Heartbreaking tenderness shone in Clover’s face. “I’ve always loved you, Thames. You never had to prove anything to me.”
Thames shook his head. “I did though. I still do.”
He flexed his hands, eyes flitting around the Treasury as if in search of something. They settled on the glowing pool. He extended a hand, a look of deep concentration on his face.
Clover’s face fell as he realized what Thames was doing. “Don’t—”
Faint light drifted from the pool to Thames’s outstretched fingers.
He was wielding Lightkeeper magic.
“See?” Thames smiled, a tear running down his cheek. “It works.”
All at once, the light extinguished. Thames started coughing violently. Silver blood marred his hand as he took it away from his mouth, frowning at it.
“Thames?” Clover said. “Are you all right?”
“I…”
Silver veins rippled along Thames’s skin, as if he were Collapsing all over again.
“What’s happening to me?” he asked, eyes wild and full of fear. “It burns, itburns—”
Thames tipped his head to the ceiling and let out an earsplitting scream. The silver beneath his skin burned brighter than Kai thought possible. And though he didn’t understand why Thames was Collapsingagainif he’d already done so, Kai knew what came next.
He caught Baz’s eye a second before the world erupted in silver, knocking them apart.
59EMORY
“AS WITH MOST STORIES, THISone begins with the gods.”
The Shadow—Sidraeus—sat up straight as he settled into his story.
“The place you refer to as the Deep is the realm of gods, paradise locked behind a divine gate. It’s where the moon, the earth, the sun, and the air convene as gods. And while this godsworld is the seat of their power, the center of the universe from which all magic flows, each god watches over a world of their own. A world they created in their image.
“There is a fifth god who reigns supreme over the others. The god of balance. His domain is the space between worlds—the sleepscape, as you call it. He was made to keep the balance between all things, and that meant keeping each world separate, never allowed to blend into one another despite the shared magic that coursed through them. The gods could rarely be bothered to leave their godsworld, and so they created messengers to dotheir bidding. Divine beings to help them keep this great balance between worlds.
“The first messenger was Atheia. She answered to the four gods who watched over the lunar, earth, solar, and air worlds—the realms of the living. Atheia’s task was that of creation. She was a visionary, an artist who molded magic in ways not even the gods themselves had imagined possible.
“The second messenger was Sidraeus, who served the fifth god, and so his domain was the sleepscape. The realm of dreams, death, and everything in between. He was tasked with ferrying the souls of the dead across the sleepscape and into the godsworld. He was not allowed into the godsworld proper, nor was Atheia, and so he did not know what awaited these souls. His job was to alleviate their fears as he brought them to this final resting place.
“Atheia and Sidraeus could only exist in the realms they were created for. This meant that Atheia could not come into the sleeping realm—at least not physically, though her magic did allow her to access it in dreams, visions, and the like—while Sidraeus could not go into the four living worlds. There was one exception to this: the only way Atheia could jump from one world to the next was with Sidraeus’s assistance crossing the space between said worlds. This was possible only when all four worlds were in perfect alignment. When the same eclipse happened at the same time in each world, which, back then, happened once every year.
“Time does not flow for gods the same way it does for mortals. Atheia and Sidraeus lived like this for centuries, millennia, but for them it felt like a few years only. They were young, and with youth came rebellion. Seeing each other once a year was at once a curse and a blessing as they tried to make sense of their respective existences.
“Atheia grew tired of beinglesserthan the gods, forced to follow all these rigid rules the gods themselves didn’t abide by. Shesaw herself as worthy of their godlike status. After all, she was the hand of these four gods she served, a conduit for their power. Magic existed in each world because of her; she was the one to shape it in her gods’ images, to share it with the people of each world. They worshipped her. She was the saint that would answer their prayers, the divine breath that allowed them to use magic. They called her many things: The Tides. The Sculptress. The Forger. The Celestials. Whatever shape she took, Atheia was seen as a creator, a dreamer. A giver of life and possibility.
“Sidraeus, on the other hand, was never allowed to dream or create. He ruled over endings and fear and death, the antithesis to dreaming and possibility, which is the very fabric of magic, of life itself. Sidraeus watched Atheia create and interact with these humans in the prime of their lives, and felt so alone in the sleepscape, so burdened by the rigid constraints he was made to live within by his own god and by this heavy task he had of ferrying the dead to their final resting place. He wanted to know what it was like to be out there, in the world of the living, and be part of something more than sleep and death. He wanted to create his own kind of magic, to carve a new path for himself, to be something more than what he’d been made for.
“This, Atheia and Sidraeus realized, was something they had in common: a desire to go beyond their station—and to discover each other’s worlds. To exist together in them. What started out as curiosity for each other became something more, a visceral need to know each other for more than the fleeting moments they were allowed to spend together. They fell in love.”
There was no warmth to his voice, only a chilling sort of distance. As if he were recounting someone else’s life instead of his own. Sidraeus blinked as if realizing this. He stared off into the middle distance, a small line creasing his brow.
“One day, Atheia found a way for me to come into the realm ofthe living, on the eclipse that saw our realms aligned. I could only come into this world as a nightmare version of myself, a creature of the sleeping realm given temporary form, which Atheia pulled from her dreaming.”
A smile played on his lips. He was no longer just telling the story, Emory thought; he was reliving it. And in that smile, she saw the boy he might have been once, the inquisitive young messenger to what sounded like loveless gods.
“I was enamored with this world,” Sidraeus said with affection. “And though I couldn’t visit it as my full self, only as a being of shadow, I was corporeal enough that my presence created magic of my own. A new strain of magic inspired by Atheia’s, something to act as a balance to what she’d created. It was the missing piece this world needed to form a true masterpiece. The kind of power that went beyond what Atheia had created inanyof her worlds, because it combined both her power and mine into something entirely new.”
