“Then—whose?”
“I’m not sure.” Neri’s voice rose in pitch, bordering on panic. “I can’t tell what’s coming from me and what’s coming fromthem.I’m not strong enough to tell the difference and keep up my boundaries at the same time.”
He stammered on, and Ysira caught something that sounded likeI’m worthless.
“Stop it.” She took him by the shoulders. “You can control this. It’ll take time, but?—”
“Do we have time?Do we?It’s so angry and so . . . old. It’s tired of waiting. It wants to kill the gods and free our world, but—it won’t stop.”
The longer Neri was quiet, the deeper the dread in Ysira grew.
“It thinks that maybe this universe doesn’t deserve to exist. It wants to drown the stars in blood.” Neri shuddered. “It wants to devour.”
Ysira gripped his shoulders tighter. Because she had felt that anger, every time she dreamed of the red thing in the desert. She had felt it because it was her own, too, and countless others’—the sense of all that rage with nowhere to go, now standing before her in a body too small to contain it. For a long while, she could not speak, struggling to conceal the depth of her horror.
“You told me these people would kill for me,” Neri said. “That they would die for me. And you were right. I can sense it in them, thathope,and I know they would follow me to any end. Maybe even this one.”
Ysira started to deny it but found the words stuck in her throat.
You’ll only know it’s taken root,Ogden had said,when you’ve lost all control.
Neri looked to her, imploring. “What do I do?”
She would not lose control.
“Go clean yourself up,” she said. “I’ll take care of this.” “Should we tell?—”
“No.”
What would those children do when they realized their pet was missing? What would their mother think? Solai, theschoolteacher turned demon priest who had been so kind to Neri, endlessly patient with his training despite being so far out of her depth . . .
Ysira severed that train of thought. She could excise the human part of herself like a useless demon, becausethatwas how she survived. She had clawed her way through dirt and darkness, doing whatever was necessary, refusing to fade into nothing even when it was all she’d ever been promised. And she had witnessed the horror in their skies. She knew what awaited them all, should they fail.
No half measures. No other approach would suffice. Regardless of what had happened this night, regardless of what Naxal might be . . . this world had served far crueler masters.
What harm could Ysira possibly bring upon this world that it had not already seen?
“No,” she said again, more sharply. She straightened. Composing herself. “We’re on the brink of war, and we cannot afford to make them doubt.Notnow, do you understand? If anyone asks about the spider, you never saw it. If they ask where you’ve been, you lie. This never happened. We will not speak of this again.”
33
CONSECRATED
JACEN
Jacen walked down to the lake alone. For the first time that he could remember, he wore none of the Church’s trappings. From a distance, he might have passed for any random denizen of the Shrouded City.
Gossamer curtains of steam skimmed the surface of the water, below which bioluminescent flora glowed white and gold. Jacen knelt on the beach, running a hand through the coarse black sand and letting it fall between his fingers.
His mind had come unmoored, like a sparrow caught in a gale. The telkaan root’s effects had faded as they had taken hold, sudden as a thunderclap, but something still lingered. He kept reliving the memories of all he’d seen at the Gate, turning it over and over in his head to make sense of it—this glimpse of the numinous, rendering all he’d known before so small in comparison. That elusive transcendence he’d searched for all his life, embodied as cosmic power.
What were the odds that such power manifested in the nephew of the man he’d loved for so long? In a way, whichsent a deeper chill through Jacen’s marrow, this even felt like providence.
They balanced on a precipice, and on one side lay annihilation. On the other side lay something he could never have dreamed of, never dared pray for.
It wasn’t quite hope.
Jacen stared into the water for a time, until Seth found him.
