The goddess’s face paled. “It’s the fountain. It may have been replenished with Clover’s power, but it hasn’t been restored to its former glory.”
“That can’t be,” Luce said weakly as her daughter helped her to her feet. “Clover’s dead.”
“And I severed his link to the restless souls he was fueling himself with,” Emory added. “I healed them all, put them to rest.”
“Yet they remain stagnant in the fountain,” the goddess said. “They aren’t being reincarnated, and so the worlds aren’t being replenished with pure magic like they should.”
They had all thought that killing Clover would heal the worlds, return magic to its people. That it would make everything as it should be. But it didn’t. Clover’s death had fixednothing.
The worlds seemed to be crumbling faster now, all fated to become ash. Almost as if Clover had put a curse on everyone: that if he should meet his end, then everything else must too.
Baz paused time just as the wave of chaos was about to hit them. The vastness of this power made him falter with the threads of time, had him scrambling to contain more and more and more. The tears in the fabric of the universe—the sleepscape sinkhole that had opened up at their feet and the dark pockets in the air through which the rest of the world poked through—they were all trying to expand, to consume the godsworld whole. It was as if the universe itself were trying to shatter around them, water pushing against a dam, and Baz couldn’t hold it back, not as more and more force built behind the flood wall, threatening to burst.
“Clocks, this escalated quicker than I anticipated.”
Equilibris’s voice startled everyone as he sauntered up to them,looking for all the world like he was late for nothing more than a tea party. This was not the energetic, frenzied god Baz had come to know, but someone who seemed to have given up entirely. It was rather shocking, the difference between him and the other gods. While the four gods of the living had an aura of divinity to them now that their power had been restored, Equilibris had never looked so human, as ifhispower were still dwindling—had been since fate was broken and the worlds were fused together.
He took one look at the chaos Baz was keeping frozen in time and shook his head with a mournful look, mouth downturned. “A pity it had to come to this.”
The god of the air narrowed their eyes at him. “And where have you been all this time, while we tried to stop it?”
“Languishing in his workshop, no doubt,” the sun god said gruffly. “Leaving us to suffer as always.”
Equilibris lifted a brow at the four of them. “Centuries we haven’t seen each other, and this is the reception I get?”
“You threw us into the abyss.”
“To keep you safe from Clover, yes. We’ve been over this before. It was never meant to be permanent. And here you stand, back in the godsworld with your power restored.”
“So what is this, then?” The goddess of the earth gestured to the fountain, to the sea of ash breaking at the seams. “Why is nothing fixed?”
“Because the magic that was in Clover has been twisted and tainted by being inside him. It may have been returned to the fountain, but it is no longer a pure source of power like it once was. The darkness from this magic will continue to spread across realms as it has.” Equilibris sighed. “I told you all it would come to this. The chaos is too great to be defeated by anyone.”
“But you’re agod,” Baz spat. “Can’t you do anything?”
Equilibris met his gaze square on, something playing behind hiseyes that Baz couldn’t decipher. “I told you you’d be begging me to reset the worlds in the end, didn’t I?”
The one thing the god of balance had always been designed to do: wipe clean the board should it ever come to this point. Restart the whole tapestry from scratch and pray that fate would be kinder the next time around.
“No,” Baz breathed. “There has to be another way.” He’d broken fate, damn it; he was not letting everything happen the way he had seen it play out.
“I have to agree with the boy,” the god of the sun grumbled. “To have gone through so much only to reach the same inevitable outcome as before…”
“Perhaps that is exactly why we should let Equilibris wipe clean the board,” the goddess of the moon said with bitter resignation. “If eliminating Clover couldn’t restore our realms to their former glory, then starting anew may well be our only choice.” She fixed Emory with a predatory stare. “Of course, the Tidecaller would first need to die.”
The last remaining failsafe preventing Equilibris from resetting the worlds.
“That’s not going to happen,” Sidraeus seethed, moving in front of Emory. “There has to be another way to fix things.”
“Thereis,” Equilibris said slowly, “but it is not something we gods can do.” He motioned to all the dark rifts around them, these cracks of impossible power that Baz was trying to hold back. “This chaos will spill across the realms of the living and sleeping until death and creation become so at odds with each other that they obliterate us all in a wink. Unless the magic that flows through the fountain is fixed. It needs to be purged of its darkness for it to flow properly again, and that darkness needs to be taken far away from here, to a place where things go to be unmade.”
The void.
The place beyond the abyss that was oblivion itself.
“But… how would that even be possible?” Baz asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” the god said with a gruff laugh. “You wrote the words yourself, Timespinner.Blood and bones and heart and soul, combined to keep chaos and death from spilling across all worlds.”
