ANGER MADE MY FEET SWIFT AS I FLED THE CASTLE. IF the king wouldn’t speak to the shadow god on my behalf, I would try and do it myself. I had to. The notion was completely mad, but hurt and fury obliterated my ability to think about anything else. All I knew was if I got the Fatestone and rewrote the past, I could change the moments that had led me here.
I could make the pain stop.
I fled into the gardens, hurrying toward the six turrets of the Grand Temple. They stood bright against the southern horizon, stained-glass windows reflecting the late-afternoon sun. I didn’t know how to get to the covered archway that led from the palace to the temple, but a winding set of stairs led from the back of the garden across a lower bridge to the clerics’ entrance on the side of the building. I jogged until my lungs burned, ignoring stares from others I passed who were moving through the gardens at a more dignified pace. I didn’t slow down until I reached the last long set of steps.
When I reached the doors and showed the clerics the king’s token, they invited me in. When I told them I wanted to try and speak to the gods, they walked me through a purification ritual. I was shepherded through a series of warm pools until not a speck of dirt remained on my body. The attendants adorned me in light-gray robes like those the temple clerics wore, anointed me with oil that carried the faint perfume of mountain roses, and braided my hair into an intricate crown. They admired its length but said nothing about the silver streaks. I tried not to cry when they touched me with their careful hands, tried not to remember the way Ina had once run her hands through my hair, tried to forget the way Hal’s kisses had turned my insides to stardust.
The clerics escorted me to an antechamber lined on each side with small partitioned booths in which to rest or pray, telling me they’d have me enter once the temple was empty of mortal visitors. I settled my cloak of shadows over my shoulders, needing its familiarity. My prayers were unfocused as I waited. I had no sounds of nature from which to draw music to sing, no way to limit the direction of my thoughts. Instead I was left with words rattling around inside my head in a jumble.
Death.
Loss.
Betrayal.
Love.
I tried to set aside the simmering anger I felt toward Hal, but every time I thought of him, it surged up anew. I prayed for answers, for guidance, to somehow know that I was doing the right thing. I prayed for the shadow god to deign to speak to me to tell me where Atheon was.
I prayed for the Fatestone, and the chance to start my story over.
When the sun had shifted far enough west that the stained glass made luminous pools of colored light on the floor, two clerics returned for me. They led me through gilded double doors into the heart of the temple, both signing the symbol of the spirit god before closing the doors behind me. My footfalls echoed in the vastness of the empty room. Chandeliers hung from the peaks of six turrets, illuminating intricate mosaics covering the walls from top to bottom. The whole building hummed with magic, like a pool into which all the streams of life gathered. I opened myself to the Sight just enough to sense the undercurrents swirling around me. They all led to the same place—an inlaid star on the floor with designs in the color of each god spiraling away from its tips.
My heart raced as I knelt at its center. The time had come for me to ask what I needed to know. But how would I get the shadow god to answer?
“Please speak to me,” I whispered, tracing her symbol in the air. “I need your guidance.”
I bowed my head and waited, but my request was met only with the deep silence of the temple. My knees ached. All I saw when I finally looked up were dust motes dancing through the beams of light slanting in through the western windows. My Sight showed no shift in the energies around me.
“Tell me what I must do. Please!” My voice rang through the space, echoing back from the apses. Tears stung the corners of my eyes, but I refused to let them fall.
When I looked down, a small silver knife had appeared in front of me. I stared at it in confusion. What did it mean?
A few breaths later, understanding dawned. A pit of dread slowly expanded in my stomach.
The shadow god wanted a sacrifice.
I had only one thing to offer.
My blood.
Dread and sorrow warred in my heart. My blood would always hold the answers I sought. It always came back to this, no matter how hard I tried to escape it.
This time, I would do this on my own terms.
I needed all the gods to give me strength.
I rose to my feet and went first to the altar of the earth god. Her steadiness would still my shaky hands. I nicked a finger and pressed it into the dip in the stone worn smooth by the thousands of hands that had come before mine. Invisible magic twined around my arms, familiar and comforting. She had accepted my offering.
“Please say hello to Miriel,” I whispered.
I circled the rest of the temple to the other gods. The wind god was the only other one to answer me, with a sourceless breeze that whispered across my cheeks.
My stomach churned as I faced the shadow god’s altar. She might not answer my call. Some would say it was madness to try to speak to a god when I didn’t have a crown and wasn’t pledged to a temple. I didn’t even know which of the gods had fathered me. None of them appeared to be willing to claim me and my dark gifts.
The shadow god’s turret was darker than the rest, the mosaics depicting death and mystery, shadows swirling throughout the other images.
She had taken so much from me.
Or perhaps I had given too many lives to her with my mistakes.
I offered a drop of blood to the empty space beneath a hollow box studded with gemstones. But instead of asking about the Fatestone, an entirely different question slipped out.
