This was a story he would tell.
He was busy crafting the epic tale in his mind when Elise finally approached him. She relayed the conversation, telling first of Isadon’s desire for revenge against Ydia, and then about His needs.
It chilled him to the bone.
He wasn’t the most devout follower of Dasis. But the idea of abandoning his faith to pray to a God of Death for the chance that this God would be different and do what He promised… It was hard to swallow indeed.
Elise didn’t seem convinced, either. She hedged and gave half answers, sometimes having to confirm things with Isadon before speaking. It was as if she were hesitant to give over power to another deity so soon, and Ermolt didn’t blame her.
“Alright,” Ermolt said eventually. “We need to worship Him, and if that means we need to forsake all other Gods and follow Him, I’ll do it. For Athala.” He frowned at the God, who’s face he couldn’t even see. “What’s going to happen?”
Elise turned to the murky figure that had once been Claus. He began to make that rhythmic clacking noise that set Ermolt’s teeth on edge and made his skin crawl. Ermolt tried to distract himself by adjusting his furs, mentally marking where there were holes or splits that would need patching.
“What is it you hear when he speaks?” Elise asked when Isadon had finished, her tone curious. He had told her before of Ydia’s melodic chiming.
“It’s just noise,” he said, grimacing. “The sound of cairn stones being laid against one another.” Ermolt refused to admit which cairn stones the noise sounded like. Neither Elise nor Isadon needed that information.
The dark shape made some more of those unsettling sounds, and Elise nodded before shrugging.
“He says barbarians are different from humans, especially in their interactions with the Gods.” She shook her head. “But that wasn’t your question. He compared the power of the Favor to a water wheel. We will provide the water to power Him, and he will use that to bring back Athala.”
“And it will really be Athala?” Ermolt crossed his arms over his chest and turned to address the cloudy shape. “We are not looking for some undead with fragments of her mind like your Knight-Commander. Like the Champion. We need our friend back.”
Ermolt suppressed a shudder at the sound of stones being piled on a burial cairn. He wanted to ask if He could communicate to Elise without making that sound, but he also didn’t want to make it obvious how uncomfortable it made him.
Elise was quiet for a moment after the shadowy God spoke. “He says He can bring her back in truth.” She turned, a ghost of a smile on her lips. “The Champion was created by animating the body without the spirit. But Isadon can return Athala’s spirit from the Nether and—”
Isadon interrupted with a sound, and Ermolt could read protest and correction in the smoky shape’s body language.
“Not the Nether,” she said, correcting herself. “There is no afterlife now?” She frowned and nodded as the God spoke again. “Alright. I think I understand. There used to be an afterlife when Isadon reigned. Remember Claus mentioned Maehala? All the spirits of the dead went there for an eternal rest. When He lost His power, it was closed off. There was no divine power to keep it functioning. So that’s what the Nether is—or the Life Beyond—or whatever the other Gods have told us. The spirits of the dead have nowhere to go. They exist in some kind of… featureless void. Where Maehala is supposed to be. They know no rest.”
“And that’s where Athala is now?”
“That’s where everyone is now. Everyone who has ever died. Our ancestors, our enemies, our allies—everyone.” Elise shivered, her face contorted in both anger and disgust. “They’re all lost. Wandering endlessly. Looking for an afterlife that doesn’t exist.” She shook off the thought. “But yes—Athala is among them. When Isadon brings her back, He will bring back her spirit. Everything about her. All of her memories and thoughts and feelings will come with it.”
“So, she won’t be undead?” Ermolt asked, once more directly addressing the shadowed God. “She’ll be back, whole and healthy, just as we remember?”
Isadon responded slowly, and Elise nodded along. He was explaining something, and Ermolt could only suffer through the uncomfortable sound as he waited for the translation.
“Yes?” Elise said, her brow furrowing in confusion. “But there’s… a complication. We don’t have her body. In fact, no one does. Whatever Meodryt did destroyed her completely. And while He could retrieve her body from anywhere, there’s nothing left to retrieve now.”
