Then the four of Them gather around her, speaking strange words that I don’t understand, the hum of that horrible Mysterium rising like a tide all around us, my teeth rattling in my skull. Some kind of a preparation, a preservation, I fear, for finishing what He started back in the Devorarium, bathed in corpse-light, pinned under the gaze of that eye-wound. He’ll want to take her back, I know, somehow—I know it fiercely and without question. He’ll need the power of Lumendei, the depth of the people’s belief, the perverted sanctity of that unholy Church.
She asked me to toss her into the waves, and I will do so even if it kills me.
I spit out blood and drag one hand across my lips. With desperate fingers, I reach for the top of a broken piece of a once-grand building. Once, twice, then I manage to grab hold.
My body screams in pain. My heart breaks and breaks and breaks, even the tiniest pieces finding a way of fracturing again as I stare at Nyatrix’s crumpled form. I’ll die here, I imagine, this horrible sight the last I’ll ever see. There’s little point in my feeble resistance, I know. But with a howl building like a storm in the back of my neck, I drag myself up to stand.
Because I’m so very tired of being on my knees.
Chapter 45
Bloody scrapes cover my hands. Bronze armor glints in the firelight. The Godwinds roar like an animal. The High Ecclesians have not yet noticed I’m standing, too focused on Their heinous work.
I wipe my hands on my robes, smearing blood all over the linen. I stagger forward a step, scouring the ground for a weapon. I almost stoop to heft a large rock, intending to slam it into the rotting skull of the closest High Ecclesian.
I don’t know what comes over me. Perhaps that strange monster slinks back out of my hidden room and bares its teeth, speaking to me in a language only the two of us know. But instead of a weapon, instead of death, that voice whispers a different song entirely.
I creep forward, a smear of bloodstained linen in a world of soot and smoke and sorrow, and place my hands on the nearest Ecclesian. Like I’m offering a Blessing, or perhaps revoking one. The tall figure turns in a whirl of torn vestments, and I tumble into Their arms, gripping Their chest in my hands.
This close, I can see Their corpse face beneath the billowing veil, the truth behind all the pretty lies. They—He—spitssomething, the words venomous, but it doesn’t matter. There are no Saints. No saviors. This god was never going to save me.
I shove my hands beneath the veil, my fingertips meeting the bone-dry skin of something that belongs in a grave. And then, I think, I scream. I throw my head back and howl, like I was a wolf this whole time, like everyone’s been fooled by the white feathers and curving breast and sweet song.
The skin beneath my hands changes—from dry fragments of barely-there tissue to the cold clamminess of a fresh corpse to living flesh, warm and pulsing beneath my touch. A scream joins mine, I think, raw and terrible, as the High Ecclesian tears off Their vestments and staggers out of my grasp.
In place of a God’s terrible puppet stands a Fatum—healthy and free, his eyes clear and bright. Beneath a threadbare tunic that might have once been grand, his shoulders relax. Something that I dare to hope is peace fills his expression, tears tumbling down his cheeks.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
Then he crumbles into ash, dancing to and fro across the ruined city. I steady myself and turn my head, blinking through the smoke, to find the three other Ecclesians doing the unthinkable: fleeing. Fleeing fromme.
Their vestments are little more than smears in the night as They race toward the gaping hole in the Ossuary Gate. I watch, dazed, as They climb aboard what my addled mind thinks are Hexen—even though that cannot be—and disappear into the Sundered Lands.
My head spinning, I lurch forward, catching myself on hands, and watch in befuddled awe as the hard, dusty ground beneath me morphs into rich black soil. Violets bloom in a matter of seconds.
But all I want are asphodels.
“Nyatrix,” I whisper, dragging myself forward until I find my cane lying across the ground, its handle tucked beneath the abandoned cloth. I reach the place where she was slain, but there is nothing there except the stolen sword, shimmering in the war-light. No bloodstain. No wolf-like helm, no single trace of the woman I think I might have loved.
I turn, so heavy with grief and sorrow, and from the heavy smoke stalks a wolf. No—something else. Something new, or perhaps something very old. Though the Sepulchyre blade lies at my feet, wings arch from Nyatrix’s back. Soot is smeared across her face, like she dragged the back of her hand across her eyes and left a trail of deep, dark black.
Her hair is loose, her shattered breastplate gone, and her mouth is curled into a snarl that makes me weak in the knees. I tremble as the only god I could ever believe in prowls closer, her head thrown back as if to scent the wind for blood. For prey.
“Nyatrix,” I breathe, half a question.
Swords clash somewhere in the distance, screams echoing against stone, but for me there is only her.
“Ophelia,” she replies in the same voice, that glorious voice that can be velvet-smooth one moment and strained, rough, undone the next.
“You’re alive,” I gasp, stumbling closer to her. She catches me in her arms, one hand curling around my waist, the other cupping my skull.
“I told you,” she murmurs into my hair, “that you are a revelation.”
“What happened?” I ask, my mind utterly scrambled, the intensity of the pain sinking its teeth into my body making it hard to have a single coherent thought.
“You,” she says, her mouth curling into that dangerous knife of a smile. “You happened, Ophelia. I . . . It was dark. All dark. It was death, I am sure. But then your voice, calling me back.”
She kneels before me, holding me by my waist. The Lupa Nox—Moryx’s Avatar, I no longer have any doubt—tilts her head back, thunderstorm eyes capturing mine.
