Above, below, side to side,something whispered in his ear, the language of the ritual dancing behind his eyes.A mirror, an hourglass, a scale onto which balance must be kept. A breath in, a breath out. Divine symmetry.
“Baz?” Emory was looking back at him expectantly. “Are you coming?”
The obvious answer would have been yes. This was why they’d come: to retrieve Kai and Luce from the abyss. Baz wanted nothing more than to save the boy he loved, to pull him out of the dark. And yet, instinct kept him rooted in place beside the hourglass.
“I think—I think I need to stay here,” Baz said, voice tinged with disbelief at his own words. “I can’t shake the feeling that my part in this lies here. That this is where I need to be.”
Emory’s shock mirrored how Baz felt. How could he stay here when Kai needed him? But this felt bigger than Kai, bigger than Baz, bigger than all the forces that had conspired to keep them apart and brought them so close again. Hadn’t the god of balance told him that he’d know what his role entailed when he came to it? Well, this was it. He had never been so sure of anything.
And if there was anyone he trusted to save Kai in his place, it was Emory—and the Shadow at her side.
“Come on,” Sidraeus urged her. “We need to keep moving.”
“But Baz—”
“I think he’s right. And it wouldn’t hurt to have someone stay behind in case we need him.” Sidraeus eyed the hourglass, thenBaz, as if trying to puzzle something out that he couldn’t quite grasp. Neither he nor Emory appeared to see the threads connected to the hourglass, only Baz, which only solidified his certainty that whatever his role was, it lay here.
Emory at last seemed to understand, or at least accept that he wouldn’t change his mind. “Be careful,” she told Baz, and with one more worried look back at him, she and Sidraeus disappeared down the path.
Leaving Baz alone at the heart of fate.
35EMORY
“DO YOU WANT TO TALKabout it?” Sidraeus asked. “What you saw while in the path’s thrall.”
Emory kept walking down the spiraling path, avoiding his insistent gaze. “Not particularly.”
The first face she’d seen when stepping onto the path was her own. Or rather, a face that looked eerily similar to hers, despite being older. She had known right away who it was: her mother in the flesh. Adriana Kazan. Luce Meraude. Mother, sailor, standing before her daughter at last.
“My sweet girl,” she had said, breaking into a smile. Her blue eyes were full of unshed tears as she opened her arms wide. “How you’ve grown.”
Emory hadn’t been able to stop herself from running into her embrace. But the comfort she should have found there soured in her heart, making Emory step away from her.
“Why did you leave me?” Emory breathed.
Her mother’s smile fell. “I was trying to protect you.”
“All you did wasbreakme.” Emotions she didn’t know she’d had burst out of her like a swollen river bursting past a dam. “You abandoned me, lied about my birth, when all this time youknewwhat I’d become, what I’d have to endure. How could you?”
The pain on her mother’s face turned sharp and vicious. Her next words left her mouth in a snarl. “What about all the peopleyouabandoned? Like mother, like daughter, they say. And you, daughter of mine, have been so quick to hurt the people around you if only so they don’t hurt you first. You have no right to reproach me for doing the same. Yes, I knew what you’d become. A leech of light. A girl of shadows. A harbinger of death. In the end, maybe you did your friends a favor by abandoning them. They will be better off without you.”
That was when Emory was assaulted by visions of all the people she’d hurt and abandoned and let down at one point or another. It seemed like everyone in her life surrounded her, adding to her mother’s voice.
“All these people who fight for you, protect you,” her mother kept going, “and still you blame them for your troubles. Still you want more, and more, and more. It’s never enough, is it? You’ll become like him—Clover, whose blood runs in your veins, whose power you share. Youarehim. And everyone you’ve ever loved will die for your desires.”
Emory saw herself using power, pulling power from others. Saw herself taking hold of Sidraeus’s hand as they rose on dark thrones overlooking a sea of ash, all the power of the gods coursing through them, Clover dead at their feet, Romie too, everyone else bowing before them. She saw herself killing Clover; saw Clover killing her; saw Sidraeus running a blade through her heart, and she repaying the favor. Saw Romie and Baz flying off as birds in a sky that she could not follow. Saw herself clipping their wings and taking their power of flight forherself, leaving them behind so that she would not be the one abandoned.
She saw herself alone.
Alone, alone, alone, because her mother was right: this desperate need for acceptance, this desire to be valued, had only ever pushed people away. One day she would truly be alone, and there would be no one to blame but herself.
Maybe she preferred to torture herself with this guilt and fear of abandonment that was still dragging her down rather than shed it for good and show up for the people in her life, no matter how hard it might be.
Maybe hell was what she deserved.
Her mother had smiled at her like she knew what she was thinking. She reached a hand to Emory in quiet invitation. Perhaps hell would not be so bad if her mother was there too.
A step—and before Emory’s fingers could graze her mother’s, someone gripped her arm tight, breathing her name. Reality came crashing in like an ice bucket dropped over her head. Her mother was not there. And when Emory turned, it was to see Sidraeus looking at her with consternation, his fingers digging into her arm. Baz was several feet behind him, and she realized she’d been walking toward the abyss without even knowing.
