“That’s what I told you I would do, didn’t I? It’s why I’m here.”
The gods gave her a pitying look. “Did you really think we would not see through your lies? We know you’ve allied yourself with Clover. We know you’ve lured us here so he can bring us to the sea of ash where we will be vulnerable.”
Atheia’s mind raced. She pressed close to the Fountain of Fate, adopting a nonchalant air as she ran a hand over the water’s surface. “Then why show up at all?”
“To give you the chance to do the right thing. Call off your beast of a god and give yourself over to us so we can fix everything.”
Atheia huffed a cold laugh. “I will do no such thing. And I don’t believe for a second that Sidraeus has suddenly become so self-sacrificing.”
“It’s the only way, Atheia.” Sidraeus swept a gaze over the onlooking students, the patch of darkness still open in the quad, the destruction of the cloisters it had wrought. “All of this started with us. The Tides and the Shadow and the choices we made. I’m done evading responsibility for what I’ve done. If oursacrifice is the only way to save these dying worlds—all these people who are suffering because of us—then I will gladly lay down my life.”
“None of this ismyfault,” Atheia hissed. “Everything bad started whenyoustepped into the realms of the living and created your Tidecallers. It’syourcorrupt magic that coursed through Clover’s veins and led to this.Youare to blame, Sidraeus.”
“If you want to play that game, then let’s not forget you helped bring me into these realms. The first pebble in the landslide that followed.” He shook his head slowly. “But it shouldn’t matter who or where or how it started. We both had a part to play. We both made mistakes. We are both flawed, Atheia, like everything we created and everything that came after us. I finally understand that the flaws are what makes the good shine through. I’m trying to climb my way through the cracks of past mistakes instead of letting myself tumble deeper into darkness. Why can’t you?”
“I will not die for them,” she spat, gesturing to the gods.
“What about for your people?” Sidraeus asked. “For the worlds you love?”
Everyone was watching them. Murmurs in favor of the Shadow. Whispers of the Tides abandoning them.
Part of Atheia knew this was her chance to sway the lunar mages’ opinion of her for good. If she went willingly with the gods, if she chose to sacrifice herself to save these people, just as Sidraeus had seemingly decided, then they would finally see everything she was doing was for them.
But she was in far too deep now to take accountability for something she did not see fault in. And she didn’t trust Sidraeus or the gods in the slightest. Besides, the damage was already done. She saw the looks thrown her way. Knew she’d let her emotions get the better of her, and now they’d seen the truth of her, plain and simple.
The Shadow was willing to die for them; their beloved Tides were not.
And this, perhaps, was a bigger shift in their world than every other horror it had endured.
Atheia had lost their belief. And without it, she had nothing—except for her determination, and a plan that would ensure both their survival and her own. If they hated her for it afterward, so be it.
Too quick for the gods or Sidraeus to know what she was doing, Atheia dipped her hand in the fountain, just past her wrist. Her spiral mark shone faint silver as the salt water activated it, and as she called on Clover through his own blackened mark, a maelstrom of ash opened behind her on cue.
She smiled wickedly at the gods, at Sidraeus. “There is only one way to save the people and the worlds I love. And it’s not with my death, but yours.”
The maelstrom swallowed her and the gods and Sidraeus whole, bringing them into the sea of ash.
Right to Clover.
60KAI
IT SHOULD HAVE COME ASno surprise to anyone that the godsworld would be accessible in Dovermere. With all the worlds overlapping one another, the sea caves were no longer underwater, and they did not resemble the caves they’d come to know at all.
In fact, they looked like a patchwork of all the caves and grottos and deep places where a door had stood in each world. The algae-slick walls of Dovermere in some places. The basalt columns of the Wychwood tunnels under the yew tree in others. The cavernous, fiery insides of the Sunforge spread in the spaces between.
Where the Hourglass should have stood—where the door of each world now overlapped, Kai supposed—stood the icy gate of the fourth world, thrown wide open onto the sea of ash beyond.
“This is going to work,” Emory said with more conviction than Kai felt as she stepped through the door ahead of the group.
Kai, Baz, and Luce followed. It had been a hard-fought battle to keep their group small. Everyone had wanted to come along—Jae,Theodore, Virgil, Vera, and Nisha especially—but they’d ultimately agreed the fewer people, the better.
If this didn’t work, there needed to be people left to pick up the fight.
As they walked up the steps toward the fountain, Kai could scarcely believe he was here, after all he’d been through. He’d seen the Wychwood with his own eyes, had gone to places that went beyond anything ever written of inSong of the Drowned Gods, yet somehow it felt incredible to him that the sea of ash actually existed. Bare and desolate and chilling, with a monster waiting in its midst.
Clover had his back turned to them, staring at a rift of ash through which emerged Farran and Atheia and Sidraeus. Clover wasted no time in trapping Farran in an onslaught of power. The gods were brought to their knees, no match for Clover here, in a world he had made his own, next to a stagnant fountain overspilling with ghosts eager to fuel their master.
Emory took the keys out of her pocket. Asphodel’s rib bone and the warrior’s gold heart in one hand, the guardian’s wooden lyre in the other. While Clover was preoccupied with the gods, she unlocked their power—and absorbed it.
