“The Tidecallers,” Emory murmured. The very first Eclipse-born.
Sidraeus inclined his head. “We wanted to share this new strand of magic across realms, not just this one. We were still so limited, confined to our respective borders. Yes, I could come into the realms of the living, but not freely, not as myself, and only on eclipses. And now that I’d tasted a sliver of what the realms of the living could be like, I wanted to know them in full. I wanted to create more than the Tidecallers. I wanted to see other worlds and create something there too.”
Emory lifted a brow. “That’s a lot of wanting for someone who called it a pathetic, mortal emotion.”
Wry amusement danced in Sidraeus’s eyes. “I never said I was impervious to it. My younger, more impressionable self certainly wasn’t.”
“How old are you now?” Emory asked tentatively, almost afraid to know the answer.
“In human years, I’m nearly as old as the worlds themselves.” He tilted his head, considering. “Though in terms of the divine, I suppose I wouldn’t be much older than you.”
The thought made Emory flustered. She was suddenly very aware of his gaze on her. Clearing her throat, she said, “So you and Atheia wanted to expand your freedom.”
“Yes. We knew the Tidecallers were the key to that dream, because they alone had the power to cross freely between worlds. Unlike Atheia and me, the Tidecallers did not have to wait for eclipses to move between the realms of the living and the dead. They were the eclipse itself. Through them, Atheia and I began to travel more often, a secret we kept from our gods. We gathered the best and brightest to us, an order of humans with whom we shared our knowledge and power and desire to break through boundaries.
“But this ability to cross worlds was still limited to Tidecallers. We wantedeveryoneto be able to travel between realms; ourselves, yes, but mortals, too. An impossible goal that would threaten the gods’ divine balance. This angered Atheia and me. Ifwewere gods, we would share our power and make all mortals as limitless as the Tidecallers.”
He seemed lost in his memories for a moment. “I don’t know what changed. One day, Atheia suggested we stop, telling me I should return to the sleeping realm and take my Tidecallers with me. She feared the gods were onto us. But I refused to abandon our goal. I refused to return to the grim existence I’d been confined to, void of dreams and creation. I wanted to fight back, take a stand, make the gods see that what we were striving for was just and right. And if they wouldn’t listen, I was ready to wrest their very power from their hands.”
His gaze grew dark, murderous. “Atheia betrayed me to the gods before I had the chance. She played the remorseful sinner and painted me as the vengeful rogue that needed to be stopped. Thegod of balance imprisoned me in the sleeping realm and stripped me of my true form, locking it away so that even in this realm that was mine, I was formless. Just another umbra like those who have always dwelled there.
“When the gods learned of the Tidecallers’ existence, they saw their power as something that was never meant to exist, power that skewed the balance of the universe and threatened their own godhood. The gods saw only one solution: to restore balance, they would have to seal the doors between worlds and wipe clean the magic that had created this imbalance in the first place. And so, the gods killed all Tidecallers, sealing the doors with their spilled blood.”
Emory felt the world tip beneath her, her own blood rushing to her head. Sidraeus didn’t give her the time to consider what it all meant.
“As for Atheia,” he said, grinding out each syllable of her name as if they cut his tongue, “she was meant to be punished by the gods too, for she was the one to bring me into the realms of the living to begin with. The gods planned to confine her to their godsworld, never allowing her to set foot in the worlds she cared so deeply for. But Atheia foiled the gods at the last. She escaped their punishment by splintering herself into pieces to keep her magic—her very life force—alive in each of her worlds.”
Blood, bones, heart, soul.
“So it’s revenge you’re after,” Emory said. “You don’t want Atheia to be put back together again.”
The golds and silvers in his eyes flared bright in answer. “I have had a long time to contemplate what was done to me and my Tidecallers,” he said. “The retribution I seek is for them. Atheia might as well have led them to the slaughter. She chose her worlds over me and found a way to keep her magic alive while mine was sacrificed in the name of balance.”
Emory thought she understood the pain he carried, the choices he’d made. He’d been betrayed by the one he loved, forced by cruel gods to see his creations die, and imprisoned in the sleepscape for ages as punishment.
His story didn’t exactly paint him as a saint either. But if she were him, she’d want retribution too.
“When the god of balance confined me to the sleepscape,” Sidraeus continued, “he kept me in stasis so that time lost all meaning, and I became nothing. I could feel the nightmares of mortals, but my consciousness could no longer slip into them as it once could. And I could still feel the souls of the dead pass through, but I was no longer able to ferry them to their resting place.”
“How did they find their way to the godsworld, then?”
“Most souls manage well enough on their own, following the source of magic that calls to us all, that created life itself. It’s the stray souls that I dealt with. The ones unwilling to go.” He frowned, as if only now considering the question. “I don’t know if another was appointed to take my place as ferrier of lost souls. All I knew was darkness. And then… you.”
Her face heated at the quiet intensity in his words. “Me?”
“When you came into the sleeping realm and healed the umbrae, it broke through this stasis I was in. Suddenly I could move freely within the sleeping realm, could feel the souls of the dead again and slip into nightmares as I once did. I didn’t know what you were then. I didn’t even know Tidecaller magic had lived on before I saw you using the very powers I’d created. This dream I thought had been extinguished.”
“What does that have to do with your desire for revenge?”
“Everything. I told you all magic comes from the godsworld. From the fountain of the gods, the source of all their power, of all magic, of the universe itself. It spills into all worlds, drawing paths through them. Lines of pure energy.”
“The ley lines,” Emory breathed.
“You feel them, as the Tidecallers that came before you did, because your magic is liminal, transcendent. Just as you can cross through worlds, this thing that the gods themselves never thought possible, you can also harness the power of the ley lines in a way no other being can. Not even Atheia and me. But what you feel in them now pales in comparison to the power the ley lines once held. Because when the gods sealed the way between realms, these doors became dams, allowing only a small trickle of the fountain’s magic into each world. A meager resource that grows thinner and thinner until it is bound to die out entirely.” He motioned to the dim sun. “It’s already begun.”
Understanding dawned on Emory. “That’s why the worlds are rotting? Because magic is dying?”
“Ironic, isn’t it? That the gods’ solution for restoring their precious balance ended up causing an imbalance so great it will inevitably destroy us all. Unless we break the dams open.”
