When the god spoke the word, it was as hollow as its void.
And I saw then that the god was truly not the faceless force of terror we thought him to be. He could not help the malevolence that seeped from his core, any more than I could help the fire that poured from my fingers. He’d left his family (I guessed family was the right word? He spoke of children, so his race must have some concept of family) to journey across the universe to start anew. Sure, he’d fallen victim to the old colonial attitude of ‘bringing civilization to the savages,’ only the savages were the creatures of earth. I couldn’t blame him for that – we’d done it often enough ourselves. He was supposed to land with his godly girlfriend, do the vertical mamba god-style, and give birth to a new race. He should have been surrounded by children – proud parents birthing new gods. Instead, he’d lost the love of his life and he was alone, imprisoned, the only company human jailers who could not possibly understand his mind and hadn’t even seen that he suffered from the most human of afflictions.
And maybe he wouldn’t have suffered if we hadn’t tried to steal his power and mix our energy with his and give him our emotions. Maybe we caused his loneliness. Or maybe we’d simply given him the only way he knew to recognize and name what he felt.
I tried to imagine loneliness stretching over aeons, and what that might do to my mind, how that would twist me into a monster. I was already monster enough.
That was the key. In his slumber, the god sensed me. It recognized me as one who had started to become like himself. A kindred spirit. The god had, for want of a better descriptor,fallen in love.
As the realization coalesced in my mind, the god fed my imagination, showing me glimpses of the hell he had lived in, of the hope that Parris had raised within him, only to bury him deeper within his prison. Of how it had not known the existence of hope.
Yessss,he hissed with his choir of tortured voices.You know my truth.
Last quarter, when I spoke to the god, I’d asked if he could go home if I took away his feelings. I thought the feelings made the god weak. But maybe those human feelings – this loneliness, this compassion and utterhumanity– were all that stopped the god from unleashing his malevolence. Maybe the cage wasn’t made of stone or magic. Maybe the god’s cage was his own conscience.
He felt sorry for his children, because he had imprisoned them. He had made them lonely and broken, just as he was lonely and broken. That was why he was so willing to help me.
The pillars were not a trick. The god didn’t understand tricks or lying. I trulyhadraised something from the deep, something that had been buried with him since the earliest days of the earth.
Raise that which been sunk, and I shall have new children.The god’s voice shuddered inside my head. The pillar vibrated against my back, and tendrils of darkness slithered from the smoke, surrounding me, dragging me back.
Chapter Twenty-One
My body slammed against cool, humming stone. I groaned, raising my hand to touch the tender skin on my head where my skull had cracked against the rock. Warm hands grabbed me under the arms, lifted me, pulled me back.
I reached out, clawing for the stone. A whimper escaped my throat. I didn’t want to be away from it. The god’s loneliness hung heavy on my heart, and it drew out the loneliness that snuck up on me as I withdrew from my Kings.
“No, no.” Hands grabbed me, dragged me back. I kicked and screamed and tore at my captor, caught in the fire-trance that bound me to the god. I needed the god, and he needed me. I could drive out the blackness in his heart, and he would do his best to sate the impossible void of their absence.
Emotions rushed my body – dark lumps of coal that I’d left untouched inside me since the fire, knowing that they would ignite a horror inside me that could never be put out. Now they burned to life, sparking through my veins and pushing out flames that rolled across the floor.
“Fuck!”
Ayaz leaped out of the way as Trey stomped out the fire before it could reach him.
“Hazy.” Quinn smashed me against his chest.He didn’t run away.Instead, Quinn clasped me tight, and bit by bit the warmth of his body and his beautiful big heart seeped into my skin. It cooled the flames inside me, and though the coals still smoldered, they no longer threatened to burst.
I was under control. For now.
Sort of.
My cheeks felt wet. I swiped my hand through the liquid. Tears. I’d been crying.
Inevercried.
Maybe that was a problem.
“You areneverdoing that again,” Trey growled, pressing his body against me, wrapping his arms around Quinn and I. For the first time, I didn’t feel the urge to argue, to tell him that he didn’t control me.
The scent of opium and incense invaded my senses as Ayaz joined the embrace. I rested my head on his shoulder, succumbing to the protective spell of their presence.
What I’d just seen and experienced was too big, too terrifying, to endure without going mad. I should be a gibbering mess on the floor and yet, I was here, my heart and mind bruised and battered, but intact. And it was nothing to do with me and my strength. It was because of them.
Because in their arms, I knew I was completely safe. And I’d never felt that before. I thought I had that with Dante, but I’d seen it stripped away in a moment by my own hand. But my Kings… they had taken the worst of me and yet they still stood to protect me.
That was love. That was family.
Fuck.More tears poured down my face. Trey offered the corner of his sleeve to wipe my cheeks. And just like that, a piece of the coal lodged in my heart disintegrated, because here was perfect Trey letting his clothes get all snotty. For me.