“What do we do, then? If He says He can do it, there must be a plan, right?”
Elise nodded and she held a hand out to quiet him as the God spoke. “He can recreate her body. Because people still remember her. Those memories are linked to her spirit. Some of the power of returning her to us will be used to reach out and find those memories. With them, He can reconstruct her.”
Isadon continued to speak for a moment more, and Elise frowned.
“But it won’t be easy. After all we’ve been through to get here, I don’t know if it’s even possible. Especially not now.”
“What does He need?”
Elise sighed, hard. “Isadon reminds us that He’s a God, and so He can reach into our memories without us doing anything. But if we’re thinking about her while He does, the memories can become… I don’t know if tainted is the right word, but it’s what He said.” She gestured to the shadowy figure of Isadon. “If we’re thinking about Athala, the memories will be affected by our thoughts. What He creates might be wrong. Misshapen or altered. And if it’s different enough, Athala’s spirit won’t recognize it. At best, the resurrection will fail, and at worst, she could come back only to die as the spirit rejects the body.”
“So, we’ll need to not think about her? Her, the thing that has been our all-consuming goal this entire journey, while we’re only moments from her returning?”
“I know,” Elise said, and she paced back and forth a few steps. Isadon grumbled at her, and Elise threw her hands up. “I didn’t say we wouldn’t try! I just don’t know if it’s possible.” She stopped pacing, and shook her head. “Here and now, she’s all I can think about.”
Isadon said something, and Elise’s cheeks reddened. She pressed her lips into a line and nodded.
“You’re right. If I would march to Grunith and demand Athala’s return, this should be nothing. We have to do this.” She turned to Ermolt, and he could see the resolution in her eyes. He just wished he felt the same way. “Isadon says that this is the trial that’s required, just the same as everything else we’ve done, or swore to do.”
“Alright,” Ermolt said, his voice firm. He put a hand to Elise’s shoulder. “This should be no more impossible than facing the Champion was, and we succeeded in that.” His hand dropped away, returning to his side. “If this is what has to be done, this is what we must do.”
Elise nodded and turned back to Isadon.
Ermolt, instead, stared out over the pit, past the two of them. He wasn’t sure how he was going to separate his thoughts from Athala. But he’d make do. For he couldn’t risk her dying again, or her spirit refusing to return. Not after all this.
He swore he would bring his friend back. The Gods themselves couldn’t stop him.
“When do we start?” Ermolt asked, his throat tight.
The shadow’s hands raised, and Ermolt knew what the clacking sound meant before Elise translated.
“Now.”
Chapter Forty-Two
There was nothing formal they had to do to renounce their faiths, much to Elise’s confusion. Everywhere else, to pledge yourself to a God was an involved process, and there were many hoops to jump through depending on which Temple you wanted to follow. But Isadon simply let them verbally renounce Ydia and Dasis, then pledge their loyalty to him, and finally instructed them to prepare themselves.
Elise closed her eyes.
She tried to focus on anything other than Athala.
> It was difficult at first, like trying to fall asleep on purpose. The act of forcing her thoughts the way she wanted only made them linger on what she was trying to usher them away from.
Her first attempt was to think about Isadon, and what the worship of Him would mean. But that only came back to Athala, and how the wizard might be beholden to the God of Death.
Instead she tried to think of Merylle, and for a moment that worked more. She almost slipped when she thought if Isadon could return the dark-haired Overseer after He was done with Athala. Elise furrowed her brow and thought past that, instead, to the Overseer’s smirk and bravado, and how she had swept Elise off her feet. But that, too, eventually led back to Athala, as Elise started to think about how the wizard had teased her before Elise knew her own thoughts.
Elise even tried to think about her time as Conscript, knowing the rigid daily routines and endless hours of prayer would be a distraction, but the thought of her service to Ydia only reminded her of the God’s betrayal. Of Athala’s death.
