“I suppose.” Baz was too close to the situation to see beauty in it. But he couldn’t deny Cordie’s talent. The dark, muted colors, the loose brushstrokes, the intricate details. It made for a fascinating piece. Haunting, yet undeniably alluring.
“Do you have any idea where you might have picked up on sucha vision?” Baz asked, even though he was terrified to know the answer. He tried to keep his tone unaffected, light.
“No clue,” Cordie said as she busied herself with cleaning her brushes. “When I paint things like this, I like to think I take away the pain of such memories from their bearers. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
The words felt a little too pointed, and Baz had to wonder if she knew thathewas the bearer of this particular memory. But Cordie didn’t seem preoccupied with such things. In fact, her mind seemed elsewhere entirely as she closed the studio up for the day, her countenance withdrawn. It made Baz wonder if she’d broken things off with Louka after all.
As they walked up the hill to Aldryn, Baz thought maybe Cordie was right. Maybe painting such a gruesome thing in such light would give Kieran’s memory a sense of peace—something he might have been robbed of when Artem brought his corpse back to life.
Maybe, in time, it could do the same to alleviate the shame Baz carried.
He eyed the cliffs below, the crashing waves that the cave mouth swallowed. And suddenly it hit him, why ley lines had sounded so familiar when Clover had brought them up: he’d read about them inDark Tides.
Ley line. A vein of power that ran beneath the sea. A thread upon which all manner of curious rifts were said to have opened.
Like the door to the Deep that he and Kai had come through. The one that no longer seemed to exist in this time.
PART IIITHE GUARDIAN
THERE WAS A CRUEL SORTof irony to being born a musical prodigy in a world that demanded silence, but such was Orfeyi’s curse.
The world had not always been so quiet. It was full of song once, when music had been a way to invoke the divine—a token of worship, an oblation made to the Celestials who ruled the skies. Different songs, whether sung or hummed or played in any way, shape, or form, called on different gods from this great pantheon. The Celestials were fascinated by music and would bestow blessings upon those who created it, magic both big and small depending on the skill of the musician.
By this logic, Orfeyi should have been highly favored by the gods. But the Celestials were gone, and to make music now was to tempt fate. To gamble with death.
So silence reigned.
But everything was music if one paid close enough attention. When Orfeyi was a boy, he would sit for hours by the fjord his village sat upon and listen, enraptured, to the orchestra of sounds around him. The water, the wind, the birds, the grass. The buzz of insects and the faint tremor of the earth shifting beneath him. He learned music without ever holding an instrument, simply by closing his eyes and tuning in to the song of the world. He would fancy himself its conductor, guiding the notes with his very soul.
Yet his hands yearned to hold an instrument. His voice begged to be heard.
Once, his mother caught him humming to himself while they tended to their small flock of sheep. She gripped his arm so hard it left a mark, though nothing was quite as scarring asthe fear in her eyes.
“You must never sing,” she warned in a frantic whisper, “or the Soulless One will come steal your song.”
The Soulless One was said to be the reason for the Celestials’ demise, the rogue deity who brought down an entire pantheon. If anyone was careless enough to make music now, it was the Soulless One who answered, and he was no benevolent god.
“What would happen if he took my song?” Orfeyi asked, his already pale face blanching to a deathly pallor as his imagination ran wild with the worst scenarios: the Soulless One ripping out his vocal chords, smashing his hands so he might never play an instrument, taking his hearing so he would never again hear the music of the world.
“Music is not tied to voice or hearing.” His mother tapped the center of his chest. “It resides here. If the Soulless One were to take your affinity for music, you would stop feeling it in your soul. And a soul without song is no soul at all.”
Orfeyi resisted the urge to sing after that—until, years later, his mother fell ill. Death waited at her bedside, laughing off all the would-be cures Orfeyi brought his mother in a desperate attempt to save her life. Nothing worked.
So one desperate day, Orfeyi decided to tempt fate and sing.
His song was an imploration to the gods, a plea for them to save the person he loved most. Thunder rumbled in answer, as if in punishment for breaking the silence of the world. A vicious storm erupted, the skies going dark and blue with veins of lightning, and raging winds shook the peat-and-stone house Orfeyi and his mother lived in, tearing off the roof overtheir heads in a violent gust.
The Soulless One was coming, but Orfeyi remained undeterred, singing ever louder. And perhaps because there had never been a more beautiful voice or a more moving melody, the heavens split open. A shaft of brilliant light pierced through the dark to shine upon the peat-and-stone house. The prodigious singer within felt his soul expand as the Celestials answered his song. Miracles danced at his fingertips. He cupped his mother’s wan face in his hands, pressed his forehead to hers, and with one final note, sung health back into her.
Lightning shot through him. Orfeyi went rod straight, head tilted up to the angry sky. Forks of blue and white entered his open eyes and ears and mouth and coursed through him, burning, burning, burning.
He couldn’t hear anything. Then he stopped feeling. And finally, he became nothing.
Death’s claim on Orfeyi, however strong, was not meant to last; the Celestials had other plans for him. He woke to find root-like scars running all along his skin from where the lightning had burned him, a sign of the Soulless One’s fury at not being able to steal his song.
“My marvelous boy, my sweet angel.” His now-healthy mother beamed at him. “You are Godstouched.” She brought a mirror to his face so he could see the spiral-shaped brand that had appeared on his forehead. The mark of the Celestials who had answered his song and saved not only his mother’s life, but his own.
Word of what Orfeyi accomplished spread across the village and well beyond the fjord. He was proclaimed the championwho might finally defeat the Soulless One, whose anger now darkened the world with storms that raged in near permanence. Orfeyi gladly accepted this role. His soul soared with purpose as he set off toward the Godsgate, the ancient seat of the Celestials’ power. If anyone could sing this pantheon of gods back into existence, it was he.
