The church was made of wood—had it been stone before? He needed a place to get out of the cold, to feel something. The door opened easily at his touch. He closed it behind him, relishing the silence.
Moss crept along the floor and up the walls over the old icons. He could feel the forest pulling at his fraying edges, trying its very best to unravel him, as it ate and ate. It had nearly succeeded once. He stepped across the hallway and closed the door to the stairway leading to the well. He didn’t want to think about what Nadya had done.
The crunch of bones underneath his boots was loud as he followed a hall to the sanctuary. He bypassed it, hoping to find a smaller room to hole up in until he felt warm.
Maybe he would never feel warm again.
It took time, stepping through rotting plants and brittle bones, to find the room that would have housed the caretaker of the church. There was an oven in the corner. Malachiasz filled it with shattered bits of furniture and reached for his spell book. It wasn’t at his hip. Neither was the dagger he’d carried for years. Frustration and anxiety and blistering fear overcame him all at once and he thudded heavily to the ground, squeezing his eyes shut. He let out a long, shuddering breath.
He buried his face in his hands and tried not to bring back the voice. He suspected the being was always there, watching. Waiting to overwhelm him further. Forcing his eyes closed did little, a cluster of them opening on his hand and disorienting him.
When he had snapped past the mortal bonds tying him to this realm of reality, a lot had been made clear that had been taken by the Vultures. Things he had lost. Was any of it real?
He remembered the boy with the scar on his eye. And dragging books into the boy’s room after a failed assassination attempt. Spending his days wandering the palace until the boy pulled him back to lessons.
His brother.
Serefin. His murderer.
Family was something Malachiasz had yearned for but now wished to forget. Better to have the false family he had built for himself to replace the one wrenched away. Reconciling this was too difficult.
His time in the forest was hazy. It had clawed at him long before they’d reached Tzanelivki. The moment they left the monastery and moved into Dozvlatovya, it began its assault, wanting to devour him. Serefin had been distant as they traveled through the forest, constantly taken by fits, his eyes bleeding. And if he—or Nadya—had shown signs of malicious intent, Malachiasz was too distracted to notice.
Yet he didn’t understand. Why had Nadya saved him when confronted by her goddess? Why let him taste the terrifying expanse of her magic?
Malachiasz had the power of a god but it was nothing, inconsequential, to what the Kalyazi girl with hair like snow could have if she knew how to wield it. The thought was as thrilling as it was terrifying. It would have been better had she not betrayed him. But he had betrayed her, too. They had spent the past year willfully kicking each other at any glimmer of weakness. She was the enemy, perhaps it had been foolish to think she would ever be anything else.
He tugged on a bone knotted in his hair. He still had a few relics, their power thrumming under his fingertips, and he could break them. Push past his consciousness, his mortal body. Transcend. But that was, quite possibly, the last thing he wanted to do.
He stared blankly at the cold oven, realizing he was useless without his spell book. But even if he had it, would it work? What had Nadya done?
Frustrated, he slashed the back of his hand with an iron claw, hoping he was wrong and that she hadn’t destroyed everything—hadn’t betrayed him so fully.
But there was no magic in his spilt blood. There was nothing.
He swallowed hard, staring at the blood dripping down his hand and fighting tears. What good was he without his magic? What was the point of him? He was nothing but a monster. He still had some magic, something far past blood magic, and he could feel it if he pressed. But using it was tapping into chaos and he wasn’t sure he had the control for it.
Malachiasz shivered. He was freezing and it was growing harder to ignore the ripples of pain each time his body shifted. At least it had quieted back down to what he was used to, eyes and mouths and twitching. No extraneous limbs or spines in the wrong places.
All his life he’d had a goal, for things to not be so bad, and he could always see that light at the end of the darkness, even as it grew farther away with each step he took.
Now it had gone out and he wasn’t sure what he was fighting for—if there was anything to fight for.
Taszni nem Malachiasz Czechowicz.
He couldn’t let himself fall—he didn’t know if he could return from that place of chaos—but his edges were fraying, the presence sliding forward with a scrape. And there was no stopping it.
* * *
The dark was far past that of the Salt Mines—that place where no light touched. This was destruction. This was entropy.
Awareness was a transient concept. Unimportant. Insignificant. The god had pulled him here. Call it what it was, he supposed. His ideals might have to be compromised. But he knew with perfect clarity that this was not one of the gods he had declared war against.
“No.”
Then what?
“Older, greater, far more powerful.”
His bones cracked as he was forced into chaos. Breaking only to be reforged. Steel puncturing through his skin. Teeth slicing through him. Eyes blinking open and fractured vision and how far could it go? How much more could he withstand? How much could he be altered until nothing left of him was human?
“Fighting is hardly in your best interest. We will work so well together, you and I.”
Malachiasz didn’t know how to respond—he had no mouth to speak in that moment. He only had panic and fear and clarity—perfect clarity.
Let this play out. Let him hear what this god had to say.
“Ah, surrender—I knew you were clever. I knew if only you listened, you would see.”
It wasn’t surrender; it was biding time. Malachiasz knew what to do with those who thought themselves capable of manipulating him. He’d known how to handle Izak, and he could handle this.
Except … he had not known how to handle Nadya. An error of a heart he did not know he still possessed. No more mistakes with that—not with her.
But he could make this look like a surrendering of will. He could play this game.
He also had no way to argue. Chaos was an entrapment, it forced him into its will and he was powerless before it. He had known what transcendence could do to him. He had studied enough to know it would either kill him or turn him into something so much greater, but there was no way to predict the result. And the chaos, it was fitting, but it was a punishment, a prison.
Malachiasz did not allow himself the luxury of regret, and, forced back into divinity, his body breaking under the weight and power of this being, this god, he let himself taste it. He had made so many mistakes, told so many lies, and here he was at the end of the universe—a god in power. A boy, broken. So damn tired.
“I know what you want. Listen. It would be less painful for you to not force my hand.”
What did Malachiasz want? Once, it had been clear, but then his path had crashed into a girl from Kalyazin who was clever and vicious and nothing like he’d thought those backward people were, a girl so wrapped around the finger of a goddess who only meant to use her, and Malachiasz’s grand ambitions had altered. He hadn’t killed Marzenya because he’d wanted to topple Kalyazin’s divine empire, he had done it because she’d forced Nadya to watch him break into pieces. Because she had led Nadya to her own destruction—merely her tool to wipe the magic from Tranavia. Because he couldn’t stand to watch as the goddess snuffed out Nadya’s vibrant spark because she had dared turn it in a new direction.