My stomach twisted as I scanned the roaming dead. I turned back to face Tynan and flinched as he slithered as close as my shield would allow, his face inches from mine. The shadows in his eyes rolled over one another as he scanned my face and narrowed his brows.
“Are you asking if they findhappinesshere?” His head jerked in an unnatural movement as he tipped it and surveyed me.
“I’m asking if they findpeace.”
Tynan blinked, as if he hadn’t considered that as an option. The God of Death swept away from me, putting distance between us. “Of course they don’t. Peace, happiness… Those are products oflife. We are Death, Lyvia.”
My chest constricted as his words settled in, and my mind shot to my list… The growing list of names whose deaths were on my hands, and I scanned the dead, looking desperately for any ofthem—for my father, Oslo, Bear, Morwyn, Eira, Xenelpha, and the thousands I’d killed.
I had sentenced them to this fate.To the Hell forged by the psychotic Embodied hovering nearby and then doomed to wander in this desolate place with no hope of finding peace.Were my parents here?They’d sacrificed everything for me, using the power they kept hidden from Dark King Daimos to change my form…
A weight settled in my chest. What had I believed death to be? A dark escape from the terrors and pain brought on by mortal life? A freeing of my own existence, surrounded by light and warmth and love? Or perhaps simply thefeelingof love…
I scanned the growing crowd and the creatures they attracted. The large, winged creatures swooped through the hovering clouds. The dead cowered as they neared. Long, scaled reptilian creatures used their short legs to move about the groups, hissing and snapping as they went.
My idea of death had been simple. It had been relief…Peace. Far from the torment displayed in front of me.
Disgust turned my stomach as Tynan’s snaking tongue tasted the air.
“You are Death,” I answered him finally. “But you’ve declared yourself more than Death… You’re judge and jury, bestowing their sentences on sins based onyourmoral compass, yet you hold yourself to none. You think this is freedom? You think you’reprotectingthem?”
Anger squashed the fear that had taken root upon my arrival at the gate. The devastation, pain, and wreckage had plundered my soul upon facing my hell. A hell that I thought I’d deserved at one point… And yet a small part of me seemed to blink awake in the realization that perhaps, in some of those moments,I had deserved grace. Had deserved forgiveness. If not from the people themselves, but from myself…
My powers reacted to the thought, their hands joining in solidarity, and the love that allowed them to work together flared in my chest.
Tynan narrowed his gaze before darkness exploded in my vision. My shield was just fast enough, and the lines of power bucked against it as his face appeared inches from my own.
“You do not know thepowerof a soul,” he snapped. “The power oflife.” He gestured to the dead. “You think this cruel? The alternative is sending these souls to Sintarrak. The mind thief, who revels in torment. They’ll feed his power, and their minds will be trapped in his own, bearing witness to every great act of evil. The dead may be lost in this realm, but they wouldscreaminside his mind.”
My stomach turned over itself. I had to get Kellan out of here. I had to get my family, my friends, thedeadout of here. We had to defeat the Embodied. And then I had to destroy the monster hovering before me.
“And what do you deserve after a millennium of sins?” I dared the question, my hands bunching into fists.
“I am not mortal, my dear,” he replied, as if it were an answer. His smile stretched too far across his face, and he retreated a few feet. “But you are. And your time is running short.”
Blood drained from my face.
“What do you mean?”
Tynan nodded to my arms, and I frowned. My tan, olive skin had lightened by several shades, the tips of my fingers nearing the gray of the dead moving about us.
“Death takes what it will.”
I turned back to the fog.I had to get to Kellan.
“Listen carefully,” Tynan continued, “the Vael Lacrima opens at the gathering of the eight. When the eight powers of theEmbodied come together. Sintarrak is already in your world, and he fears only one thing:Death.”
My mind flipped. How had all eight powers gathered together when we still didn’t know where the Celestyn Bone was?
“How do we close it?”
Tynan’s smile faltered, and his brows knit together. “You don’t.”
How could I trust anything this creature told me?
“I will allow you to leave,” he continued, his darkness unwinding his humanoid form and surrounding my shield in a cage of death. “And you will kill Sintarrak. Then you will return to this realm and free me. An empire of worlds awaits us.”
I was going to throw up.
