“Knowing there was limited time before his spell was complete, we decided the only option was to remove the source. The majority of us left our worlds, since his spell would slow without our energy bulking it up. Once we were gone, the strongest ten gods would hunt Dalmia down.”
“They never hunted him down?” I burst out. “We’ve never been able to return to our world?”
She shook her head. “No, they destroyed him. But it took the combined power of all ten to end his existence. An Origin can be killed by another Origin god if they have enough power behind them. They bonded their energy together and wiped him,and themselves, from existence.”
I was vibrating, this memory creating a visceral reaction in my body. “Did that kill their worlds?” I whispered.
“Yes.” Sorrow creased her face. “Ten worlds sacrificed to save the many. It was a choice we all would have made.”
I was not capable of understanding what she was saying. My current brain was young, and we thought like a young being. “I couldn’t sacrifice my people.”
“Then all would have fallen,” she said simply.
True, but what a choice to make. “If Dalmia is dead, why did you never return to Faerie? All of this had to have happened long before the memory spell.”
“I was eleventh in the power scale,” she said simply. “One being from going after him. Upon their deaths, I became the most powerful Origin god. I ordered everyone to leave their worlds and hide on Earth, the one planet that had no real power grid. Here we hid and waited, until such a day came that Dalmia’s tainted energy was destroyed.”
It was starting to make sense, all in a super fucked-up way. “Killing him didn’t stop the spell?” I said with a shake of my head.
Other me shrugged. Fucking shrugged. “No, it didn’t, but it allowed us to halt the spread, providing we stayed away and didn’t add our power to the Origin any longer.”
She shrugged again, and I had the sense that other me was a real cunt at times. “It might have weakened our worlds, but they still survived.”
“Barely,” I bit out. “I’m sure there’s been a ripple effect from this weakening through all the worlds. I mean, is this the reason the Solaris System has had so many issues lately?” My pack had spent the last few years saving the worlds on a regular basis. “Did your abandonment of the worlds allow new darker energies to emerge? New gods?”
“Yes. The Origin gods not returning to their worlds has led to gaps in their protective shields. It’s allowed other gods to step forward in power. Your friends are the prime example of that. It allowed a beast to create new life on Earth and be the catalyst for the strongest pack of supernaturals that we’ve seen in a long time.”
Other me might believe she only had memories, and information that she’d lifted from my mind, but I sensed word was spreading about Shadow and his pack. About our strength. Which created the worry that we’d soon be fending off attacks on the regular, as others sought to test their strength against ours. Not that we couldn’t handle it.
But first… I had to figure out how to fix this situation and get back to my family.
Before it was too late.
46
SAMANTHA
Other me looked like she was thinking hard thoughts, so I pushed for more information. “How could a being of light and darkness tilt so far into the dark that they’d be willing to destroy worlds and their family?”
“We still don’t know why,” she said, “but the assumption was that the balance faltered for a moment, which happens at times, but in this instance Dalmia’s world was at the end of the sliding scale. And once the darkness took hold, it refused to give up.”
“How do we stop it from happening again?”
Other me shook her head. “The Origins are lost now. Most of them have been gone so long, and are so weakened, they could never return to what once was. Proof of this is how your line was cut on Faerie. At our peak of power, it would be impossible to destroy us in that way. Any who tried would explode the second they touched our cord to the Orig—”
She was cut off as a low humming energy washed over us. I was shot back against the wall of the sphere. Power zipped around the space, akin to a thousand dazzling crystals.
It took almost a minute for the kinetic energy to die down, and when it did, a familiar set of silver eyes came into view. The rest of him was covered in crystals, but I’d know my mate anywhere.
“Len!” I gasped.
He headed straight for me, his ghostly energy wrapping around me. Pain welled in my spirit, and I wanted to cry at the knowledge that he must have died to make it here.
Died and followed the golden line too.
He came for me.
“Storm,” he breathed, and maybe it was that we were both dead-ish, but I could feel him as solidly as I had when we were alive. The crystals cut against me in hard lines, and I relished in the sensation of feeling.