“Why did you let this happen?” I whispered. “Did you really need to take everyone from me?”
The light in the temple grew richer as the sun sank to the west.
“At least tell me how to make it right!” I shouted.
I collapsed in front of the altar and finally let the tears fall.
Everything was hopeless. Perhaps I would have to find Atheon on my own, or Nismae would kill me before I could even try. Perhaps the Fatestone was lost forever, and I would have to live with the tangled mess I’d made of the future—both my own and that of the kingdom itself.
I sobbed into my shadow cloak, not noticing at first that black smoke had begun to pour from beneath the shadow god’s box. I scrambled backward, clutching the silver knife so tightly that the base of the blade nicked one of the fingers on my uninjured hand. A trail of blood droplets followed me to the center of the room.
The black cloud finally drew in to become a tall, hooded figure, wisps of smoke retreating until it became solid. It moved toward me, shrouded in a cloak of darkness that shifted restlessly about its body. The figure leaned forward, and terror choked off the last of my tears.
Only in moments when I had used my blood power and felt it steal the years from my life had I ever felt as mortal as I did kneeling before the god of death.
Hope and fear battled inside me, shifting and tumbling until I couldn’t tell which was stronger.
“I am both sorry and glad to see you.” Her voice was gentler than I expected, almost soothing. It had the low quality of a bell, and held the promise of a quiet place to rest. A white hand with long, slender fingers emerged from the sleeve of her robe.
“Look up so I can see you, child,” she said. Her hood left her own face shrouded in darkness.
Frozen in place like a frightened rabbit, I obeyed the nudge of her hand when she tipped up my chin. I swallowed hard, grasping to find words to ask for what I needed.
“You have his eyes,” she said, and her voice faltered. She withdrew her hand, leaving me staring at her in stunned shock.
“Whose eyes? My father’s? You know who my father is?” Though I’d come here for other reasons, my desperation to know consumed everything else. My mouth went dry and tremors continued to rack my body as I waited for her to answer.
Instead, she drew back her hood.
Hair the deep red of dried blood cascaded over her shoulders. Her eyes were empty and black as a starless night, but that wasn’t what frightened me. It was the long arch of her eyebrows, her high cheekbones and delicate nose, the angle of her jaw and the pensive pout of her lips. It was that her face, in spite of bearing the terrifying exquisiteness of a god, was so similar to the one I saw when I looked into a tranquil pool of water and saw my own reflection.
My tears finally spilled over.
My father was not a god.
My mother was.
The abandonment I’d known about all my life cut down to the dark heart of my soul. How could a mother leave her child? How could she have let all this happen to me?
“Asra. My child,” she said. The sorrow in her voice made my chest grow even tighter.
“Why did you leave me?” My voice cracked. Even as I asked, some part of me knew that no answer would be satisfying. I couldn’t imagine leaving a baby in the hands of strangers without so much as any idea who she was—or how much destruction she could cause.
“Amalska was supposed to be a safe place to keep you out of mortal hands. Who would look for you in such a small and unassuming place, especially if your gifts were never used?” The lack of emotion in her voice made it impossible for me to tell how she felt about it. Did gods even have feelings?
“Where is my father? Why couldn’t you have left me with him?” It would have meant something just to know I had family. That someone loved me without conditions or because they were hungry for the dark power I possessed. Even Hal’s friendship hadn’t been free of ulterior motives, much less his love.
“Your father passed away before you were born,” she said. “He was sick for a long time, with a wasting illness that slowly destroyed his body.”
“Why didn’t you help him? Why didn’t you save him if you loved him?” If I could heal someone’s broken back, surely a god could heal someone from an illness. She could have at least given me a father if she wasn’t going to be there for me.
She blinked slowly, her black eyes unreadable. “That is not my role.”
Anger raced through me, fierce and wild. “So you left me with no family? If you couldn’t save my father, why did you bother getting close to him?” What was the point of falling in love if it was doomed to end from the start? I never would have let myself grow so accustomed to Ina’s arms around me if I’d known they would one day be torn away. I never would have kissed Hal if I’d known how he had betrayed me.
“I didn’t mean to. But your father composed the most beautiful music. He had the sweetest voice,” she said distantly, remembering. “I spent so many hours hovering close by, waiting for the right time to welcome him. I fell in love with those melodies—and with the man who made them—even though I didn’t want to. Not after what happened to Veric.”
The way I heard music in all of nature, in the chirp of a cricket, the whisper of leaves in the wind, the sound of a stream running over rocks—that had been my father’s gift. The vespers were a far kinder one than my mother had given me.
“But how could you leave me all by myself?” My voice trembled. My life would have been so different if I had grown up with someone who understood my powers, with someone who would have told me I was dangerous. My decisions in life would have been so different. Would that not have been better for everyone?
