If only for a few moments in a thousand lifetimes, I got to know those who complete my soul.
“Don't think like that, Eternal,” the Crux says, holding out a hand and pressing it to my cheek.
He's having to take care of both of us now, something that doesn't sit quite right with me, but I lean into his hand anyway. It feels strange to do, like the hand isn't familiar to me, but at the same time, it feels like home, because the god beneath the skin remains the same.
“You two should go. Leave here quietly together. I will stay for a little longer, finish what we started and hope that our enemy sleeps through the next cycle.”
He always would give every last piece of himself until there was nothing left, but the Corvus and I would never let him leave alone, not if we had a choice in the matter. Instead, we brush ourselves off, standing together. I try not to wince at the state of my vessel as the blood continues to drip down to the scorched earth beneath our feet.
“We will finish this together,” I say. “We will go to sleep together.”
CHAPTER THREE
North
Watching Oli shut down as she speaks to her bond still sends the same ripples of unease and frustration through my gut as it always has, but I try to distract myself by speaking with my own bond instead.
My least favorite thing to do.
But my feelings don’t matter right now, because as much as I have always fought with the thing that lives inside of me, I will do whatever it takes for my Bonded to be safe. Knowing that there are gods living in each of us means that it’s time to get over my own feelings and start working with it to get through this, especially if there is a precedent of us losing this battle.
I’m never going to lose Oleander again.
Do you call her the Eternal as well?
It answers me quickly enough, clearly listening in on this conversation, though it hadn't made itself known to me. My bonded is Eternal, always.
And what do they call you? You must all have names if you’ve been around that many times.
The Crux. My brother's name is the Corvus. There's also the Soothsayer, the Cleaver, and the Draconis. They have all woken, finally.
The Soothsayer.
That’s what Oli had called Gryphon’s bond.
How are we going to keep them alive? What is your plan for the Eternal and my Bonded that it lives within?
I'm not sure what sort of a response I'm expecting from it, but I'm happy with what I get. Beyond happiness, the relief it fills me with is enough that maybe, just very maybe, I might start speaking to the god a little more often.
They are both mine, as they are yours. There is no distinction. When our enemy comes, as they always do, we will defeat them all. We are unmatched now.
I open my eyes and glance across at Nox to find him already staring at me. I give him a simple nod before he turns back to Gryphon’s bond.
The Soothsayer.
I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from smirking, already knowing that my Bonded is going to have a lot to say about the names of the gods, but I also find myself happy with the one chosen for her bond.
The Eternal.
Without question, she is eternally and completely mine. The center of our Bonded Group, eternally the one thing that we can all agree on and come together for, all of us working together to keep her safe.
That's the difference, my bond says. That's how we are going to make it through this time, all of us together.
“What's going on?” Gabe mumbles into the silence of the room, and I answer back without any attempts at secrecy.
They have no place here.
“My bond’s name is the Crux, yours is the Draconis. Atlas is the Cleaver, and Nox is the Corvus.”
I’m expecting some sort of reaction from them, especially my brother, but Nox merely shrugs back. “The Corvus makes sense. They both link back to the Draven name. What if all of the reincarnations of the gods with shadows are born to our family bloodline? Father had them too.”
I groan and rub a hand over my face. “Don’t you think we would’ve heard more about all of this if that were true? That maybe we wouldn't have had to look so hard to find the gods?”
“Did you, though? I mean, I know a lot of the books are rare and out of print, but it sounds like these things were hiding in plain sight… If they were ever hiding at all,” Gabe says, still looking incredibly green around the edges, and Atlas gives him a pat on the back with a sympathetic grimace.
The budding friendship they’d shakily started has turned into one of deep respect, and seeing the lengths that the dragon had gone to to keep the masses of Resistance soldiers away from Oleander was inspiring, to say the least. Atlas himself had mastered the Cleaver’s powers in such a short amount of time, thanks to the urgency of the fighting.
All in all, we’d walked away from everything relatively unscathed, only the now-healed bruises and scratches on my Bonded to show for it. Fighting in the Wasteland had taken too long and we’d come too close to losing her. The moment the shield had snapped into place around Oleander, separating her from the entire Bonded Group, I thought we’d lost her. It had only gotten worse when Nox’s shadows had filled the space, obscuring her from our view as she’d fought her torturer off.
I don’t know what I would’ve done if my brother hadn’t made it in there to get to her.
“Do we need to be worried about that?” Atlas murmurs, running a gentle hand down Oli's cheek, but Nox only shrugs.
“She's always had a close relationship with her bond, even when she was scared of what it could do. Whatever it's showing her right now, it’s important for her to see.”
Any distraction to keep her from thinking about what had happened on the battlefield at the Wasteland is a win in my opinion. When we’d returned to the Sanctuary, it was only the distraction of Gryphon’s bond that had kept her from falling apart.
The moment we had returned here, I could see the cracks beginning to show on her carefully pasted-together facade. No matter how righteous she may feel in her work now that she is doing so to defend her Bonded Group and the community itself, it still takes a toll on her that no one understands as well as I do.
Her kill count in the Wasteland was only rivaled by my own and Nox’s, the sweeping clouds of our Gifts flooding over the soldiers and tearing them apart in the most vicious and violent ways. There isn’t an inch of remorse in me, but still, the cost of that power is heavy on my shoulders. It’s part of being a human with a soul, I think. Knowing that the weight of that choice is yours alone to carry.
I might believe in my abilities to tell right from wrong, but there's no denying that to the Resistance and families of the East Coast, I'm the villain for what I can do, a role I'll gladly play again and again for our safety and freedom.
“Are we going to remember the past lives as well? Am I ever going to remember what it was like to be a dragon back then?” Gabe asks, and when I look up, he's staring at the Soothsayer.
It stares back at him with its blank and soulless eyes as though it has no intention of answering him, but Gabe stares back at it with that open and easy way of his. Whether or not it's that that breaks the god-bond down, he does eventually answer. “If the Draconis chooses to share it with you, then yes, but it has always only ever communicated with the Eternal. It's only ever wanted her.”