Sidraeus shot backward, hitting the rocky cave wall. For a second, or perhaps not even that, Sidraeus seemed to split into two: there was Keiran’s body splayed out on the ground, and a phantom shadow—an umbra crowned in obsidian—hovering over it. As if Sidraeus’s spirit had been ejected from its vessel.
Emory thought she glimpsed fear and confusion and relief in those hazel eyes—Keiran’seyes, burning with a humanity that was entirely his—before the phantom returned to the body, and all that was left in that gaze as it settled on Clover was a murderous hatred that was all Sidraeus’s.
Before Sidraeus or any of them had time to react, Clover had them all immobilized with some remnant of Glamour magic, Emory was sure. He stepped on the ley line and breathed in deeply, hands tilted up. His black veins were burning silver as he drew energy from the ley line. With it, he made creatures appear as if from thin air, drawn from the dust of the blasted cave wall and the broken bits of bones from the dragon carcass. The dust and bones swirled and drew together until they formed what looked like a dozen umbrae, made not of shadow and nightmare but ash and death.
The creatures flocked to each of the keys—Romie, Aspen, Tol—and set their pale, bony hands on their shoulders, like grim reapers ready to take them to meet their end.
“I apologize for this,” Clover said to the keys. “It’s a shame, really, that you have to die for Atheia to be rebuilt.”
“What?” Romie said in a small voice, face blanching.
“You hadn’t figured it out? You have to give the pieces of her back to her, which means that you can’t exist if she does. For Atheia to come back, you have to die. But I promise yours will be a worthy sacrifice.”
Emory knew the horror on Romie’s face was mirrored on her own. Their panic-stricken gazes met. Before either of them could move, before Emory could beg the ley line to lend her its power and break free of the Glamour, before Romie and Aspen and Tol could rage against this impossible fate that awaited them and fight back against the creatures holding them, it was over.
Clover’s creatures tightened their grip on the keys and vanished with them in clouds of billowing dust.
They were gone.
A scream tore through Emory’s throat. Desperation and anger had her breaking through the Glamour like it was nothing. Clover set his sights on Sidraeus. Emory refused to let him take the only leverage she might still have. She barreled into Clover, taking him by surprise. They stumbled past the door’s threshold and fell onto the starlit path.
“Bring them back!” Emory raged at him.
Clover easily drew himself up, wiping away a trickle of blackened blood at the corner of his mouth. “This is for our own good, Emory. Imagine what the worlds could be with someone like us at their helm.”
“I’m not letting you kill my friends to make yourself into a god.”
“We all have to make sacrifices.”
“You’re a monster,” she spat at him. Her Tides-damned ancestor. Another Tidecaller like her who’d gone corrupt with power, wanting more than what he already had, the same way she’d wanted more power and significance for herself. Seeing what he’d become, she knew that wasn’t a path she wanted to ever go down.
“God, monster.” Clover waved her off with a shrug. “It’s all the same in the end. There are simply those who have power and those who do not.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Emory said, advancing a step toward him. “But the thing about power is that it can be taken.”
She called onhispower, trying to tap into his limitless Tidecaller reservoir and all the power of the fountain that he had gorged himself on.
“What are you—” Clover laughed. “Stop this. You cannot possibly win against me.”
Clover looked annoyed now as she tried harder, but he was right; it was like trying to move the stars in the sky itself. Still, she did not relent. Clover came at her with murder in his eyes. His intent was clear: he meant to finish her off, kill her for trying to bleed him of his own stolen power. He fashioned a blade from the twisted magic that clung to him—rotten roots and white-hot silver and sizzling electricity—and aimed it at Emory’s heart.
Only it never found its mark because someone stepped in front of her.
“No!” Emory yelled, lurching toward Sidraeus.
Clover seemed to realize his mistake at the same time she did. He had driven the blade right through Sidraeus’s heart—or at least, the heart of his vessel. Of Keiran.
And as he fell to his knees, Emory knew it was Keiran—not Sidraeus—that looked down in confusion at the blade sticking out of his chest. Because Sidraeus stood right behind him, nothing but shadows swirling with faint stars. An umbra with a crown ofobsidian. The ruler of the sleepscape, returned to his realm.
Clover called on a maelstrom of power he aimed at Sidraeus, but the deity dissolved into shadows before it could reach him, blowing away on a nonexistent breeze. Clover raged against the darkness. His plan worked only if he had Sidraeus. Fury marred his features. He turned to Emory instead, looking to take his anger out on her.
But then a veritable army of umbrae descended upon them. They swarmed Clover, forcing him away from Emory. As if they wereprotectingher.
Clover didn’t fight back against the umbrae—he didn’t need to, with the power of gods in him. With a narrow-eyed look at Emory, he simply vanished like his creatures had with the keys, in that strange cloud of billowing dust.
With him gone, Emory turned her attention to Keiran. Because it reallywasKeiran, just him now that Sidraeus’s spirit had left his body. His hazel eyes found hers, glassy and hurt, but so clearly his. Blood dripped down the side of his mouth. He toppled over, the blade still lodged in his chest.
The world narrowed to just the two of them as Emory knelt at his side. “Keiran…”
