the contact of light. A scream ripped from his throat as his face melted in, his skull slipping through red flesh.
But the gold stayed on his bones.
Ruslan had shining bones, thought Laila. Like a god. Like the skeleton they’d found on the shores.
And right before the metal melted, right before death stole him, Laila watched his eyes widen. He fell to his knees, mouth wide—why?
An uncanny brightness glimmered, reflecting off the goldenmirror where his face had once been. It looked like gathered starlight, and yet somehow fathomless, like the black skin between stars.
This is not for you to see.
IT WAS HERlast thought before the light swallowed her.
35
ENRIQUE
Even before Enrique saw the writing on the steps, he knew that this was an end.
An end to what, he was unsure. He had come here thinking he might break off a piece of greatness for himself. He thought that whatever lay in this stone could drag down his dreams so they were within grasping distance. He had even imagined that Séverin might be able to do the impossible…
In the seconds before he closed his eyes and the light seamed out from the portal, Enrique caught sight of his friends on the burnished steps of the ziggurat. He saw Hypnos and Zofia leaning against each other, their faces grimy and tear-streaked. He saw Laila laid down on the steps, ragged as a doll. And then there was Séverin, regal as ever, not in the way of gods, but of kings. When the light touched him, Enrique imagined his friend looked like the kings of old… the ones who had once walked up the steps of ziggurats, laid sacrifices and offerings at the feet of the gods, and knew that their greatness was not without price.
Enrique watched as Séverin plucked a string. If it made a sound, he never heard it… but he felt the temple recoiling. In that second, it was as if the world had shifted on its axis… as if the stars in the sky held still to see what would happen next.
Enrique imagined long, slender fingers made of music dragging up his rib cage, strumming his bones as if they were the strings of a lute, as if it could turn him into a note that was part of the song that moved the universe.
36
SÉVERIN
Séverin Montagnet-Alarie was no stranger to death.
Death treated him like a son. Death roused him from sleep, coaxed him to test his ambitions, and reassured him—the way a mother might push the hair from her son’s brow and tuck a blanket up to his chin—that there was no ambition too great. After all, Death would always be there. And no fear compared to her.
But in the moments when Séverin reached down to strum the divine lyre, he experienced a death he was not prepared for.
Here, on the stone steps of the ancient temple, Séverin experienced the death of certainty.
It was the moment when conviction crumpled into confusion, and Séverin had no choice but to grasp hold of weak-winged hope.
Séverin knew he was meant for godhood, but doubt’s cold fingers hung new words at the end of that knowledge:
