Blessed Monsters

by Emily A Duncan

  He didn’t know how he was supposed to break out of this. How he was supposed to find the fragments of his soul that he had bartered away.

  His respite did not last. Panic bore down on his chest, so fast and heavy that it took him a moment to realize it wasn’t his own. He filtered through the threads of magic he had flowing and realized it was one he hadn’t drawn on in some time.

  What were his Vultures doing?

  What had they done?

  They were closer than he would have guessed; he had traveled farther than he thought. He was very close to Komyazalov. His Vultures were in Komyazalov?

  Damn. He worked his way to his feet. He was covered with blood and surrounded by corpses. He closed his eyes as dizziness threatened to overtake him. None of these people deserved this fate.

  He needed to move, to stop his Vultures before they died on the walls of Komyazalov. He didn’t know who was behind this—Rozá must have finally worked up the courage to fight against him. He’d kept his thread of power over them closed even as it had woken up alongside him. There was only so much he could focus on and Chyrnog was a more important issue.

  Malachiasz reached for the threads that bound him to his Vultures. He’d told Serefin he needed to be in Tranavia to fix the fraying threads, and that was mostly true. In the Salt Mines his power over them would be at its highest, but desperation could force his hand to do great things. He threw his power into the threads and felt the trembles of those who had taken advantage of his absence.

  He had to stop them. His Vultures were powerful, but this … whatever they were up against, was madness. But he was so tired. He wanted to sleep, only for a few minutes. Just a few. He lowered himself to the blood-slick floor of the hut and knew only darkness.

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  Nadya had to close her eyes against the crushing wave of despair that swept over her as she stood before the fallen god. The feeling of inevitability, of being so so small and utterly helpless. She took in a deep breath, Serefin close and Żywia at her side.

  Żywia doubled over, holding her head. “Oh,” she gasped. “Malachiasz is angry.”

  Nadya swallowed her heart down from where it leapt into her throat. She had other things to worry about.

  He had the look of a dragon, Cvejtko. Well, Nadya considered, a dragon with three heads: a lion, a bear, and a wolf. He was horrifying to behold, but in a different way than the other fallen gods. Her brain glanced away from true comprehension, but it wanted so badly to rationalize. A shivering of horror—a thousand eyes—then gone. A shiver of razor teeth and screaming, gaping mouths, then gone. She staggered under the weight of knowing.

  Żywia shook off whatever Malachiasz was doing and slammed into the god, all teeth and claws and wild black hair.

  What’s the plan here? Nadya asked. How did the Vultures convince you to come here?

  “Convince me?” Cvjetko sounded like three voices speaking at once. It was profoundly unsettling and immediately gave Nadya a headache. “Convince me? Hardly. All I had to do was whisper, to nudge, to convince these beasts this was what they desired.”

  Serefin cast her a concerned glance before he very gently put his hands on her shoulders and pressed her to the ground. He crouched in front of her. Here, in the shadows of a burning building, they were momentarily safe.

  Serefin opened his mouth but Nadya put her hand over his lips. His expression wearied as she shushed him absently.

  “Let me talk to him,” she whispered.

  “You don’t have much time,” Serefin said, staying with her. She almost told him to go. The Vultures who weren’t trying to kill him would need his help. But he was solid and strong and his hands on her shoulders were a grounding weight she would need. She wanted him there.

  Why come here? she asked. What could we possibly have that’s of use to someone like you?

  “Who are you, little bird?” One of Cvjetko’s heads began searching for her.

  She didn’t even blink. He wasn’t the first god who had used the nickname for her, he wouldn’t be the last.

  Daughter of darkness, daughter of death, she replied, suddenly realizing why the god was there. It was deceptively simple. You want to free Nyrokosha. It explained why the goddess had stirred, sensing freedom at hand. If Nadya wouldn’t free her, someone else would.

  “You are clever! How novel! You smell different than the others, why is that?”

  How condescending.

  She wasn’t willing to set the goddess free. Not when they already had to stop Chyrnog. They couldn’t survive both. Why was this fallen god concerned with the fate of an old god when the others weren’t? Old alliances coming out to play?

  She got to her feet. She needed to stop Cvjetko before he freed Nyrokosha. Serefin scrambled after her.

  “What are you planning?”

  “To kill a god,” she said flatly.

  “But—”

  “Use a god to kill a god.” Nadya plunged herself fully into the dark water.

  SEREFIN MELESKI

  Serefin stumbled back as Nadya ripped away some shield over her power. She was practically incandescent with magic. Her eyes, already dark, went shadowy, and her skin threaded with power like molten iron.

  Żaneta thudded to the ground next to him, eyeing the cleric as she spat out blood. Nadya held out a hand, a bundle of discarded spears coming to hover next to her.

  “That girl almost won the Rawalyk,” Żaneta observed blandly. “I suppose she would have made a visually impressive queen.”

  “Żaneta, I’ve missed you,” Serefin replied.

  “Ah, my idiot prince, I have not been conscious enough to miss you. Do we help?”

  Cvjetko slammed a clawed paw down where Nadya was standing as she deftly stepped away, flicking her fingers and slamming a spear up into the hinge of his shoulder. The bear head roared. Serefin couldn’t move past the feeling of utter helplessness. This would crush them all.

  “I think we’re more likely to get in her way.” He saw Katya nearing them and remembered her necklace of teeth. “Shift back,” he said, voice low.

  Żaneta cast him a sidelong glance. “What?”

  “The tsarevna is a Vulture hunter.”

  Her eyes widened. Her claws were gone in the next instant, onyx eyes clearing to brown. Her teeth looked a little sharper than normal, but that could be explained away. She was Żaneta again, and though Katya would certainly know how a Tranavian got into her capital, Serefin hoped she would be distracted enough to let Żaneta go without notice.

  The Vultures had been stopped by whatever Malachiasz had done, but this god, oh, this god was more than any of them were able to stop.

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  It was too much. It didn’t matter that Nadya was a creature of strange divinity, that she harbored power stolen from so many sources. Malachiasz, Marzenya, Zvezdan, who else would she take from before she finally had enough?

  I suppose I could steal from this one, she considered, the thought strangely idle as she narrowly avoided the sharp teeth of the wolf’s jaws. Claws raked close to her flesh, each one large enough to tear her into pieces on its own.

  She had walked the limits of her capabilities before. She could only press so far until she became no more than charred bones. She was still mortal.

  “You could … not be, you know.” So many voices were speaking up and she had no idea who this was.

  She shoved a spear into Cvjetko’s chest, rolling out of the way as a foot slammed down. Too close. She wasn’t fast enough.

  “It would be so easy to take and take until you left this behind. Until there was nothing left. You were made to be one of us. All you have to do is keep going. Take his power. See what you become.”

  Nadya had three spears left and there was so much blood pouring down Cvjetko’s strange body. She struck again; another blow landed.

  He batted her away like a gnat and she slammed into a building hard enough that something cracked, all the wind knocked out of her. S
he lay on the ground, frantic heartbeats passing where there was no air in her lungs. A beat, another, another.

  “Pathetic. You could be so much more.”

  A gasping breath. She struggled to her feet, flinging out her power and finding the last two spears. Two more.

  Cvjetko slammed her into the wall again. She was going to die. All that power and it would never be enough.

  “All you have to do is reach a little further…”

  She didn’t want to die like this. She gave in, pressing harder—

  And grasped both spears with her power, slamming them up into the jaws of the lion and the bear. Blood rained down from the beast and she could feel the magic escaping the god as he crumpled inward, a supernova, a dead star. She could feed on it, let it carry her out of this pain.

  All she had to do was reach.

  SEREFIN MELESKI

  As the death of a god yanked all the air away from the night, Serefin ran to pull a shivering Nadya away from the wreckage. Blood dripped from her mouth. Her eyes opened, pure white, her skin so hot he thought it was going to burn him.

  Then she went limp.

  Everything was quiet, eerie. Serefin’s arms trembled as he held Nadya, because he didn’t think they were going to make it. Because he was trying his very hardest to not take in the absolute devastation around them.

  Żywia raked her hair back with a weary hand and turned toward where Serefin stood across the road. Or what was left of the road.

  She stopped, her gaze meeting Serefin’s, and his stomach dropped. Her eyes weren’t seeing him, her expression lightly puzzled. The front of her shirt canted out in the strangest way, and Serefin realized the tip of a blade protruded from her chest.

  “Wait,” he said. He would have dropped Nadya if she hadn’t woken up struggling. He set her on her feet, and she gasped.

  “No!” She ran toward the Vulture girl as she fell.

  The tsarevna stood behind her, face impassive. Serefin recognized the pale blade in her hands with intimate familiarity. He had forced it through his brother’s chest.

  Serefin’s hand absently patted for the metal disc and nearly dropped it when his fingers burned. Malachiasz was here.

  And Katya had killed his right hand.

  34

  MALACHIASZ CZECHOWICZ

  He takes and he takes and I can feel myself unraveling and I’m so hungry, but the power he gives in return is worth the hunger. The ability to bypass every law of magic made by the gods is worth every piece of flesh he takes.

  —Passage from the journal entry of an anonymous worshipper of Chyrnog

  When Żywia’s thread snapped, a hundred thousand memories threatened to bury Malachiasz underneath their weight.

  A scared young girl, crying, curled up next to him in the Salt Mines. Her name had been ripped from her, and when they went to give it back, it was gone. He had his name, but she couldn’t find hers.

  “Am I going to be a monster forever?” she’d whispered.

  “No,” he’d said while wrapping his shredded knee, trying to decide what wound to deal with after. “Choose your own name. Keep it for yourself and they can never take it away.”

  The girl who had stayed with him when the order deemed him useless.

  The only one he’d trusted when he realized he was going to take down Łucja. That he was going to take the mantle and change everything.

  She hadn’t tried to convince him not to. She’d tilted her head, her black curls falling to one side as she regarded him with her dark blue eyes, before shrugging. “It’s your head she’ll take, not mine.”

  The Vultures liked to tease—torment them—because in another life they could have been mistaken for siblings, and for Malachiasz, that’s what Żywia was.

  What did Malachiasz have left?

  Nothing and nothing and nothing.

  He slammed into the wreckage, into the road where her body fell, knocking someone away. She was still breathing, shallow, pained, almost gone.

  He knew the taste of power that seeped from the wound in her back and he was going to burn down this world until every relic that could do this to his Vultures was destroyed.

  “Żyw,” he whispered, barely managing to pull himself back enough to talk. He cradled her head, stroking the bloody hair away from her face.

  Her eyes opened at the sound of his voice, hazy and confused. “Malachiasz? Fuck. You’re a little late.”

  He touched her cheek where something wet had splashed. Oh, it was him, he was crying. Everything he’d ever had was being taken, piece by piece.

  Someone reached out across from him, and he lashed out. He barely had control, and no one was going to touch Żywia.

  Undeterred, a small hand, the skin stained and claws curling from the nail beds, lightly touched the bloodstained spot on Żywia’s chest. Malachiasz frowned, looking up, and his world was shattered and remade in the same painful breath.

  She was dead. He knew what he’d felt.

  Her pale hair was stained to rust, and there was mud and more blood smeared across her face. He’d thought he would never see those warm brown eyes again. This couldn’t be happening. This was Chyrnog. All of this was Chyrnog and he would wake up and be in that damned forest. None of this was real.

  Żywia’s breaths grew more labored. He couldn’t lose her, not her too.

  “Malachiasz,” Nadya said. “I don’t know if you can hear me … if you’re you. Malachiasz, how do you kill a Vulture, truly?”

  He couldn’t tell Nadya that. Nadya was a cleric. The enemy.

  “Cut off their head,” he said, so quietly that she probably wouldn’t hear him.

  He heard a thoughtful sound, felt magic in the small space between them. Like a fire in the heart of a blizzard. An ocean of roiling, churning, dark water. Narrowing down, focusing to a singular point, one open wound.

  Żywia stopped breathing.

  “Wait,” he said, strangled, gathering her in his arms. “Wait, Żyw—”

  “Let her go.” Not aloud. Through the bond of magic created when she’d stolen his power. “I make no promises. But…”

  He met Nadya’s gaze. He couldn’t find his way out of the chaos.

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  He was alive. He’d almost ripped out Nadya’s throat before and now the only friend Malachiasz had ever had for so long was probably gone and his eyes were dark and so much of him swirled with chaos. If he lashed out again, she didn’t know that she could fight it.

  He’d killed her goddess.

  But she’d killed a god, too.

  And she didn’t know what the feeling in her chest was. She thought her heart was going to beat so fast it might explode. Nadya couldn’t tell if he recognized her. Recognized his name. If he had regressed so far back, there was no saving him.

  Chyrnog had him. If she had any doubts, they were gone with a glance. Shivering chaos he could not control, entropic decay picking at his edges in the strangest way. It wasn’t there when you looked straight at him, but Nadya could see it out the corner of her eye. There was a strange, jittery twitch to him. Eyes and eyes and mouths at his skin. His lower lip was shredded from his too-sharp teeth.

  He tensed, prepared to strike, and froze. A spear point rested at the base of her neck. They were surrounded. Ever so slowly, his eyes began to clear, until they were pale blue, and swimming with tears.

  “Dozleyena, Malachiasz,” she whispered.

  “Nadya.” There was so much in his voice that she did not understand. What had happened to him?

  She had to fight to keep her hands still. She wanted to touch him. He was so close, and it had been so long, and she was so angry with him, but he was alive, and he was here and—

  He was in Komyazalov.

  They were going to die.

  His gaze flicked over her shoulder, eyes narrowing.

  “Well.” Nadya didn’t know that voice. An odd, puzzled expression flitted across Malachiasz’s face. “No one informed me our kovoishka was in t
he city.”

  Nadya slowly leaned back on her heels, the spear point giving just enough to not impale her. Malachiasz reached toward her, fingers brushing her jaw. He winced as one of the spear points made its home in his flesh.

  The spot he’d touched was on fire. She didn’t move. Katya stood nearby, disappointment on her face.

  “I can’t protect you when it comes to him,” the tsarevna had warned her.

  She hadn’t thought it would really be an issue, frankly.

  “Someone knows what happened here.” The Matriarch. Magdalena. It had to be. “Though some of it is fairly obvious. Dozleyena, Vashny Koroshvik.”

  Serefin was still here. Shit.

  “But the rest, I’m not sure about.” Magdalena moved closer, tipping the blade of a sword under Malachiasz’s chin. “I have heard much of you, Chelvyanik Sterevyani.”

  Nadya expected the curtain of the Black Vulture to fall over Malachiasz’s expression, but it remained broken and vulnerable.

  Magdalena eyed him before turning her attention to Nadya. “And what are you, truly? The cleric to save us, they all said, but I knew the truth. Your mother burned like the witch she was, and my only regret was I didn’t kill her when we were children.”

  Wait.

  What?

  Malachiasz inched his hand forward until it was covering hers, fingers twining into the spaces. She couldn’t—she didn’t—this wasn’t—

  Nadya swallowed hard. For an instant, she regretted turning away from the power Cvjetko had left for her to take. She regretted clinging to her mortality. She didn’t want to hear about the mother she had never known.

  She bowed her head, the spear point digging into her skin. Gods, wouldn’t it be easy. Take out the damned cleric and the Black Vulture in one fell swoop. Nadya held back the tears threatening to overtake her. She clutched Malachiasz’s hand.

  Magdalena made a disgusted sound. She started to bark out an order, but someone cleared their throat.