The tank directly next to Adrian shattered when it landed, smashing into a thousand pieces with the unmistakable sound of breaking crystal. All the glowing water poured out when it broke, dropping the prince who’d been floating inside. Adrian had already scrambled back to his feet by the time he landed, flinging his hands up to deal with whatever came next, but thewounded prince didn’t attack or even resume dying. Instead, he started to vanish, his flesh evaporating like ether exposed to air.
That was probably a mercy considering the horrific head wound he’d been sporting, but Adrian hadn’t expected his body to disappear like a puddle on a hot day. Gilgamesh had warned him that liquid quintessence was unstable, though, so maybe this was the natural result of keeping all that volatile magic inside a vessel that was no longer alive enough to contain it. Adrian was about to break the next toppled tank open to see if the princes evaporated every time when he heard the muffledclankof metal boots hitting the moss-covered stone behind him.
Sorcery slammed into his back a second later. The magic grabbed Adrian like a giant fist, hauling him off his feet and whirling him around to face his furious-looking father.
It was a sign of how angry Gilgamesh was that he didn’t bother with gloating or demands. He simply squeezed his golden-armored fist. The magic holding Adrian followed the motion, crushing his body like an apple in a cider press. He was seconds away from being squeezed into sausage when Bex appeared out of nowhere and crashed into Gilgamesh like a flaming meteor.
The crushing pressure vanished that same instant, dropping Adrian face-first into the moss as Bex and Gilgamesh brawled a few feet away. It was a testimony to the Bonfire Queen’s restraint that her roaring flames didn’t even burn the dew off his new forest’s delicate young leaves. Gilgamesh, on the other hand, was being roasted alive, and this time, he didn’t seem nonchalant about it. The smug smile was long gone from his face as he attacked the queen with his sword, fists, and legs in a desperate struggle to get out of her grasp and back to killing the forest. A fact that Bex realized much faster than Adrian did.
“Don’t stop!” she shouted as she sliced Drox’s black blade through Gilgamesh’s flailing arm. “Whatever you’re doing,keep doing it!”
Adrian nodded and scrambled away, giving the queen and king plenty of room to brawl while he dug his fingers into the tangle of vines, brambles, and roots that hadn’t stopped growing even while he was being squeezed to death.
That was the best part of being a witch. Gilgamesh’s sorcery worked only when he told it to, but Adrian’s forest would keep spreading whether he was alive or dead. The tree roots had already wound themselves around the unbroken tanks, squeezing the glass like constrictors and working the lids off so the glowing water could spill out.
It took a while. The original tank Adrian had watched the prince evaporate from had shattered when it hit the ground, but they hadn’t gotten so lucky with the others. The gold-and-glass constructions looked delicate, but Gilgamesh’s craftsmanship was superb, and none of Adrian’s plants were supernaturally strong. It took them ages to pry open the well-made seams, but even nonmagical forests could reduce entire civilizations to rubble, given enough time, and with a desperate witch plusthe full might of the Great Blackwood behind it, this small woodland was doing a century’s worth of work every second. It squeezed and pried and pulled and eroded and grew over until all the once-pristine enclosures looked like old, abandoned fishbowls left out in the sun.
The tanks started snapping like melting icicles after that. The air filled with the sound of breaking glass as the cloudy vessels shattered, exposing the princes inside to the air, where they vanished like mist on a summer morning. Gilgamesh’s fighting got more desperate with every son he lost, but while he’d blasted Bex away several times by this point, she always managed to get back on top.
She wasn’t even trying to stab him anymore. She’d actually dropped Ishtar’s sword on the moss to free both her hands for grappling and covered her flaming body in thick, gleaming scales that looked like a combination of Fear and War demon armor. The new plating still couldn’t stop Gilgamesh’s insanely sharp sword, but it added a ton to her weight, which helped pin the king down. Considering the magic Gilgamesh had been throwing around earlier, that still didn’t seem like it’d be enough. Then Adrian caught a glimpse of his father’s desperate face behind his lion helmet, and he understood.
Gilgamesh looked centuries older. The sleeping princes must’ve done more than just hold his magic and die in his stead, because every time one evaporated, the Eternal King looked closer to his actual age. His formerly robust frame had shriveled to a skeletal husk under the shell of his golden armor, and his skull was clearly visible under the sagging, paper-thin skin that now covered his face. His once-thick salt-and-pepper hair was now white and stringy where it hadn’t fallen out completely, and his sharp blue-gray eyes were cloudy with age.
He looked one rattling breath away from death, but he was still fighting like a madman, stabbing Bex’s armored back with glowing swords and summoning golden lions to roar their fire in her face. The only reason Adrian didn’t get vaporized by the splash damage was because he’d crawled up into the thicket that had formed around the shattered tanks, which Gilgamesh’s destructive magic never got close to no matter how desperate the king became.
Not that it mattered anymore. Only three tanks were left intact at this point, and they were already overgrown. Even if Gilgamesh blasted both Adrian and Bex to dust, the forest’s roots were dug in too deep to stop. The Blackwood’s will would be done whether a witch was there to help it or not, which madeAdrian the smug one as he watched his father’s final struggle, holding his breath as he waited for the end.
