Ruthless Gods

by Emily A Duncan

  The problem was, Serefin wasn’t really the one walking. Yet still he moved through the forest—it, thankfully, looked like a perfectly average forest, but who knew how long that would last.

  Serefin didn’t have control. The gods had him completely.

  “No,” he said into the silence, trying to force his legs to stop, trying to regain some kind of control. “No. I won’t let you do this.”

  There was a long silence. The forest was eerily quiet.

  “Fine. Work for your salvation.”

  There was a strange buzzing in the back of his head, the feeling of something wrong, which was ridiculous because of course something was wrong, everything was wrong. This was the world thrown from its gentle and precarious balance. This was something changing so astronomically that even as it brushed against Serefin, he felt it. Even though it did not touch him completely.

  Even though he was spared.

  It was terrible, whatever it was. None of them should have come to this place.

  The forest spat out Kacper and the tsarevna. Kacper landed heavily at Serefin’s feet, blood dripping from his nose, covering his hands.

  Serefin wanted to collapse with relief. “Kacper,” he breathed, dropping to his knees in front of him.

  Kacper looked dazed, staring through Serefin. He blinked, his dark eyes clearing only so slightly. “Serefin?”

  Serefin put his hands on either side of Kacper’s face, tracing the shell of his ears, index finger moving to skim over a cut that ran down his cheek. He almost sobbed. What had happened to him?

  Did he even want to know?

  “We have to get out of here, Serefin,” Kacper said, hands grasping for him, fingers catching in his shirt and pulling him closer. “This place is evil. We have to get out. I lost…” He shook his head slowly. “I can’t remember. I can’t remember what I lost, but it feels important and it’s gone and I don’t even know what it was.”

  Serefin stared at Kacper, eyes wide. Or, he tried to. His one eye was so far in a different reality that it wasn’t even registering Kacper in front of him. But he still held on to the other. He hadn’t lost his right eye.

  “Can’t you feel it?” Kacper asked desperately.

  Serefin nodded, but he had no idea what it had been. Kacper choked on a sob and Serefin pulled him closer, burying his face against his neck. Kacper’s shuddering breaths shook him as he clutched at Serefin.

  “I’m not finished here,” Serefin murmured against Kacper’s neck. He kissed it. “There’s one more thing I have to do.” He let go of Kacper to reach for his spell book, looking up at Katya where she stood dazed. There was a long trio of cuts down her cheek, and her right leg was covered with blood. “Can you find Ostyia? Gods, the Akolans, too, they don’t deserve to be left behind. Here, I have a spell so we don’t lose track of each other.” He tore it out of his spell book and held it out for Kacper.

  Kacper stared at his hand.

  “What are you doing? It’s simple, I promise.”

  “Serefin…”

  Something in Kacper’s voice made Serefin go cold. He couldn’t put a name to it, the blind panic mixed with blank confusion.

  “What am I supposed to do with that?” Kacper asked carefully, delicately, like he was trying not to offend Serefin but also like he knew that he should know exactly what to do.

  “What do you mean? You know what to do.”

  But Kacper was shaking his head slowly. He skittered back from Serefin and did not take the page. “I-I know where the temple is. I’ll find the others and meet you there.”

  “Kacper?”

  Kacper had already gotten to his feet and disappeared into the trees. Serefin slowly crumpled the piece of paper in his fist, dread making a home in his chest.

  What happened?

  He met Katya’s eyes. She was holding a long dagger of bone in her hands.

  “I think,” she said quietly, “we’re all going to die here.”

  Serefin wheezed out a laugh.

  She flipped the blade in her hand and held it out to Serefin, hilt-first. “Can you kill him? Whatever that was, there’s more to come.”

  Serefin took the voryen. The hilt warmed in his hands. He could feel the soft thrum of power within the bone.

  They had all been waiting with their knives at one another’s backs. It was time to plunge the dagger home.

  41

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  A bone broken under the weight of a thousand roiling worms, desperate for purchase, frantic for light. To hunger, to devour, to consume.

  —The Volokhtaznikon

  Nadya was not meant to be here. Creature of magic that she was, she was not meant to walk this realm. She was supposed to remain firmly in the mortal world; oblivion was not supposed to be a lasting state. But she had to stop Malachiasz.

  Here was the next step in his grand plan turned into reality. The bones in his hair she’d chosen not to think about were the magic she’d felt the whole time. Relics he had stolen from her people because he had known it would take a little more magic to get to the place he wanted.

  He had lied again. And again she had believed him because she had so truly wanted to believe that what he had done had not fully worked; that he would not be able to put the chaos he desired into motion. That he had become chaos.

  It was all a lie. He had known, the whole time, what he needed to do, where he needed to be.

  He hadn’t wanted to help. He’d known that this was exactly where he could get to the gods he wanted to destroy. She had been strung along again.

  Betrayal serves itself.

  She was a fool. Here, perhaps, was the curse laid upon them by that creature in the clearing. Or it was just their thousands of lies catching up with them.

  She had known not to trust him, but she had accepted his lies all the same. But what had she wrenched from him in return?

  Maybe he would never forgive her. Maybe she didn’t deserve to be forgiven. Maybe this was the line that neither of them would be able to cross. It had to come eventually.

  This was never meant to last.

  Where she was now was an overlay on the world Nadya knew, this world of gods and monsters. She pulled herself out of the pool and found everything slightly askew. The stone temple had become carved of bone. The flowers were crumpled black stains on the ground, crawling with maggots. When she took the stairs back up, the wooden church was made of polished marble and the stairs ascended up into the mountains.

  It was a sick bit of irony, a cruel turn of the knife in her heart. She didn’t need to count the stairs that twisted up into the mountains, she knew.

  Seven thousand.

  Seven thousand stairs to take her to where the boy she loved was doing his best to destroy the gods she had dedicated her life to. Like the seven thousand stairs that led from the monastery she used to call home down to the base of the mountain.

  She pulled her voryen from its sheath and started up.

  If she had known how this would end, would she still have gone through with it? She didn’t know the answer to that question. Whatever they had between them must end here.

  They had betrayed one another.

  And the entire world would suffer for it.

  But Marzenya had lied to her as well, hadn’t trusted her. Everyone had lied to Nadya.

  The ground shook treacherously. Nadya had lived her whole life in the mountains and she knew how terrible, how fast an avalanche could come. She paused in her ascension, waiting to see if this was where she would meet her end or if she had a little time.

  A few errant chunks of snow skittered across the steps in front of her.

  But the tremors continued. Each one gave her pause, each one made her wonder if this was it. Surely this wasn’t Malachiasz’s doing. He didn’t work in massive, broad strokes of power, that wasn’t—

  Well, that wasn’t Malachiasz, but she didn’t know how this god of chaos given form would act.

  The tremors couldn’t stop her.
She had run up those seven thousand steps at the monastery before. She could do it again if she had to.

  Gone were her doubts that he could not do this; that he had underestimated his own capabilities and could not see this destruction through. She didn’t know how she would stop this, how she could stop this. She did not have the power of a god. She was only a girl with some magic and a blade.

  But a girl he consistently underestimated.

  She kept climbing, climbing, climbing as the mountain shuddered around her, as the world started to fracture. Something else had woken up. Hers was not the only cataclysm to have started here, and the thought terrified her.

  Serefin had failed. A part of her always knew he would. And maybe she could have stopped him, or maybe that would have further doomed the world.

  But Serefin was the one whom Nadya underestimated. Serefin, the drunkard, the reluctant king who ran before trying to fix his mess of a kingdom. He had been caught in the web of a god she had set free and she had been too caught up in her own miseries to realize that maybe maybe she should have helped him first.

  It was too late. Thunderous cracks sounded around her; something was crumbling within this mountain. Something unforgiving and furious had been unleashed. The consequences of her actions, of Malachiasz’s, of Serefin’s, all one glorious nightmare. What would she find when she reached the top? How would she get back to her own realm of existence?

  Would Malachiasz come with her? Or was this where he existed forever, now? Did she even want him to return with her?

  Nadya felt strange. She did not belong here. Or maybe she had changed something within herself and those consequences were still to come.

  Her hand no longer hurt. The scar had blackened her hand, like she had dipped it in ink. Her fingernails were sharp—not unlike Malachiasz’s iron claws, they were unnatural in their sharpness. But the darkness had stopped seeping out over her. It trailed a little up her forearm before it disappeared and came to a halt.

  “You fucked up.”

  Nadya froze. There was a figure sitting on the stairs. Human-sized, but even sitting Nadya could tell they were very tall. Their long hair was void-like, with stars twinkling in the depths, and their voice sounded impossibly sad. It made Nadya want to lie down and give up right then and there.

  Nadya closed her left hand into a fist. The figure looked up at her through their hair—their eyes were similar voids.

  “They wanted you to be perfect. You weren’t.” The figure shrugged. “Now you have a war of magic raging inside of you. It must hurt.”

  Nadya shook her head. “Not too badly.”

  “They won’t let you go, though.” The figure cocked their head. “That’s the odd thing.” They closed their eyes, smiling slightly. “That’s what happens when your magic comes from the same place as mine, I suppose. They locked me up, and those like me, you know. They don’t like when magic doesn’t fit their immutable rules.”

  A chunk of ice tumbled past and when Nadya went to move around the figure—there was no time—they put a hand out to stop her.

  “My name is Ljubica,” they said. “You and I will be seeing a lot of each other in the future. Someone has to answer your questions, no? Hold fast to your mortality, little cleric—yes, still a cleric after all this, but perhaps bound to a different sort of god—because it’s the one thing you do not want to lose.”

  They disappeared into smoke. Nadya frowned. She clutched her hand to her chest, urgency building inside her. She had to keep moving. The world was shifting underneath her feet, its very fabric altering.

  At the top of the stairs was simply more mountain, and so Nadya trudged through the snow as the ground pitched treacherously, the sky a sickly ominous green.

  There were bloody footprints in the snow, the feet bare. Nadya followed them reluctantly, praying she wasn’t too late. She would know, wouldn’t she? She could feel whispers in the air, the blood she was drenched in drying stiff and uncomfortable against her clothes. Little bits and pieces of her were breaking away with every step.

  Through the snow, with the mountain falling down around her, Nadya fell into a blizzard. The heart of a storm, of a war raging around her that she was still too human to see.

  Nadya shoved her fingers against the palm of her corrupted hand. Ice froze her eyelashes. There was a well of power within her, eldritch, dark, mad. Divine. She still didn’t know what that meant, but she was desperate, and she would use it. She dipped into the swirling vortex of power that tasted of poison and copper—copper and ashes—and swept itself over her bones until her blood was on fire. She held out her hand—

  —the blizzard froze around her.

  And, once more, there were the bloody footprints in the snow. Not much farther to go; not much farther to fall.

  Maybe it wasn’t about where it came from, or what this meant. She had been lied to for so long, and maybe all she had was herself and this power. Maybe that was all she needed. No more trusting beautiful Tranavian boys with tortured smiles, no more listening to a goddess who gave so very little in return for such ardent devotion.

  The snow began falling slower and the footprints were less faint. There was so much blood left behind in the snow, heavy drops of it in a trail to a scene that Nadya wanted to flee from.

  Nadya’s mind could not wrap itself around what Malachiasz had become. Chaos was a fitting mold for the erratic, anxious boy. It was as though all the shifts from before were amplified tenfold. He was an ever-changing horror—yet still so unlike the horrors he faced, static in their monstrosity.

  He wasn’t facing down the whole divine empire. They didn’t deem him important enough. He was a nuisance. A mortal who had stepped too far and needed to be dealt with. But Nadya knew the god before him.

  Death and magic and winter.

