“I felt something when I used magic on it,” Emory said. “Granted, it was in a dream, so maybe that’s all it was… But what if there’s more to it?”
“Like what?”
Emory grabbed the pencil from Baz. He refrained from protesting as she traced lines around the tree he’d drawn. At first, he didn’t understand what he was staring at. Then it hit him.
“An hourglass?”
It was like the tree was trapped inside one, the branches in the top bulb and the roots in the bottom one. Emory looked over her shoulder at the Shadow—Sidraeus—who peered down at the drawing with a frown.
“You were there when I dreamed of this,” Emory told him. “It’s not the first time I’ve dreamed of the Dovermere door being an actual hourglass. Even before, when Romie was trapped in the sleepscape… Every time I saw this, the glass would shatter and something would come out. One time, there was an opening at the bottom. Like a portal. And now recently there’s been this tree trapped inside. Glass shattering. And you appearing.”
“So what does it mean?” Virgil asked, taking the question right out of Baz’s mouth.
“We have a tree connected to a portal in my dreams,” Emory said, “a tree connected to a ritual meant to save Kai, and a tree back at Aldryn that’s been killed by Reaper magic countless times over.” She looked at Virgil. “Don’t you think it’s odd that it keeps coming back to life without any of you making it regrow? You told me no Sower ever comes in to nurse it back to health after you’ve used Reaper magic on it. So what makes it come back to life?”
“It couldn’t possibly be…”
This came from Sidraeus in a hushed whisper.
“What?” Emory pried.
“There used to be trees like this in the godsworld. They connected it to the realms of the living, the sleepscape, and even the underworld.”
“Like that glass-looking tree that towers over the fountain?” Emory asked.
“That was always the main one, yes, but there used to be many more before the godsworld became the sea of ash. The way Equilibris described it was that the flourishing top of the tree represented the heavenly godsworld. The middle of the tree where you see that spiral, that was meant to represent the sleeping realm as well as the four realms of the living. And the roots below, those represented the underworld.”
“Trees have roots planted firmly in the underworld and hands that graze the heavens…,”Baz recited.
“I thought the underworldwasthe sleepscape,” Virgil said, frowning. “Or the Deep. The sea of ash. Whatever the hell it’s called, no pun intended.”
Sidraeus shook his head. “What you might consider the afterlife is divided into parts. Death brings all souls to the sleeping realm, yes, but they must be ferried in one direction or the other. The godsworld is the heavens where souls go to find eternal peace—or where they seep into the fountain so that their souls can beresurrected into new life. But the underworld… the underworld is the place no soul wishes to go. Only the most corrupted of souls get sent to what we call the abyss, the first layer of this underworld. Here they are tortured for eternity, denied a chance at eternal rest or new life.”
Baz blanched. This was where Kai and Luce had gone, but… “What does this have to do with the tree?”
“When we founded the Veiled Atlas, Atheia managed to smuggle seeds from these trees out of the godsworld. We gave them to members of the Veiled Atlas to plant in each of their worlds, for them to tend to this piece of godhood and shape it into something that might feed into the ley line and become a source of magic all its own. I thought Equilibris had destroyed them all, just like he did the Tidecallers. But I suppose that if a Tidecaller survived, they could have found a way to get this past him too. Because by the sound of it, this could be one of those trees.”
A seed taken from the garden of the gods that had grown into this tree—a tree that had likely stood at Aldryn when the college was a temple to the gods, and long before even that. A tree that had since been brought back to life and died a thousand times by the magic of Reapers.
“Sorry, am I the only one who fails to see how a tree is gonna save your nightmare-weaving boyfriend?” Virgil asked in a dubious tone.
Baz blushed, avoiding everyone’s gaze. Was it that obvious?
“This Nightmare Weaver.” Sidraeus was staring at Baz. “I remember him. He first passed through the sleeping realm centuries ago, while I was still in my prison. I recognized him when you and he passed through the sleeping realm again more recently, that day I escaped.” The day he’d taken possession of Keiran, he meant. “He and I had made a bargain during his first passage. He and the Dreamer woman he was with…”
“Luce?” Emory interjected, her eyes going wide at the mention of her mother.
“They’d been trying to escape Clover. I sent them help in the form of a thousand umbrae, asking the Nightmare Weaver to free me in return once he left the sleeping realm. But he never made it out. He and the Dreamer fell into the abyss beyond the stars. I could no longer feel them then. No mortal soul has ever set foot in hell, to my knowledge. They must be as good as dead, I’m afraid.”
His gaze had shifted ever so slightly to Emory. There had been nothing soft in his voice or his words, but seeing the devastation on her face seemed to give him pause.
“Kai and Luce can survive it,” Baz said, both for Emory and for himself, as those severed threads flashed in his mind. This was what the ritual was for. The fate he had to undo.
Emory gave him a small, grateful smile that vanished as Sidraeus spoke again.
“The abyss, they might survive,” he said. “So long as they haven’t fallen into the void beyond it.”
“Sounds lovely,” Virgil quipped. “Dare we ask what this void is?”
