“How the magic flows, the motion of its currents. Familiarize yourself with it like you would your own breathing.”
She was even more annoyed that it worked. She could indeed feel the ley line in ways she hadn’t before if she just concentrated enough. The spiraling paths it carved through the world. How it began at one door and ended at another.
It was pure possibility. Orshouldhave been. Emory felt the wrongness within it, like moldering ash corrupting this divine power that should have been incorruptible. She wondered if she might heal it the same way she’d healed the umbrae. Tentatively,she called on different magics—Healer, Amplifier, Purifier, Unraveler—blending them to cleanse the rot.
All it did was call on the darkness that followed her magic, like a corruption of its own.
“Easy,” Sidraeus warned.
Emory couldn’t let go as the ley line coursed through her, beckoning her to use more. But there wasn’t enough power in the ley lines themselves. She felt her magic running along them in search of something else to tap into, something that sang to her in a different way.
“No,” she murmured as she felt herself drawing closer to the blood and bones and heart that would fuel her, as silver began to ripple along her veins and her ghosts flocked around her.
Solid hands grabbed her firmly by the arms. She was forced to look into Sidraeus’s eyes, a tether to reality. “Resist her call,” he said.
Hercall. Atheia’s. Because that’s what called to her, what she kept taking from the keys: the parts of Atheia that lived in them, the power of creation that Sidraeus never had… until he created Tidecallers like her.
Tidethieves.
She began to panic, unable to breathe as that pull drew her closer, closer—
Sidraeus dug his fingers into her skin and, with unnatural strength, shoved off the ley line with her in his grasp. They fell to the ground, Emory landing on top of him. For a second, she saw only Keiran in his face and was reminded of moments spent similarly entangled. Disgusted, she pushed off him and stood.
Only then did she notice the darkness around her had receded as it seeped into him, just like it had at the Chasm. She realized what it reminded her of: a Nightmare Weaver drawing the darkness from a nightmare.
“Do you do that on purpose?” she asked.
“What, save you from yourself?” he said dryly. He got up and dusted himself off. “A thank-you would be appreciated.”
Emory hugged herself, watching the still-crackling ley line with wariness. “Did the first Tidecallers experience any of this? The pull to Atheia, the darkness that follows.”
“There’s a reason they’re referred to as Tidecallers. Their magic was reliant on that of the Tides. Like you, they could mimic the lunar magics that Atheia created by calling on her power of creation. Some found they could even twist that magic in different ways, creating various new strains—magics that exist now in those who are born under regular eclipses in your world. But always they needed to borrow from Atheia’s power of creation to use this magic, otherwise they would burn out. They could not exist without her. A cruel joke of the universe, to finally allow me this gift of creation, but to have what I create be so dependent on another.”
So it was true. Tidecallers had always been Tidethieves, in a sense. And from the sounds of it, they ran the risk of Collapsing just like any Eclipse-born today. Except, hadn’t Virgil said Collapsing wasn’t the curse it was believed to be, but a broadening of their limits? It was as if, once Sidraeus and Atheia had left, once the doors between worlds were shut, magic dwindled for everyonebutEclipse-born.
Maybe Sidraeushadcreated something entirely his after all.
Emory thought it best not to mention this. She wondered again whysheapparently couldn’t Collapse—always coming close to it, but never quite. And suddenly it clicked. The ley line. All those times she’d almost Collapsed, she’d been on the ley line, unwittingly tapping into its power. It was as if her magic sought to replenish itself by tapping into another source—whether that be the keys or the ley line or both—so that she never did burn out.
“There has to be a way for me to power myself up withouthurting my friends.” To use magic without taking something away from anyone else. It made her feel dirty, made her think of Keiran and what he’d been doing with silver Eclipse blood.
Sidraeus studied her. “You fear it, this power in your veins. You hate it like those of your world taught you to.”
In her mind, she saw Romie’s fear, and she understood it. She felt that same fear at the thought of hurting her friends. But could she say she hated her magic? This thing that had saved her, that had pulled her out of mediocrity and given her a reason to see herself as something more than the girl who lived in her best friend’s shadow? Her magic had made her see her own worth—a worth tied not only to what power she had but to everything that made herher.
“I might have, once,” Emory said. “Not so much anymore.”
This magic might be a burden, but she loved it all the same. There was beauty in it, even if it was hard to see.
You learn to live in the dark when you have no choice. Can you blame me for making the darkness mine?
Emory would make this magic hers. She would fight for it because she wanted it all—her power, her life, her friends. Not one over the other, but all of it at once.
Something proud and eager flashed in Sidraeus’s eyes, as if he could see the determination in her. She imagined it was an echo of his own, this desire he’d had to break through the limits imposed on him. He’d wanted what Atheia had, and once he got it, he didn’t want to give it up. He wanted to fight for it, for himself and his Tidecallers and all mortals alike.
Emory saw in his eyes the deity he must have been once, the enthusiasm with which he’d wanted to share his power with mortals. She found herself imagining what he might have looked like, a near god that was only a boy, starved for purpose and connection beyond the souls of the dead and the creatures of nightmare he was bound to.
“Is there any way you can regain your true form?” she asked.