It couldn’t be more than a few seconds away. But then, just before the twining roots crushed the final three tanks, Gilgamesh finally managed to kick Bex off him long enough to teleport.
He reappeared almost a thousand feet away, standing on the lip of one of the giant coffins that contained the gods’ bodies. Adrian hadn’t realized just how big the sin-iron boxes truly were until Gilgamesh was standing on top of one. It didn’t seem possible that any human, especially not one as decrepit as Gilgamesh had become, could affect something that enormous. But while the king’s body was so shriveled that his golden armor was falling off him like a discarded shell, his sword was still the divinely sharp blade that had cut the Wheel of Reincarnation from the sky. All he had to do was wave it at the coffin’s base, and the pipe that tapped the slain god’s quintessence—which looked tiny at this distance but was actually big enough to drive a car through—cut cleanly off the end, creating a waterfall of white magic that Gilgamesh toppled into gleefully.
“No!” Bex roared, making Adrian jump. He hadn’t noticed her land beside him in all the chaos, but the blast of her fire knocked him off his feet as she rocketed past and dove into the gushing river of gods’ blood after her ancient enemy.
CHAPTER 19
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BEX HIT THE WHITE WATERFALLof quintessence like a missile. She wasn’t thinking, wasn’t listening to the increasingly dire warnings Drox was yelling through her skull, wasn’t paying attention to anything except her burning need to finish this. Gilgamesh was almost defeated. She’d seen how shriveled Adrian’s attacks had made him, felt his weakening strength with her own hands. Just a little bit more and he’d be dead for good. If he reloaded on magic, though, the fight would start over from the beginning, and unlike the quintessence-fueled king, Bex didn’t have a second wind waiting to pick her up again.
If they were ever going to beat him, it had to benow, so she dove into the gushing quintessence without a second thought. She could still see Gilgamesh’s golden boots in front of her, but the moment her flaming body entered the river, the entire world changed.
It felt like she’d been dropped into Limbo, only instead of a big gray nothing, all she saw was white. Endless, formless, relentless white that poured through her eyeballs and into her skull, filling her mind with a light so bright it burned away her thoughts, leaving her empty. For one blissful second, she floated in nothingness, a nameless ripple floating in an endless sea of light. Then something inside her freshly emptied brain seized up, and a chorus of thoughts exploded where Bex’s own should have been.
So many voices were talking at once that it was impossible to tell what they were actually saying. Bex wasn’t even surethey were speaking a language she understood, but while the overlapping words sounded like gibberish, the feelings inside them were as plain as day. The voices were envious, fearful, hateful, and sad. They were lustful, warlike, greedy, and proud. Most of all, though, they were angry.
Their furious shouts ripped through Bex like spears, tearing her apart with the intensity of their rage. Their righteous, well-deserved wrath at being imprisoned, tortured, and bled for power at the pinnacle of what was oncetheirkingdom. How dare that traitor show his face among them again? But he would pay. One of their best weapons had just fallen back into their possession. Ishtar’s Executioning Blade had returned. The only reason she wasn’t already swinging at their enemy was because too many divine hands were fighting for control. They squabbled like gulls over the right to wield her, and as the fighting consumed their attention, Bex finally managed to wrest back control.
“No!” she roared, driving back the blinding white ocean with a wave of red-hot fire. “I amnotyour sword anymore! I am Bex the Bonfire, sword ofmypeople! I’m killing Gilgamesh for their sake,notyours! The demons of the Riverlands are slaves no more! We arethroughwith you!”
Her defiant words echoed through the emptiness, and then a screech came back so loud it whited out her thoughts again. But when the hands returned to try to take advantage of her lapse, Bex flared her fire even brighter, burning them away with a river of her own wrath, because if there was anything worth being angry about, it was this bullshit. The gods hadlost. They were nothing but disembodied voices howling in an empty white room, and they thought they could take her over? Make her fight their battles for the prize of being their fawning servant again?
Hells no! Bex was never bowing a damn centimeter to any of them ever again. She was building a new future where demons lowered their horns to no one.Thatwas her burning purpose, the meaning behind her new name, and the moment Bex embraced it, all the grasping hands fled, leaving her floating alone in a pool of what felt like glowing white paint.
It was so thick that Bex could barely move her arms through it. She could still hear the voices howling, but the sound was in her ears now instead of her head, which made it easier to ignore. The bad part was that she still couldn’t see anything. She knew Gilgamesh had to be in front of her somewhere, but the liquid quintessence was as thick as glue and as bright as a spotlight. It was also still, more like a pool than a waterfall, which meant she must’ve fallen into the tank at the bottom of the sliced pipe.
That was bad. Her six horns had made her much stronger, but Bex still needed to breathe. She had to get back to the surface, but when she pushed her hands through the thick liquid to start swimming in the direction she was pretty sure was up, her grasping fingers bumped into something that felt an awful lot like a metal boot.
Bex couldn’t believe her luck. She forgot all about breathing and lurched forward, wrapping her arms around the two kicking legs that had to be Gilgamesh’s. She climbed his body next, working her way up his armored chest like a lemur climbing a golden tree. She didn’t have a plan other than to keep him from escaping, but when she reached up to grab his helmet, she felt the too-fast, almost-painless pressure of his impossibly sharp sword slicing through her left arm.
