Adrian dropped his eyes to the ground. He could hear his father saying something cocky, but he didn’t have a spare brain cell left to interpret the words. Every thought in his head was focused on what he’d just witnessed: the miracle everything he knew about sorcery told him shouldn’t have happened, yet clearly had. Even his aunt Lydia, the Old Wife of the Bones herself, couldn’t pull off a total resurrection on a vaporized corpse, and while sorcery’s claim to fame was doing the impossible, the sorcerer still needed fuel to do it. Gilgamesh himself had taught Adrian that, so how had he pulled it off? Where was he getting that insane amount of magic from if it wasn’t in his blood?
“Adrian?”
The whisper was soft and close, and Adrian looked over with a jump to see Boston crouching on his shoulder.
“If this is about getting to safety, I already know,” Adrian said, heading off the lecture. “But I can’t leave Bex alone to—”
“I wasn’t going to ask,” his familiar assured him. “We both agreed to this fight, which means no running. I only interrupted you because I saw something.”
He pointed his paw at the row of glowing glass-and-gold boxes above them. “You see that prince on the corner?”
“Not really,” Adrian said, craning his head back. “That tank looks empty to me.”
“Precisely,” Boston said with a lash of his tail. “Itwasn’tempty when we got here. I didn’t see what happened with everything else that was going on, but I remember distinctly that every tank on this wall was full. Now there’s one vacant right after Gilgamesh—”
“Brought himself back to life,” Adrian finished excitedly, stepping back to get a better look at the giant display case. “That’show he’s doing it. He must be using the injured princes as replacements!”
“It’s too soon to jump to conclusions,” Boston warned, but his green eyes sparkled with excitement. “If that were the case, though, it would explain why this wall is here. I thought it was odd that Gilgamesh was storing his injured sons so close to him when he had no problem sending off all the functional ones to die stopping us. If he’s using them to give himself extra lives, though, it all makes sense.”
“It makesperfectsense,” Adrian agreed, ignoring the odd darkness in the sky as he pressed his face against the glass wall of the closest tank.
Like all the princes he’d seen up here, the man floating inside it was mortally wounded, with stab holes through his stomach, heart, and head. Now that Adrian knew what he was looking at, he could practically see Drox’s old shaved-down shape in the puncture wounds. This prince had definitely been killed by one of Bex’s previous incarnations, probably not even that long ago. But while the lack of scar tissue proved that thisprince had died from his wounds, there was no white blood clouding the tank’s beautifully glowing blue water. If he turned his head sideways and pressed his cheek flat against the freezing cold glass, Adrian could actually see the liquid quintessence shining inside the prince’s severed arteries, and that made him more excited than anything.
“I don’t think they’re just replacements,” he whispered. “All of these princes still have their quintessence blood! That’s how he’s able to—"
“Adrian,” Boston interrupted in a terrified voice, his black ears flat against his skull as he stared at the sky. “Do you see what’s happening above—”
“No, and I’m not going to look,” Adrian interrupted, keeping his eyes firmly on the tank in front of him. “Bex is strong. I know she can handle whatever Gilgamesh throws, but she can’t win if he’s got a whole wall full of extra lives while she only has one. It’s our job to level the playing field, andthisis how we do that.”
He smacked his hand against the glass tank.
“The princes aren’t just Gilgamesh’s backups,” he announced, grabbing Boston’s head and forcing him to look. “They’re his fuel tanks. This is how he’s able to cast so much magic despite having no quintessence in his own body. He’s using their bodies and blood instead.”
It all made sense now. Adrian had never seen sorcery on the scale Gilgamesh was throwing around. He’d assumed that was due to the experience difference between the master who’d invented the system and his students, but it still felt like too much. It’d taken all the quintessence in Adrian’s body to grow his new tree, but the magic Gilgamesh was doing now—endless teleportation, the complete reconstruction of his body, whatever that giant shadow before had been—was even bigger. Pulling off that many miracles back-to-back required more quintessencethan any single person could hold, but Gilgamesh wasn’t doing it as a single person. He was fueling his magic using an entire array of princes, and now that Adrian knew that, he knew how to bring him down.
“Cover me,” he told Boston.
