Seven
Emmy
Staviti knew about me and was trying to kill me. That was the only thing that made sense. Why else would he create indestructible servers, and then send them right to Cyrus and me?
Or was he trying to kill Cyrus?
Was Cyrus even killable? There was a definite grey area with the gods and death. Even being sent to the imprisonment realm was a form of death, although … Willa had returned. There was a way for souls to come back from that world and re-inhabit the vessels that they had left behind.
“What the hell are you thinking about now?” Cyrus growled as he pushed right behind me, forcing my legs to move faster and my mind to focus.
“Things aren’t adding up,” I huffed. “With this entire world. With the gods. I’ve thought so for a long time, but I was taught to just accept whatever stories I heard of your kind. I’ve never allowed myself to explore all the inconsistencies.”
“Until now,” Cyrus said, sounding amused and annoyed. An emotion he did particularly well.
Cyrus distracted me when he placed his hand on my back. He then gently pushed me into the mouth of the cave, darkness closing in around us. He spun as soon as we were inside, waving his hand in a half-arc and sending white light out. The light began to knit itself together in a circular pattern. Very quickly, the entrance to the cave was barred to all murderous servers.
“That should keep them out,” he said as I laid down my axe. “At least until we can figure out what’s going on here and how we’re going to stop them from going about their little maiming spree.”
It was darker now that the entrance was covered, the webbed barrier dimming down to an almost-solid blackness, though light seemed to shine around Cyrus without him doing anything, giving us just enough visibility. The cave was small, about twenty feet around, and unless there was a tunnel further back in the darkness—which I was pretty sure there wasn’t—we were trapped in there until Cyrus removed his barrier.
While I had been exploring our surroundings, Cyrus had been watching me. He remained in the same position, doing his scary glowing thing. “What were you thinking before?” he asked. “About things not adding up?”
I was surprised that he hadn’t just pushed that from his mind … almost like he needed to know my thoughts.
“There are just a lot of inconsistencies. Like … that story about Staviti’s beginnings. How he came to be the Original God. Dwellers and sols are all taught the same story: that he was sick as a child, his father was a miner and found special water, and it healed his son and gave him extra abilities. Staviti then went on and had a bunch of children, creating sols and so on. But … Willa didn’t see that history in the Mortal Glass. She saw something completely different. Which version is true?”
He stilled then, and everything inside of me froze because in that stillness was a predator, waiting to kill. “The Mortal Glass …” he said slowly, letting the word trail off. There was a long pause and then: “The glass never lies.”
Which meant … “Staviti lied,” I breathed. “About his origin story. How the hell did he manage that? Did he kill everyone who knew the truth?”
And why? Why would he lie about it? What was he trying to hide?
“What story did Willa see in the glass?” Cyrus asked me, still holding himself with unnatural stillness. “When did she tell you this?”
I hesitated, unsure if I was supposed to share it with anyone else. It was Cyrus though, and despite everything that had happened—despite him being a god—I trusted him. “She told me that Staviti was the son—a twin actually—of the last royal couple in Minatsol. That the Queen was pregnant, but she was sick, so they found a local person who knew how to get into Topia. She had her twin boys in the waters of Topia, saving them all—herself and both of her babies. Her sons were changed in the process.”
“Staviti had a brother? Another just like him? There is no way.” Cyrus blinked.
I nodded at him. “It’s true. The god from the imprisonment realm—the one Willa thinks might be her father—is Staviti’s twin. Which means technically, he would have the same powers as Staviti. They were both changed in the same way, in almost the same instant. He was the oldest, the one who would have inherited the crown.” Only … the royal ascension had died off after Staviti’s parents. Whatever happened, whatever Staviti did, it changed the entire governing system of Minatsol.
“The last king of Minatsol was a miner,” Cyrus said suddenly. “The Queen was the one of royal blood: she met and married the love of her life.”
I blinked at him slowly, trying to figure out how the hell he knew that.
He shrugged, reading my expression. “I have a lot of time on my hands to read. There aren’t a lot of things I don’t know.”
In that moment, he was twenty times hotter than he’d ever been. Intelligence did it for me. His was teamed with arrogance as well, but that was kind of to be expected for a god.
“So, Staviti only lied about some parts of the story.”
Cyrus’s barrier across the entrance swelled toward us slightly, and it looked as though several more of the servers had appeared and were trying to get in.
“It’ll hold,” he told me, catching my worried expression. “Staviti’s brother … what was his name?”
It was almost like Cyrus thought things through in the same way I did. Piecing together the random facts to make a whole picture.
“Jakan. Do you think he’s in the imprisonment world because Staviti was trying to cover up his past? Is there a way to ask him, to go back there somehow the way Willa did?”