  “Child of death, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.”

  Nadya was too far away. They seemed so close, but each step she took only pushed them farther away. She couldn’t stop him if she couldn’t reason with him.

  But her heart knew they were past reason. Past sheer brute force. She didn’t understand why they were so out of reach, why she couldn’t touch the hem of Malachiasz’s shredded tunic.

  No one looked upon the faces of the gods and lived. No one—full stop. Nadya had thought that her dreams of many-jointed monsters with rows and rows of teeth would be as far as she ever reached, condemned to the subconscious wanderings of a tormented experience. But this was real. She had tasted divinity and oblivion and survived. She was a cleric of the divine who was born of darkness.

  And if she didn’t stop Malachiasz, there would be no defense against what Serefin had set into motion. Her gods were all they had left against those Serefin had woken.

  Magic churned around her in a storm until suddenly she broke through whatever had caught her in its loop—suddenly allowed—and her fingers grasped Malachiasz’s arm—

  —only to pass through air, his arm gone.

  —then there were too many limbs because he was ever-changing.

  There was nothing of the Vulture boy from Tranavia to cling to. Gone was the renegade blood mage, the advisor to kings, the anxious, ridiculous soul she had tried desperately to save.

  “There is no reasoning with chaos,” Marzenya said from behind Nadya.

  Nadya didn’t turn, she didn’t need to. The eight fathomless eyes. The skin translucent pale. The ribs of teeth and fingers painted with death.

  Her gods were glorified monsters. That was no longer the question. She had moved past that conundrum and on to a new one that she still had no answer for.

  Did they care, at all, for those such as her? Or was she only another pawn in their divine madness?

  “Chaos is inevitable. It is a storm that passes eternally through the world. And we have not had chaos in our number in a long, long time.”

  The chill of death was at her shoulder, Marzenya’s fingertips hovering at her skin, bruises blooming underneath the inch of s
pace the goddess’s fingers left even as they did not truly touch her.

  “What a sad creature he is, but strong.”

  “You knew,” Nadya whispered, horrified. “You knew he would do this.”

  “Of course I knew.”

  Nadya tried to reach for him but the snarling monster snapped at her, blood pouring from his mouth of jagged, iron nails. Her tears froze on her cheeks, blood dripped from her nose.

  “So this was your plan? To bring me here, to use him, to turn the gods away so that … what?”

  “The era of heretic magic is over,” Marzenya hissed. “The time of the abomination has ended. Sacrifices must be made to reach an ending that speaks of truth.”

  Malachiasz fell to one knee. His spine cracked out from his skin. Nadya slammed a hand over her mouth to keep in a sob. Marzenya’s fingers clutched the back of her head, forcing her to watch. Blood dripped underneath each spot the goddess touched on her head. But she could no longer look away as his bones cracked and bent, re-formed only to shatter. As blood fell from his eyes and his eyes and his eyes and there were too many, so many, and it hurt to look, it hurt to see.

  She loved him. Even now, even here, even when he had forged the last pieces of his monstrous plan into place with hatred in his heart for her. His betrayal for her betrayal.

  He would die here. He had the power of the gods, the knowledge to form it into being, but, oh, he was so young—a child—and they knew how to twist his power of chaos against him. They’d had gods of chaos before and every single one burned out as they would burn Malachiasz out.

  He wouldn’t survive.

  “You have been so good, so useful to us,” Marzenya whispered. “I love you, my daughter.” She brushed a finger over Nadya’s cheek, still holding the back of her head. Nadya flinched, her skin parting beneath her goddess’s caress.

  Nadya turned her face into Marzenya’s touch. “And I love you,” she whispered, dropping her corrupted hand down from where it rested close to her chest, palm out to Malachiasz.

  Marzenya’s hand slid down from her head to her back. It would take so little, one errant brush of her deathly cold fingers, for Nadya to die. Her usefulness at an end because for all that she had done, she still asked too many questions. She still doubted too much. She had still fallen in love with a monster.