She knew, though, that by unbinding Romie, Aspen, Tol, and Orfeyi from Atheia’s essence, Atheia would die. She would go back to being a splintered thing, only this time, she would be gone for good.
Unless Emory took Atheia’s essence into herself. She was a Tidecaller, after all; her ability was to call on the Tides’ magic, to wield it as her own. And so she called on Atheia’s power, her very essence, and consumed it.
She drew in a sharp breath as it settled inside her. It was ice cold in her veins. It was strength in her bones. It was fire in her heart and a gentle wind blowing through her soul.
With that divine power, she gave the keys back their lives. They had never been dead to begin with, had only been fused with Romie, kept tethered to her by their lifelines. She could see them suddenly: all of them surrounding Romie, connected to her pulse points by shimmering threads. Their lifelines tying them to the blood that coursed through everything like water.
So Emory called on her oldest magic and begged it to heal her friends.
Those threads shimmered brighter as Aspen, Tol, and Orfeyi solidified, going from translucent, ghostlike things, to flesh-and-bone living, breathing beings. And Romie—Romie’s eyes were a definitive brown once more, not a single trace left of the cruel deity she had housed.
The keys were no longer keys. They were human, entirely themselves and so very much alive. And the deity whose essence Emory had taken inside herraged, and cried, and finally quieted, molding herself to Emory’s insides.
For a terrible second, Emory heard Keiran’s voice in her mind, telling her she would become the Tides’ vessel and finally be rid of the Shadow’s stain inside her. And she’d thought, perhaps, that taking Atheia’s essence into her would indeed unmake her identity. She feared that she would lose being what she had now accepted she was: Eclipse-born, a Tidecaller, wielding the magic Sidraeus had created against all odds.
But no. She felt oddly complete, like this was what she’d been barreling toward all this time. And she didn’t feel any less Eclipse-born than she did before. If anything, Atheia’s magic transformed inside her to fitheridentity.
The Tides. The Tidecaller.
Emory met Sidraeus’s gaze. The way he looked at her made it clear he sawher, not Atheia. He knew she was still the same. That she’d molded Atheia’s essence into her own, until Atheia was only another sort of magic pulsing through her veins, nothing more.
“Emory.” Her mother looked at her with utter devastation. “What have you done?”
The words to make her understand escaped Emory. How could she tell her mother that this was, in a sense, her way of repaying Luce for the sacrifice she’d made all those years ago—leavingher child, interrupting her whole life to journey into the past and across worlds and into the pits of hell itself, all in an attempt to save not only Emory but all the worlds, too.
Now it was Emory’s turn to do so.
Heart fracturing around her resolve, Emory drew Luce in for a tight embrace. “I wish we’d had time to know each other better,” she whispered against her mother’s ear, inhaling the scent of her, committing everything about her to memory.
When Luce pulled back, holding Emory’s face in her hands, she didn’t argue, didn’t try to sway Emory from her decision; it was too late to do so anyway. Through tears, Luce mustered a smile and said, “But I do know you, my brave, incredible girl. You’re everything I’d always imagined you’d be, and so much more.”
Emory gave her a tearful smile of her own. “So are you. Take care of Henry, will you? Tell him—tell him I love him, and I’m sorry I had to leave him like this.”
Luce nodded. “I will.”
Her mother the sailor and her father the lighthouse keeper. In so many ways, Emory was the sea that had brought them back to each other. And now, like any tide, she would ebb outward again, leaving them both on a shore she wasn’t destined for.
Before her resolve could shatter, she turned away from her mother, meeting Equilibris’s gaze. Making it clear what choice she’d made.
The thought crossed Emory’s mind that she had done what Clover had tried to, in a sense. She had imbibed the essence of a god. Did that make her a deity? Perhaps, in another time, she would have let herself become drunk off this knowledge, would have let herself sink into this deep well of power inside her. But she was changed. She didn’t want such power. She had never needed it.
Now it was only a burden to bear, at least until the void unmadeher and this power inside her and the chaos that threatened to destroy all the worlds and those she loved.
It was her sacrifice to make.
But not hers alone.
As Sidraeus took her hand, the fear that had started to take root inside her receded. They would face the void together, and that made it bearable.
67ROMIE
ROMIE WAS USED TO HERlife fracturing intobeforesandafters, but nothing could have prepared her for the pain of being splintered from Atheia—from the keys, especially. These bonds that had united them and tethered them to Atheiasnapped, and Romie felt like screaming, the loss so poignant she thought she would never be whole again without them. But when she opened her eyes, Aspen and Tol and Orfeyi were all here. Alive, in their own bodies.
And so was she.
The four of them held on to one another, embracing as if they couldn’t quite believe that they were here, that this was real, that against all odds they werealive. But as Romie watched Aspen nestle her head against Tol’s arm, saw the love in the draconic’s eyes as he whispered something in the witch’s ear; as Orfeyi squeezed Romie’s hand with a wide, triumphant smile, all she could think was that there was something missing.
The echo of the song they’d all followed, this link to Atheia theyhad all shared that had made such inexplicable kinship bloom between them, was gone. There was an emptiness inside Romie that felt like grief, even though they were standing right here with her.
