“This is not your sacrifice to make.”
A great groaning crashed around them, a hole opening in the sky. Darkness where there had once been a horizon. Serefin swallowed hard.“What’s your plan?”
“Nadya,” Malachiasz interjected.
Parijahan put a hand on his arm. He relaxed ever so slightly, but still looked ready to argue.
“I need you to cast all that wild, chaotic power you have,” she said, cupping his cheek with her hand. “I need you to be alive. It won’t work if you’re the one he takes. He’s already had you. You and he are the same.”
Malachiasz flinched.
“Serefin, the stars?”
He frowned, plucked one out of the air around him, and held it out to her.
“Magic, condensed,” she said softly. “Folded again and again. Weave it into a prison, Serefin.”
He nodded, curling his fingers around the light.
Nadya took Parijahan’s hand. “I do not want to ask this of you,” she said, her voice—voices?—trembling.
Parijahan smiled. “You didn’t think I would let you face this alone, did you?”
53
MALACHIASZ CZECHOWICZ
There were four, there were always four. There always needed to be four to bind the horrors into the earth and contain them for another cycle. The songs, each playing their careful part. Tamarkin and Shishova and Milekhin and Greshneva. They died, but they died martyrs, and they died to reset the cycle.
—Fragments from a personal journal, author unknown
Nadya went to Malachiasz, yanking him down to kiss him hard.
There was a storm churning before them, ripping pieces of the world away. Every second it grew a little stronger. Chyrnog grew a little stronger.
“One last fight, my love. Together, this time,” she whispered.
He pressed his forehead against hers. “I have made so many mistakes, and I am sorry for it.”
She pulled back, laughing. “Are you only saying that because Pelageya said you have to apologize before you can do big magic?”
He lifted his eyebrows. He wanted to know that doorway spell so badly.
“No remorse! Terrible to the end! The apology has to count and you’re not sorry.” She grinned up at him. This would be the last time he ever got to see her smile. See the freckles that dusted her skin and the way she scrunched her nose up.
He kissed the bridge of her nose. “You’re certain of this?” He wanted there to be another way. Some way that didn’t mean her stepping into Chyrnog’s jaws.
“I have the two most powerful mages in Tranavia looking out for me,” Nadya replied. “I’m not certain of anything, but I have to. It has to be me.” She tugged out of his arms. She hesitated, then darted over to Serefin, kissing his cheek.
“You’re insufferable,” she said.
“Deluded menace,” he replied.
Malachiasz turned to Parijahan, who tilted her head.
“I don’t want you to do this, either, for the record,” he said.
She smiled sadly at him, taking his hands. “I’m glad you crashed into Rashid in that alleyway, Malachiasz Czechowicz. I’m glad to know you.”
“Few people would say that!” He kissed her forehead.
Nadya returned, taking Parijahan’s hand, and they walked into the storm together.
Serefin let out a long breath. Malachiasz immediately got to work. He took his spell book from his waist, tossing it to the ground. It wouldn’t do him any good, but blood would. Blood had power. It always came back to blood magic, even with blood magic as they knew it gone.
“I can see you forming a spell and you need to tell me what you’re planning. I can’t read your mind and you need my help,” Serefin said.
There needed to be four. Four directions, four corners of the earth, four corners of a cell. It made sense, but he didn’t think the pendant would work.
“The pendant has Velyos’ symbol on it, it’s useless.”
“Velyos says that’s rude,” Serefin told him primly.
Malachiasz stared at Serefin for a long moment before shaking his head. He didn’t watch as Nadya walked into entropy. He couldn’t.
He yanked his blade from his belt and began to cut lines in the ground at each corner of his spell book.
“You are an enigma,” Serefin said.
“How’s that giant spider doing?”
Serefin glanced over his shoulder. “Still standing but she doesn’t look good. Hey, what was with Nadya’s spider eyes? Those were horrifying.”
“We should have had the girls bleed on these,” Malachiasz murmured. He frowned, thinking. No, it would be fine. He could work around that. Hopefully Parijahan would keep the entropy from devouring her and Nadya completely.
He tensed, pain stabbing through him. A raw hunger scraping at his insides. He doubled over.
“Malachiasz?” Serefin said, alarmed.
He’d thought he was free, that Nadya had severed the ties, but Chyrnog had dug too deep. He had molded himself too fully to Malachiasz. He would never escape. They could bind him to the earth, and Chyrnog would still have his hooks deep within him.
He held out a hand. “Don’t come closer,” he said through clenched teeth.
He had to get through this first. This first. Then he could throw himself off the ravine and into the boneyard and spare everyone a fate worse than death.
Well, they would all probably be dead anyway.
He straightened, fighting through the pain, the hunger. No voice from Chyrnog, but the need remained. To consume, to devour, to destroy.
He cut his forearm, bleeding into the tracks he’d dug. The north and the south. He gestured for Serefin to do east and west. His brother frowned but rolled up his sleeve—there were cuts on his forearms already. What had he been doing?
Serefin scowled. “Are you not going to tell me?” He sounded wounded and there was no time for that.