Athala was her best friend, and had been tied up in everything Elise had done in recent times. When she thought of Cuertt, she remembered how much she wanted to avoid discussing the failed relationship when Athala found out about it. She thought of Nolte, but it caused her to remember the times that she had repeated his wisdom to Athala, guiding the wizard to grow as a person. When she thought of her life on the streets, she remembered being in a tavern in Khule, sharing stories of her struggles against the street gangs with Athala and Ermolt.
And when she thought of her father—
There was a moment, just a bare breath, where she realized she had never told Athala what happened to her father. But then her memories focused on him. Elise remembered the way his moustache would lift up to show his teeth when he smiled. She remembered how he taught her to make pancakes from scratch. Pancakes.
Elise struggled against the memory, but it came unbidden, forcing aside all else.
The day he was taken was like any other. They were cooking breakfast. Talking about enrolling Elise in school, and of the plans her mother had always wanted for her.
Then there were City Guards forcing their way through the door. Breakfast was scattered to the floor. There was the sound of a gauntleted fist hitting a skull. Her father grunted in pain—the last sound she ever heard from him. Then he was dragged out of the house with no further explanation. The last guard out of the house looked over his shoulder at her. His look of pity was fleeting, and he didn’t try to help her, even as she cried. Instead he closed the door, leaving her alone. Abandoned.
Elise focused on holding back her tears at that feeling of rejection. It wasn’t a struggle—she had no more tears left for this particular pain—but she still needed to focus on it. This was an old wound for her, but it was still unhealed beneath the scab. She never found out what he’d done.
After her time on the streets, Elise didn’t blame him. He had been a good man, raising her alone. If he had broken the law, he must have done it to survive, just as she had. It must have been bad for him to been shipped to Lublis, though.
Elise felt her frown grow deeper, and she realized it still bothered her that she didn’t know what happened. What became of him. Had he been executed? A victim of a prison riot, or of an overzealous guard’s anger? Or was he still there, locked in a stone box a thousand fen below a city where she had recently walked the streets?
Would Isadon know?
It wasn’t until she felt the God’s foreign touch on her mind that she remembered what was happening. She struggled for a moment to keep her thoughts on her father, to avoid affecting whatever Isadon was doing. But she found her mind consumed by the sensation as soon as the outside force began to pull. It felt like a physical tug within her skull, and Elise was momentarily alarmed.
Her eyes snapped open, and the touch was gone. At the same time, fatigue crashed down on her. She fell to her knees, her body weighed down by her own armor.
“It is done,” Isadon said. With two smooth, practiced motions, He pushed His sleeves up to His elbows. “I have all I need now.”
Elise nodded and willed her body to move. She looked to Ermolt. He didn’t seem as fatigued as she did, but he was a barbarian. Ermolt had proven time and again that his endurance was greater than hers, and that he could shrug off anything. He looked her way and a ghost of a smile crossed his lips.
Anticipation set in. Elise watched Isadon closely. The God lowered Himself to his knees and He reached down to the floor. He dusted off a section of the tiles in front of Himself and placed the bone—the Favor—in the middle of the cleared space. Then He sat up straight, closing His eyes and concentrating.
This was followed by an uncomfortable moment of silence.
Then He started.
Elise was stunned by the sudden eruption of energy out of the bone. In a flash, the empty space was filled with a radiant cylinder of pure energy. It was purple, and glowed as bright as a bonfire. Elise had to avert her eyes from the sudden light in such a dim Temple. As her eyes adjusted, she returned her attention to it. Isadon was leaning over a glowing shape, molding it with His bare hands. As He shaped it, squeezing it into a smaller shape, flickering motes of magic popped and scattered off it, bouncing across the floor like sparks of embers from a crackling fire.
