His guilt had allowed Dalvia and this goddess to rake their claws into Edessa.
“You owe her, acolyte of Wrath.” the goddess said.
“I do.” Everything he was and all he had become. Bending, he pressed a chaste kiss to Sarai’s forehead. His hand fell from her face. It took everything he had to stand. The storm seemed to stutter as he did. Sarai’s body briefly vanished before returning.She has me in a dream.
Faragathe’s human eyes hardened. “Will you walk away from her again?”
“I’m walking to her.”
“How?” she asked curiously. “You’re in my realm.”
A menacing smile parted his lips. “Not yet.”
Her eyes flared. She opened her mouth, jaw unhinging to reveal a swallowing darkness. He sent a burst of power to his left hand. The claw Wrath had gifted him burst from the tip of his index finger.The bastard knew.
When Faragathe lunged, he cut through the dream imprisoning him with a slash of his hand. Reality bled from the rift, two worldssuperimposing. A snarl of pain, then the goddess and Sarai’s body vanished.
Stormfall still roared around him, that nameless eerie hand of smoke manipulating the sky with delight. He stood on the Academiae’s grounds outside Sidran Tower amid hundreds of people shrieking. Drenched, they rocked back and forth on the ground, trapped in Faragathe’s nightmares.
A familiar roar caught his attention. Cassandane strode across the Academiae’s grounds, directing people to drag as many as they could indoors. Sighting Kadra, she groaned in relief.
“I would thank the gods, but I’m a little furious at them right now,” she yelled above the rain. “Did that teal goddess try to cut you a deal too?”
“She did.”
Cassandane glanced at him standing under Sidran Tower and winced in understanding. “I see. Where are Sarai and Anek?”
“I have a guess.” Kadra grabbed a screaming magus by the collar and shoved them into the tower. “Can you hold the Academiae?”
She wordlessly pointed at Cato, Telmar, and to Kadra’s surprise, Harion, who were dragging insensate people inside as the storm raged. With a grim nod, Kadra sprinted inside Sidran Tower, almost slamming into Noceo on the stairs.
His brother looked inches from collapse. “I figured she would be—”
“Upstairs.” Kadra took the steps at a run up to the fifth floor where Aelius had held many a convivium until Sarai’s fall. He tore the portrait of a former Magus Supreme from its nail and pressed the depression beneath it. The wall parted and revealed a black hall, dusty with disuse, and a staircase to the upper level from which Sarai had fallen. Breathing hard, he ran up the final set of steps, Noceo behind him.
And there she was.
Her knees struck the ground with bruising force.
Winded, she clutched her head until the world stopped spinning and slowly stood. The tile at her feet gave away where she was before the snarl of thunder outside.Oh, for the Elsar’s sake!
“This is getting tiring!” she roared, gripping the railing of the balcony atop Sidran Tower. “What’s next? Will Aelius rise up from the dead to shove me off once more?”
A throaty laugh boomed in the air. The view past the balcony darkened until it seemed as though she and the tower were suspended in a black void.
A face emerged from it. All eyes,eighteeneyes—black to the reaches of her sclera, all swallowing any semblance of light. She understood now who the madness-struck saw. The goddess hovered midair, ribbons of what could have been night sky wrapping around her lithe frame.
Understanding lanced through Sarai. “Faragathe,” she whispered, recalling the play in Sal Flumen.
Of course.Burned alive for supposed heresy by greedy, apathetic folk who’d called themselves devout. And then, she’d ascended to incredible power. Dalvia would have seen a kinship.
“Most people react differently.” The goddess laughed. Her voice made Noceo’s sound like rocks cracking against each other. “I show the evil their fears, and they screamsoloudly.”
You showed me mine a few times too many.Sarai took a shaky step forward. “Why hold massacres across the country? Could you never forgive the land for hurting you?”
“I massacred your evil to remind your people that theycould. Many still chose not to.” Horns crowned Faragathe’s void-black hair.
“You won’t convince me that everyone who died was evil.”