“We can’t trap him in a vessel that’s been used. We’re going to use my spell book.”
Serefin blinked. “That will destroy it.”
Malachiasz closed his eyes. Years of spell work. Of sketches. He had sketches of Żywia in there and she was gone forever. He’d had that damn book since he was sixteen years old. It was a compendium of the past three years of his life. The first sketches he had ever drawn of Nadya were in there. It was all of his research, all of his collected knowledge. Everything that was him was in that book and it would be gone.
“It’s useless to me anyway,” Malachiasz said, his voice thick.
Serefin hesitated, then swiftly cut his forearm, bleeding on the other two points.
“Weave a prison,” he murmured, then stars and moths burst out in a cloud around him.
Malachiasz looked up at the storm before them. He watched as it sucked in a massive god that drew too near it. The god corroded into dust before them. The darkness edged toward the armies and Malachiasz dropped his eyes as soldiers were torn into pieces.
Malachiasz sat down before the book. After a moment, he felt Serefin sit down next to him.
“Blood and bone, we’re going to die in a field outside Komyazalov,” Serefin muttered.
Malachiasz couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re going to have to haunt a field outside Komyazalov.”
“I wanted to haunt an alehouse. What is wrong with these people?”
“About as much as is wrong with us.”
Serefin laughed softly. “Can I be bleedingly sentimental for a second?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
Serefin glanced at him before his gaze went back to the storm, dark and heavy and churning. The lightning that cracked within it was strangely distant, barely putting off light. Parijahan and Nadya could no longer be seen.
“I’m … I’m glad we had a chance to figure out this whole thing. I could’ve done better in the little brother area, but I suppose you’ll do.”
“Serefin, I hate you.”
“You don’t.”
>
He supposed he didn’t.
Malachiasz reached for the thread of magic binding him to Nadya. It was so much weaker, shorn and remade, but she was on the other side. She was and she wasn’t, and she was so brilliant, the sheer raw power within her more than Malachiasz could have fathomed. The girl in the snow had power, but that girl and this one were so very different. The darkness Nadya harbored that she no longer shied away from made her more terrifying than any mage he had ever known.
He waited. He waited for her signal. He waited for her to be consumed, and for Chyrnog to realize his mistake.
54
NADEZHDA LAPTEVA
It’s all spiders. It’s all spiders. It’s all spiders. There is darkness there are spiders there is her.
—Fragment from the personal journals of Sofka Greshneva
Nadya walked straight into the jaws of entropy.
She clung to Parijahan’s hand, the storm swirling around them. If she lost the cool rationale of Parijahan’s magic, it was all over. She would be swallowed whole. All the power she and those Tranavian boys had, but nothing would matter without Parijahan.
“Tell me what you need,” Parijahan had said before they’d walked into the storm.
“Chyrnog has merged with Malachiasz and Malachiasz’s chaos has influenced Chyrnog just as Chyrnog’s hunger has bored deep into Malachiasz’s bones,” Nadya said. “I need that chaos soothed.”
And Parijahan had given that to her. It was fragile armor, but it was armor all the same.
Nadya, with all her layers stripped away. Whatever creature she was, laid bare. All that she had been running from, all that had been hidden from her, all that had never truly made sense, in one girl, more than a little bit monstrous, more than a little bit divine, but in the end utterly mortal.
They were all wrapped up in the exact same thing. Different shades of the same parts.
“What do you think you can accomplish here? You who have already helped me, already freed me, do you think you can turn on me so quickly? Are you so quick to betray?”
Nadya almost laughed. The storm raged around her, all darkness and flashes of light and glimpses of monstrosity. A hunger that Nadya could feel as she stood within it. An ache. A burning need to consume all that stood in Chyrnog’s path. There was no reason here. There was no killing this. She didn’t expect to walk away from this. She could only hope to manage the impossible.
Have you not been paying attention? Betrayal serves itself and I am so very human, and I want to live so very much. Of course I will betray you. I’ll betray all of them. I would betray every god who has ever shown me kindness if it meant living.
“What a fool you are.”
She wasn’t here to exchange platitudes with unknowable darkness. Who knew how far Chyrnog had stretched?
“I have already consumed so many cities, so many forests. All will fall underneath me.”
Yes. That was what they had to stop. Entropy was everywhere. With each second that passed, thousands more would die.
Malachiasz would die.
Serefin would die.
Nadya remembered the girl she once was. In the snow, voryens clutched in her hand, running from one boy she now called her friend and into the one who had captured her heart. The girl who believed so fully in the will of her gods. Who believed the Church was right and unerring and she had divine providence on her side and mistakes were not things a cleric could make.
Utterly mortal and utterly naive.
Ljubica had said hold tight to her mortality, and she had. It would have been so easy to give into the songs. To show her country that she was more than the sum of her mistakes. That there was a reason she had grown to love the Tranavians. That they were as good and as terrible as any Kalyazi and this war between their countries had raged for too long.
But Chyrnog didn’t care about any of it. Chyrnog only cared about consumption. About razing the world. About tearing through to the realm of the divine and destroying it as well. Eating the sun. Killing Alena. Ending everything. That was his purpose. That had always been his purpose.