“Cover you with what?” the cat cried, digging his claws into Adrian’s coat as the witch dropped flat on the stone. “There’s no forest here!”
“There’s about to be,” Adrian promised as he pressed his entire body into the ground. “Just keep your eyes on the fight and bite me if something’s about to hit us. I’ll do the rest.”
Boston growled deep in his throat. Adrian hoped it was a growl of approval, because he’d already turned his attention inward, leaving the chaos of Heaven’s pinnacle behind to focus everything on his heart, which was still beating far below at the base of his new tree. Through its deep roots, he could feel the battle raging in the main Blackwood grove. Not enough to tell how the fight was going, but it made him feel terrible about asking for resources. He was about to go see if there was an outer grove he could pull from instead when the forest itself forced its way into his mind.
It felt like someone had shoved a handful of roots inside his skull. The Great Blackwood was famous for showing up where it was least expected, but Adrian had never felt it do anything like this before. It was almost like someone was using a spell to thrust the forest’s magic directly into his hands. Not that Adrian was complaining, since that was exactly what he needed, but the timing was too perfect not to be suspicious.
That thought survived only a few seconds before Adrian tossed it aside. Nothing was suspicious when your aunt could see the future, and the whole coven knew he’d come up here to finish Gilgamesh. If he actually managed to kill the Eternal King, the army attacking the main Blackwood would collapse on itsown. That made Adrian’s tree the most important to the forest’s survival, and survival at any cost was the first rule of all living things. Look at it that way and it made complete sense why the Great Blackwood was suddenly pouring magic into him like a firehose into a bucket. The only question left was what to do with it all.
As a greedy Witch of the Present, that was Adrian’s favorite question to answer. He soaked the magic up as fast as the Blackwood fed it to him and used the power to send his forest surging to the sky. Not Heaven’s sky. That place was just another prison, same as the Hells. Thetruepath to power followed the chains just like the Morrigan had said, so that was what Adrian did, growing his forest along the same black links they’d used to climb up here in the first place.
Just like during his experiments below the Seattle Anchor, the sin iron killed his plants almost instantaneously, but Adrian was no longer working with potted sprouts from a nursery. He had volume on his side now, and he used it mercilessly, burying the chains in vines, moss, and twisting roots until the layer of dead material was so thick that the chains’ poison could no longer reach the new growth that surged over it.
All that coverage took up a lot of room in the narrow, hidden tunnel, but the chains were sagging now that Gilgamesh had destroyed the Wheel they’d been made to hold. Several had already fallen out completely, making room for all the new branches and greenery Adrian was shoving into the hole. The wave of growth hit the ceiling Bex had punched through to reach the golden throne room like a landslide, but the forest didn’t have to go around like they had. It bashed its way straight through the plug at the top, breaking the magical base that supported the gods’ giant sin-iron tombs like roots cracking a foundation.
That was exactly what Adrian hoped would happen. But as he poured the Blackwood’s magic onto his forest like gasoline on a fire, he realized for the first time just howbigthis place was. His forest was spreading like every witch in the world was pushing it right along with him, but it still took a full twenty heartbeats before the first roots started poking over the edge of the rocky shelf Adrian was lying on.
Once the flood of life got going, though, it didn’t stop. The moment the roots broke through, the rest of the forest erupted into Gilgamesh’s black desert in an explosion of vibrant, violent green. Saplings and vines, flowers and weeds, even the upper branches of his fir tree pushed through the black sand like water welling through a cloth. Within seconds of the first root’s appearance, the entire stone outcropping was tilting like a caught kite in a canopy of green, but the real magic didn’t happen until Adrian reached up and pressed his fingers against the cool glass of the magical holding tank above him.
The moment he gave the signal, Adrian’s forest hit the wall of preserved princes like a tidal wave. Vines twisted around the golden filigree that held the tanks together until the metal snapped. Roots pushed the stacked coffins into skewed angles while bright-green algae blossomed inside the glass. No one element was enough by itself, but together they created a storm of entropy that even Gilgamesh’s precise engineering couldn’t stop. Adrian barely had time to scramble out of the way before the wall of tanks broke free of its bolts and crashed to the now moss-covered ground.