“Asra, my days and nights are spent at the edges of battlefields, by the bedsides of the sick, or hovering at the edges of an accident just before it happens. I am sometimes the only witness when a mortal chooses to take their own life. I am fed by the last heartbeats of the dying, and my duty is to unmake their souls and deliver them back into the magic that exists all around us. What way would that have been for a child to grow up, seeing death at every turn? Even if it is part of the cycle that sustains our world, love cannot grow where grief and sorrow reign.”
Resentment smoldered in my breast. She’d never even given me the chance to be loved. “It might have. You could have at least shown me how to use my gifts. Told me who you were. That you existed. That you cared!”
“Your gifts are those of blood, fate, and death. And like all gifts, they have their prices. No one has ever survived the blood gift long enough to master it. You know what happened to Veric. . . . I thought if you never used it, perhaps you might have a chance at a more normal life.” Her voice was deep with sorrow. Perhaps she did have feelings after all.
“Nothing about my life has been normal.” I failed to keep the bitterness out of my voice.
“But a life with me would have been no life at all. I left you because you deserved the chance for a quiet and beautiful life, and if that meant I could only watch you from the shadows when you cut the stem of a plant or took the life of an animal for food, so be it.”
“I would rather have known who I was,” I whispered. “I would rather have known that someone loved me.” Tears streaked down my cheeks.
“I have always loved you, sweet girl.” She pulled me forward and kissed my tearstained cheek, the brush of her lips cold and tingling. In that single kiss the pull of darkness and final endings called to me. “I did not want to repeat the mistakes I made with Veric. He was ambitious. I visited him often when he was a child, and sometimes I took him places I thought he needed to go to understand the gravity of his power. The problem was that he never could keep it to himself—he wanted to make the world a better place, and to use his gift to accomplish that. When he was still quite young, he used his gift to destroy the serpent king at the behest of the Six, much like you ended the southern drought.”
I remembered the story. The serpent king had been the most evil leader Zumorda ever had. While it was true that Zumordans favored power, and the strong would always rise to leadership, once he got there the serpent king had twisted the power into something evil. He hadn’t cared for his people. His rule was one of bloodshed and death, as venomous as the enormous black snake he’d taken as his manifest. Entertainment at his court was always something that ended with spilled blood.
“When the serpent king turned away from the Six Gods, refusing their guidance or their magic, we asked Veric to write his death.”
“So the mouth rot . . . and the respiratory infection that killed him . . . you’re saying that wasn’t natural? The gods were responsible?” I had never heard this version of the story.
“Yes, Veric wrote the king’s fate in great detail, and it came to pass. The use of his power aged Veric into a feeble old man. He retreated with his partner, Leozoar, to the cave in his territory, hoping no one would find him. But he was too well known and had done too much work documenting how his blood could be used for various purposes. Mortals were desperate for what he had to offer—desperate to get it from him before he died. So they hunted him. Only by the grace of his lover’s protection did he escape. But he knew he could only hold them off for so long. He decided that if he couldn’t do good for his own generation, he would do it for the next.”
“The Fatestone,” I said. My birthright.
My mother nodded. “It was made from the last of his blood, and enchanted with his dying breath.”
“If I can’t find it, all is lost,” I said. “Please tell me where I can find Atheon.”
“First, tell me why you seek the power of the Fatestone,” she said. “I know much of your story as told to me by the dead, but I want to hear it from you.”
“The boar king is expecting a challenger,” I said. “She does not have a manifest bound to the gods, and it is all because of me.” The story of Ina and me poured out, of how I’d selfishly tried to change our future and destroyed everything instead. “It’s my fault she doesn’t have a bond to one of the Six. I must correct the mistake that made her a monster.”
The shadow god considered my words. “I have felt the boar king’s soul calling to me in the distance from time to time. It would not take much to push him close enough for me to grasp. Perhaps you will be the one to decide his fate.”
“What does that mean?” I already carried too much responsibility on my shoulders.
“Whether you change the past or the future, the ripples will be felt throughout all of time. Are you prepared to take on that power?” my mother asked.
“Yes.” I wasn’t ready in the least, but what other choice did I have?
“Then let me tell you how you will find Atheon. First, look for a thread of magic that feels like yours. Like calls to like. Second, listen to your heart. Third, know that your blood is the key. Remember—fate is a slippery and changeable thing. You are one of the few with the power to change it. Be wise and be well, my child.” She touched my cheek with a gentle hand.
“But wait—where do I find the thread of magic?” I asked. She’d left me with a riddle, not an answer.
The darkness surrounding us gathered until a new cloak formed around her body. She pulled up her hood and the shadows fell to pieces and dissipated into nothingness, taking her with them. The emptiness of the Great Temple felt vast enough to swallow the world.
I wiped the last tears from my face. Fate had led me to live up to my birthright, even without intending to. Now I had to embrace it no matter how much it hurt.