What am I doing here?
Visiting every day since Ruelle’s death was unhealthy, but it was the idiotic belief that a glimpse of her would soothe his heartache. He knew it wouldn’t do anything but inflict more misery. The sight of her would deliver a stale reminder that she was gone—dead—and that his older brother—his pillar—was no longer at his side as a High God.
He could feel the stark shift of energy in the air, pressing down around him like the belly of raging, bestial water, drowning him with all the things that would never be the same.
Exhaustion coagulated in his blood like tar, and suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to return to the sanctuary of his noise.
Acacius turned, and with his back facing Mavros, he said, “I won’t return.”
I can’t, was what he meant.
“I will summon you if you are needed.” Mavros’s tone held a delicateness underneath its poise, an understanding.
Chaos would continue to crawl up the soil of Moros and infiltrate the prison. There would be no reason for Mavros to everneedAcacius unless the Land’s cage went cold.
In his unseasoned youth as a deity, Acacius used to wonder if the day would ever come where he’d crave peace. The kind Iliana embodied, that which Cassius promised to those in the afterlife. He imagined it would be like light shining in and breaking apart his shadow. All his pent-up aggression to end silence, breakstillness, and destroy beauty would one day just drain away. Ruelle had given him a lapse of it once.
He’d been naive to ever wish for something against his nature.
Acacius disappeared, leaving behind a distortedslicein the air while rustling the lavender at his shins.
He stood on the ledge of a hollow within the ruined structures of Tavora—his tumultuous home.
Up past the floating islands of the realm, bounds of air churned like voracious beasts and fed the twisted gales encircling them. There was always movement and sound: broken temples whorling past, thunderclaps in the distance, the crunching of earth against earth as debris filled the air.
Tavora was like a living thing, always hissing in pain, always fracturing and rebuilding just to fracture again. A span of deconstruction. Peace did not exist. It was the opposite of Cassius’s serene Land—or rather, Mavros’s Land now.
The horizon wept streaks of mahogany from the ash-slate clouds. Chaos swirled, thick brown smoke emerging in the shape of claws from the churning black slit in the sky. He could taste it in the air, the way petrichor bloated in the soil after rain, traveling to the Mortal Land. This was the price of tranquility. A disorder he did not command, forever out of his control.
Focus on what isinyour control.
He was far from finished with Marina.
However, eliminating the demigod and Naia was also a priority.
Behind him, fragments of black and indigo fabricated like a storm. Within its billowing wisps, an eldritch creature stepped out, an inhuman crown of long, slender limbs fused to its skin. It looked as if the branches of a birch tree, dark as old blood, were growing from its skull toward the sky. Over its face rested a thick, opaque veil, masking whatever gnarled featureslay beneath. A Herald, one of the three types of his Olethros: a fiendish species born from Acacius’s Chaos and Ruin.
There were few things that he feared, one of which had already come to fruition the day he lost Ruelle.
However, the other was simple.
He was not willing to accept the idea of death like his older brother was.
Death was the bringer of peace.
And peace had no place in Acacius’s heart.
“To Hollow City,” he ordered the Herald. “Bring calamity upon them all.”
5
A REQUEST
Marina
Marina was ten years old,standing in the dense, damp heat under the dome of her mother’s training grounds. Two mages were squared across from her. Their forms were pillars with cloaks rippling behind them like flags in the wind, hoods drawn to hide their masked faces. They were mortals. A man and a woman.
Their deaths came in a simple rise of Marina’s arm. A cut of darkness to the pumping arteries in their necks. They fell to the ground just as swiftly. Victory burst in her chest alongside a chill that dripped like ice water down her back.
