As she pulled in Mortem, Anton’s knot unraveled, the dark threads curling free into the stagnant air.
She anticipated him shouting at her, doing something to stop her, trying to gather up that magic into its tangle again. But the Priest Exalted merely stepped aside, the corona of white light around him turning to face her.
Lore tried to stop, but the instinct was too strong now, and she was caught in its current like sand in the tide. The threads of Mortem that Anton had altered flowed to her hands, breached her skin, found her heart.
It felt different. Stronger, somehow, slithering through her veins in a torrent. And it didn’t come back out.
Panicking, Lore planted her feet and flexed her fingers, trying to hold up against the onslaught—
That’s when the screaming started.
Her body wouldn’t obey when Lore tried to close her hands, frozen like the corpse she undoubtedly resembled. Everything in her was cold, a deep, numbing wave coursing from her outstretched fingers and all the way down her spine, her heart stopped and stilled as if a giant fist had closed around it.
And still, the screaming. The screaming that, somehow, was her fault.
But it was hard to hear over the voice in her head.
This isn’t something you can escape. Haven’t you figured that out by now?
It echoed in every one of her bones, danced on every icy nerve. The voice was alien and familiar at once, and sounded strange, like two throats twined together and speaking as one, harmonizing with itself.
One of those voices sounded like Lore’s.
Every day, it grows stronger. Growing in you like rot as you come nearer to ascension. The voice felt like oil poured over the grooves of her brain, slipping into every empty surface. It reminded her of the voice that had told her to use her power, that day in the square with Horse, but stronger, more sure. You can’t flee from what you are, daughter of the dark. Death is the one thing that will always find you, and you are its heir. The seed of the apocalypse, end-times walking. You are the wildfire necessary for the forest to grow, the destruction that brings rebirth.
Lore felt death clenching at her lungs, her heart, every organ that was ripe and vital turning shriveled and dry. She hadn’t been able to channel any Mortem out, only draw it in. It wasn’t killing her—that’d be too simple—but it was doing something.
Changing her. Taking her capacity for power and burrowing into it, making it wider, so it might swallow her up. Hollowing her out to be filled again by something vast, something dark.
Her eyes wouldn’t open, as if her lids had been sutured together. Lore bared her teeth, pulling up strength she didn’t know she had. With a roar, she forced the Mortem out of her, through veins that felt like they might burst, through bones that wanted to break against the pressure.
The rock beneath her feet was too brittle already, but Lore could feel the life surrounding her the same way she could feel death—the two of them inverted, different streams from the same source. She felt the heaving bodies of the terrified horses, the fear-curdled heartbeats of the other Presque Mort. The placid, unthinking life of the garden, still green and blooming, and beyond that, the farmland.
There was too much Mortem to direct it with any kind of finesse. So Lore let it loose into both, funneling death into living roots both close by and far away, the death in her veins guiding her to life.
Law of Opposites, she thought distantly. Death and life strengthening each other, death and life entwined.
Spiritum fled every bloom and leaf in the garden, replaced not by death, but by stasis, freezing them in time. Mortem wove into the aura of every scrap of life both seen and unseen—cocooning tiny bugs, larvae, the aphids invisible to the naked eye. Then it went deeper, spearing through the cobblestones of the road, turning to rock the tiny shoots of grass that tried to find cracks of sun, the earthworms waiting for rain, the bulbs of fall-blooming flowers that hadn’t yet broken the surface. Then the farmlands: wheat turning to spears of thin rock, roots becoming intricate statues beneath the earth. She managed to spare the livestock, but only just; the panicked lowing of cattle came loud enough to hear, a deeper counterpoint to the human screams.
Everything, stone, their lives frozen as Lore let herself be death’s causeway, let Mortem flow through her like water in a mill wheel. Gabe had told her this kind of channeling required care, but it came through her like chaos.
Lore didn’t realize her own screams had joined the rest until all the magic was gone.
They want your power, the voice said quietly, fading along with the Mortem as her body slowly clawed its way back to living, dwindling to nothing but the barest whisper. They’ll force you to be stronger, and then break you down. Reduce you to nothing but a womb for magic they can’t make. But only if you let them. Even when you ascend, you must remember that you are wholly your own.
Lore opened her eyes.
The leak was gone. That was good. But it hadn’t gone quietly. One of the Presque Mort, a man whose name she didn’t know, was now on the ground, staring at his foot. What had been his foot. Now it was only bone, the flesh eaten away, the muscle gone, and even the bones weren’t in the right shape—just a pile, a discarded jumble. They gleamed wet ivory in the sunlight, and he stared, and screamed and screamed and screamed.
Lore whipped around, searching for more casualties, but it appeared only the one man had been caught in the Mortem leak. So preoccupied was she with looking for more bony limbs that she didn’t notice at first the way all the other Presque Mort were looking at her.
With shock. With horror. With revulsion.
Anton stood at the front of the company, his face still blank. The knot of Mortem he’d made was gone. He watched her like someone might look at an animal they didn’t recognize, curious and wary, seeing what they might do.
Next to her, Gabe stood still, his one blue eye wide and staring at the fallen Presque Mort. He hadn’t moved away from her, but when Lore reached for him, desperate for something to hold on to, he flinched.
Her hand crumpled in on itself like a dying spider.
“Did I do that?” It came out small and fragile, almost childlike. Immediately, she wanted to swallow it back down, but she had to have an answer.
Gabe didn’t give her one.
The Mort on the ground had stopped screaming, and that was somehow worse. He just stared at the place where his foot had been, now only that mess of picked bones.
Her legs were unsteady. Her vision blurred—on everything, now, not just Gabe. The sour-empty smell of Mortem lay thick in the air, even though the leak was gone, and it drowned her with every gulping breath she took.
“Did I do it, Gabe?” she asked again, but the words were slurred, and she fell into the dark before she heard him try to answer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The body always knows.
—Eroccan proverb
Her mind felt sludgy, her mouth sour, her limbs leadened. Neither awake nor really asleep, but caught somewhere in between, where the air tasted stale and mineral, where there was nothing soft.
Lore knew she was dreaming—or something like it—but it didn’t stop the kick of fear against her ribs when she saw the tomb. It looked larger than she remembered, a block of obsidian gleaming night-sky dark. Looming like a slice of the earth itself, prepared to bury her beneath it, to crush her into itself and make her part of whatever waited inside.