The gods were not as mortals, even if they had been, once. They could not be turned away from the paths they had set upon. The gods could not be changed.
So, it was up to Nadya to change. For her to see her enemies as friends, as family. To recognize that her beliefs needed to adapt to the world as it truly was. To allow them to live alongside the beliefs of a boy who thought differently, instead of smothering down what he cared about.
It was idealistic.
But Nadya was idealistic. She was idealistic and too empathetic and too hopeful that things might change, one day. That maybe she would never end the war, but she had tried. She had tried by extending a hand to the prince who had burned her home and destroyed her family. She had tried by falling in love with the boy who had done so much harm, so much evil, but wanted to be better.
She didn’t know if he could. But she hoped.
It was that hope that kept her standing as Chyrnog began to take her apart. As he started to rip her into more palatable pieces. As he decided that her bitterness on his tongue wouldn’t be quite so bad after all.
Just a girl at the end of everything, power all her own because it didn’t matter who had given it to her. It was hers and she wanted it and she would use it.
She held Parijahan’s hand tight and prayed to every single god she knew that this would work.
She let herself be devoured.
55
MALACHIASZ CZECHOWICZ
It’s death. It’s always been death. The final piece, the final key, the thing that has been driving us all. There’s no escape. There never was.
—Fragment from the personal journals of Innokentiy Tamarkin
It was when the tether that tied Nadya to Malachiasz snapped that he struck. It was through an overwhelming tide of grief that he channeled all the chaos of his power into throwing the storm before him into the trap he had built within his spell book.
It was too much.
Even with Serefin’s power alongside his own. Even with what he knew was Parijahan’s calm in the storm. Even with the last dregs of Nadya’s dying eldritch magic. It was too much.
Malachiasz knew when he was overwhelmed. Chyrnog’s smug satisfaction. They hadn’t been strong enough. If they hadn’t all chosen mortality, would they have been able to trap him? If one of them had sacrificed more, would it have been enough?
He didn’t know. He didn’t know. He didn’t know.
He pressed his hand against the worn cover of his spell book, blood dripping down his arms, from his eyes, from his nose. He worked to form the magic swirling around them.
He … failed.
So, he pulled on Chyrnog’s power. He formed the entropy into himself. It would take him. It would eat him. But maybe it would be enough.
He dimly heard someone swearing. Felt someone’s hand over his. Too late. It was too late. They weren’t strong enough. They wouldn’t ever be strong enough. They chose to be human; they chose to live.
And so, they chose to die.
56
SEREFIN MELESKI
I’ll defect. They cannot keep me here, I have always been their toy, their pawn, their weapon. Veceslav cannot hold me where I do not wish to remain. The gods are not nearly as powerful as they claim to be. The Tranavians, not so wrong, after all.
—Fragment from the personal journals of Celestyna Privalova
Warmth played across Serefin’s skin. He frowned, dimly aware he was waking, but not enough to open his eye.
“He’s breathing, at least.”
He knew that voice.
“And the others?”
A sigh. “Breathing, but comatose. I don’t know. It’s been weeks. They might be gone. I don’t know what they did.”
“Let me know if anything changes, please.”
“Of course.”
The sound of a door closing. The feeling of someone taking his hand.
“Y
our eye is twitching, which is more than I’ve been getting from you.” Kacper. “Maybe you’re still in there. I hope so. I miss you. Also, I cannot keep these moths from chewing through the bedding and Katya’s servants are going to murder me.”
It was the urge to laugh that knocked him through the wall holding him back. He stirred. He heard Kacper’s sharp intake of breath.
“Serefin?”
It took monumental effort to open his eye, but he did.
Kacper’s breath left him in a rush. “Serefin.”
Then he was being kissed and it was all very overwhelming, and he didn’t think he was really in a state to be kissing, but that didn’t deter Kacper who moved right on to kissing the scars on Serefin’s face.
“I shouldn’t’ve done that.” Kacper leaned back. “You need space, sorry. I’m sorry. Serefin, I’m so glad you’re all right.”
Serefin didn’t know if he was. The last thing he remembered was losing Malachiasz, feeling Chyrnog consume him totally.
He closed his eye.
“Give me a moment,” he said, his voice scratchy from disuse.
Kacper took his hand. He was freezing, suddenly. Had he died again?
“Who were you talking to?” he asked without opening his eye.
“Katya. I should tell her you’re awake.”
“Don’t leave!” Panic clutched at Serefin’s chest. There was nothing and nothing and nothing. He had lost something to Chyrnog—what? He was scared that he didn’t know.
“All right,” Kacper said softly. “You’re the first to wake up, but … I think you were the one outside of Chyrnog’s path, at the end.”
Tears welled in his eye. The feeling of everything being torn away from him as Chyrnog ate and ate and ate was much too close.
“What happened?”
“You four … did it. At least, I think. I don’t know. There’s a rift in that place now. It’s terrifying. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of whatever will come out of that.”
Serefin made a soft sound of assent. Kacper brushed his hair away from his face.
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