She could only watch with awe as the glowing purple shape was compacted, smaller and smaller. It had started as tall as Ermolt, and three fen thick. But as Isadon made it smaller, working it into a human shape, it was approaching more believable dimensions. Elise squinted. The shape was crude and chunky, like an amateur’s carving of a person. Isadon’s hands ran up and down the limbs, shaping and molding them.
The glow took on a shape far too wide to be the wizard.
For a bare moment, Elise worried that the memories Isadon had reclaimed were tainted, and that He was creating Athala in Elise’s image. But the God’s hands passed over the body again and again, slimming it down and rubbing away the bulk. While it made her a bit uncomfortable to see a shape so like herself being altered like that, it was also a relief to see the limbs becoming slimmer. The curves of this form became more pronounced, and the shape approached that of the wizard’s physique.
As the body became smaller, fewer motes of magic scattered away. The glow became brighter, too, as if someone added logs to the fire. Isadon leaned forward, pushing His fingers into the center of the brightly glowing shape. It was as if He were altering and tweaking things beneath the skin. Things Elise couldn’t see. Elise’s stomach rolled as she thought about the things Ingmar had done to Athala’s insides during their stay in Auernheim.
She looked away from His hands, and instead concentrated on the God Himself. It was obvious that the work was taking its toll. The God was looking more frayed around the edges than He had before, and she thought she could see a spectral sheen of sweat standing out on His brow.
Elise closed her eyes a moment and prayed to Isadon. Prayed to not only give him the strength to continue, but for Him to do the job right.
When she opened her eyes again, the God seemed to be slightly steadied. He squinted His eyes and leaned closer to the glowing body. It grew brighter under His touch, intensifying from light purple to a near-white pinkish hue. Elise followed His gaze down and saw that he was shaping the surface of her body. It was too bright to see the results of His touch, but from where his hands were, and the movements of them, she could tell what he was doing. He was shaping her nose. Carving out her belly button. Carefully molding her fingernails. His hands hesitated for a moment before His fingers outlined the places on her belly where Ingmar had left scars.
Isadon closed his eyes and put His hands to the head of the glowing figure. From it he pulled strands of light. At first, they stood out perfectly straight, but the God wrinkled His nose in distaste. His hands shook with effort before the stands curled into Athala’s dark spirals. Isadon smiled with a nod. His hands passed over the body once more, carefully spending moments to even
out the spots that He saw as not right. But wherever He touched, the glow began to quiet down, reducing back from white-hot pink to a shimmering purple.
Elise could finally see. And she gasped. Ermolt grasped at her hand, his own surprised audible.
The shape was that of Athala in silhouette. It was like she was entombed in the purple magic of the abandoned God. Elise wanted to reach out and touch that which encased her, but something held her back.
Isadon struggled to His feet, and Elise almost moved forward to help Him. Ermolt’s hand on hers stopped her. The God was breathing heavily, and flickering shadow bled like smoke from His form. It seemed to be escaping from His right shoulder and left knee, and as He breathed, trails of it curled out of the side of His upper lip.
But He managed to stand tall again over the glowing shape. He raised His hands to the sky, looking up. His lips moved, but Elise heard no sound from them. What was He saying? An incantation, perhaps?
Beside her, Ermolt flinched, and he withdrew his hand to cover his ears.
What was he hearing? And why could Elise hear nothing?
Isadon thrust His hands down into the shape that would become Athala. A hot wind blasted from the form, whipping His robes around, and throwing up a cloud of dust from the floor.
Both Elise and Ermolt shied away, shielding their eyes from the blinding wind.
The wind was just like what had erupted from the pit when the Champion had been killed, and Elise desperately wished she could see what was happening.
She lowered her hands as quickly as she could, hoping for a bare glimpse.
It was Athala.
The blast of air from Isadon’s hands turned the glowing purple into dark skin. Full lips. Curly hair. Chewed fingernails.
Never in her life had Elise seen such a welcoming sight.
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