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Lily startled. It was barely more than a flinch, but enough Xavier could run with. He backed away with a wide grin as she glared at him
He wouldn’t dare tease her. Not only hours after he’d been so understanding.
And he didn’t. Not directly. He crossed his arms and followed her gaze. “It really stands out at this time of night, doesn’t it? Even from the Flux.”
The first time she had stepped foot in the fourth district it was as if the lift dropped her into another world. Unlike the pristine, polished peak of the city, or the run-down sickly district of the bottom layer, the Flux was a new breed of chaos.
Most of the business owners here dabbled in the more risqué market that revolved around the selling of dangerous substances and weapons to bodies that often sold themselves. Above each and every door was a neon light that indicated what one would find inside. Lily imagined what it must look like from afar—a deceptively bright rainbow tearing straight through the snowy mountains. Not much stood above that.
Her gaze lifted back up to the carving.
“It’s only displaced rock.” Lily shrugged, turning away to the bustling road of the district. “Something so simple might be impressive to a snake.”
Xavier’s green eyes shimmered over his smile. “You’re only scared because you’re a reaper.”
Snakes, like Xavier, were marked by the green color of the god that made them—the Serpent, god of fear and shadows. Purple souls born from the Wraith were reapers.
Lily scoffed. “Reapers don’t get scared.”
“Reapers should be scared. He’ll remember when he returns to feast on the hearts of the descendants who wronged him.”
She pictured the paint slathered body in the mural. Valen’s First Incarnation—marked as the God Eater for the role he played in his father’s war. She’d heard the story told to those both in high standing and in low: how he slew the vessels of the Dusk Flares and devoured their souls to harness their power. How he turned on his family on the final night of the Reapers’ War.
The same night he killed Keara and stole the Wraith.
His brother managed to kill him, but in death, the Serpent, the last Flare freed from his body returned, reanimating him.
He became Diseased. Worshiped for his immortality by many and loathed by many more. For his betrayal, Valen sealed him under the mountains almost three hundred years ago.
Good, Lily thought. The Hazevale’s destroyed two of the three bonds needed among the Flares to create souls. Valen turned the Guardian against the Wraith, and through his alliance with the Imordial for the Vulpes Flare, god of curiosity and creation, destroyed the bond between it and the Serpent. A calamity Eizreth had been suffering under for three centuries. Without those bonds and the souls they could create to populate the land, the Aithre in the mountains had withered away, turning the once plentiful region to a tundra plagued by snow. Coupled with the empire’s greed of using souls as a source of power for ghostsoil and their quest for immortality, the population relied on a process of recycling souls to sustain the life that lived here.
The majority of babies were stillborn. If someone managed to die of natural causes and their soul escaped the empire, it would seep back into the Aithre and maybe an expectant mother would be gifted a natural reincarnation for her child. Otherwise, one would have to afford a soul, and they weren’t cheap since most Dawn souls were chosen for reincarnation while the Dusk’s were harvested for power.
Lily lived here only to hide and learn. While they were capable of great things, the imperials showed no restraint, no signs of slowing or changing. Immortality was what they sought, and the noble Dawns built it on the backs of the Dusks.
Her brows drew close while she examined the carving, recalling the deliberate placement of the hole in the black paint on the mural. “Why hearts?”
“To replace the one his brother stole,” Xavier answered, ominously. “I’d tread carefully if I were you.”
Lily gave him a gentle shove. “Us reapers didn’t do anything to him he didn’t deserve. He’s right where he belongs, with or without a heart.” Setting her lips in a tight line, she secured her bag over her shoulder and leaned against the closest wall. “You get scared?”
Xavier fell beside her, taking a long swig of the bottle in his grip. “I did this morning.”
He was so calm about the specter that she couldn’t tell if its presence bothered him at all. “Really?”
“You and Rey are so jumpy, one of us has to keep the group grounded. How else can we manage working for someone like Kael?”
Lily had never met the leader of the smuggler’s guild, but his network was vast and profitable in Reave’s underside. He sold ghostsoil technology, escence, and medicine outside of the empire to populations that lacked the technology and resources to manufacture Reatian products themselves. Lily knew they were sold to cities like Gridian, and even as far west as Eyos. The empire legally traded protection, medicine, and other metals for organic resources that they could no longer grow themselves, but it was all limited, never including weapons that would give oppositional sides like Tyrsia an edge against them.
Not like the southern leaders would permit it anyway. According to the Tyrsian queens, Amalia and Minerva, the last remaining pair of bonded Imordials, Reatian technology was abhorrent because of the sacrificed souls that were required to create it, no matter how beneficial the technology could be.
It wasn’t enough to deter Lily’s curiosity from seeing it herself.
When she was young—small enough she had to crane her head to meet his eye—Lily’s father had gotten a hold of a Reatian remedy on one of his excursions off the peninsula. Supposedly, it was able to regrow lost tissue in a matter of hours.
“Remarkable, but dangerous,” he had said, spinning the syringe between his bulky fingers, the liquid inside gleaming against the sunlight like ice. He told her it had been synthesized using a white blossom cultivated just on the other side of the Alokyian border.
The syringe never left the bottom of his medical bag. Lily remembered sneaking glances of it when he was busy with a patient, fascinated by such a concept.
