“He says that, before the universe tips toward the kind of chaos there can be no coming back from—before the gods themselves are all killed by Cornelius and the worlds fall under his dark reign—the only way to preserve balance is to start anew. Think of it as a scale. On one side, balance and peace. On the other, chaos and ruin. If the scale were to tip fully toward the side of chaos, the side that awaits us if Clover manages to make himself into the one true god, there would be no coming back from it. The gods would bedead, and under Clover’s monstrous rule, darkness and suffering and hate would destroy all that is good in our worlds.”
“So this is some bullshit self-preservation thing,” Kai seethed. “This asshole of a god is willing to let us all fall into oblivion for the sake of saving his own neck.”
Farran nodded. “That’s why I left him. Everything I was doing, ensuring the cogs of fate worked as they were meant to, was playing into the very destiny the god of balance wanted us heading toward: total oblivion for us, a fresh start for the gods.”
“Is there no way to change things?” Luce looked horrified, and Kai knew she was thinking of what this meant for Emory. “Instead of wiping us all from the map to preserve balance, why doesn’t the god help us stop Clover?”
“Because that’s just it: he’s the god ofbalance. He can’t meddle with fate directly even if he wanted to, because he’s meant to be an impartial surveyor.”
“He meddled with your fate, didn’t he?” Kai noted.
“Like I said: loophole. I was a loose thread in an unchangeable pattern, and he took advantage of it. But something as big as Clover becoming this supreme god who brings about the end of the universe as we know it… Even the god of balance can’t stop such a fate in its course. The only thing hecanactively do is wipe clean the slate if things get out of hand. It’s what his very nature is set to resort to, a last recourse to preserve balance in the face of utter chaos. Only, the thing is… there are others whose hands are not so tied by fate, who are willing to do what must be done to prevent such an end.”
“The four gods of the living realms,” Luce breathed.
Farran nodded. “They’re who I set out to find when I left the god of balance because they’re our best chance at thwarting fate and surviving. And they’re who we’re sailing toward now because I need your help getting them out of the abyss.”
19ROMIE
MEMORIES OF THE COLLEGE THATRomie knew so intimately overlapped with Atheia’s own recollection of what this place used to be, so very long ago. There had always been power here, on this spot that sat above the door to this world. Dovermere, it was called then and still now.
Before it was a college, before it was the temple that had preceded it, it had been the place Atheia and Sidraeus would gather with their faithful Veiled Atlas, these like-minded individuals who had wanted to open the boundaries between worlds. Tidecallers whose magic was key to this expansion of limits.
The last time Atheia was here was to beg Sidraeus to return to his realm and take his Tidecallers with him. The breaking that happened that day—the love and trust between them shattered by their unwavering opposing stances—was an echo that had carried, traveling over centuries to this very moment. The divide between lunar and eclipse a result of it.
Atheia could feel it beneath her bare feet, the history of thisplace that was enmeshed in her very being, everything she had experienced here before her splintering, and everything that had come after in her absence.
If she closed her eyes and let the sea breeze brush against her skin, if she breathed the briny air deep into these lungs that were another’s but also hers, she could almost imagine she had gone back in time to that place that had held so much significance to her. But everything was different. There was a desperation in the air, a threatening, rumbling force driving the sea, a visceralfeelingthat clawed inside her, letting her know this was not the world she had left behind.
There was a wrongness here, an emptiness where lunar magic had once overflowed. Her life’s work, swept away like a flimsy castle in the sand. Teetering now on a delicate edge that could see it obliterated for good.
The motto on the college’s iron gates greeted her mockingly.Post tenebras lux; iterum atque iterum.After darkness, light; again and again. That’s what the lunar cycle was meant to be. What the nature of all the magics she’d created was. But now they faced infinite darkness, an everlasting end brought upon by the stain of Eclipse magic.
Unless we put an end to it first.
Romie’s thought echoed in the chambers of Atheia’s mind, brimming with a righteous anger that Atheia herself felt.
“Who goes there?”
A man in a charcoal uniform appeared at the gates, peering at her with an air of authority.A Regulator,Romie’s mind supplied. A figure of magical authority meant to regulate the use of magic. The thought inflamed Atheia at first—magic should be accessedfreely—but then, their allegiance did skew in favor of lunar magic, not eclipse.
The man rubbed at his eyes as Atheia drew closer to the gates,as if trying to make sense of what he was seeing. She knew what she must look like: unseasonable clothes still dripping wet from the beach, walking barefoot on gravel in the late winter cold, eyes dancing in all the colors of a divine rainbow. She gripped the bars and pressed her face between them. They smelled like iron; like blood. Like magic.
She smiled at the man. “Open the gate. I wish you no harm.”
The words, laced with a Glamour, tasted divine. She was the mother of all lunar magics, and it was a comfort to know that it flowed out of her unencumbered after so long.
The man fumbled over himself to open the gate for her. He had a silvery full moon tattooed on the back of his hand. Atheia glanced at the waning crescent on her own hand, reminded, thanks to Romie’s memories, that lunar mages now could only access a single tidal alignment, depending on when they were born. A travesty she hoped to rectify.
The college was magnificent. There was symmetry in the cloisters and columns and towering elms that surrounded the central quad, in the middle of which was a statue representing the Tides of Fate, this multi-deity that Atheia had embodied. Young Bruma of the New Moon, beautiful Anima of the Waxing Moon, motherly Aestas of the Full Moon, and wise Quies of the Waning Moon.
A swell of pride and love rose within her as she stood close to the fountain, admiring every detail of those four faces. Not exactly done in her likeness, but she supposed it did not matter; it was a lovely testimony of the devotion lunar mages had for the Tides even long after Atheia had left their shores.
Everyone is staring at us.
Romie’s voice had Atheia snapping out of admiring the statues. Indeed, students were peering at her from the cloisters, whispering among themselves with wide eyes and quizzical brows.
“Hey, are you all right?” someone called out to her.
