crashed into another pillar, ripping it out by the root. The walls of the Rib split again, hurling them all to their knees. Mercurio gasped, breath ragged, his whole body shaking. Gravebone dust on his tongue, his shadow twisting beneath him. Mister Kindly appeared in front of him, not-eyes wide.
“… go…!” he shouted. “… head to the nethers now…!”
Sidonius grabbed Mercurio by his collar, hauled him to his feet. “Come on!”
Helping Marielle up, the big Itreyan slung Bladesinger over his shoulders and pushed the weaver out through a gaping new split in the wall. The city beyond was in flames. Storm howling. Earth shaking. Oceans swelling. All Four Daughters, arisen. Mercurio looked back into the room, watching the pieces of the Moon crash and burn. Looking for whatever remained of the girl he’d loved. And knowing what he had to do.
Sid roared over the tempest, “Mercurio, come on!”
The old man pressed his fingers to his lips, held them out to her.
“I’ll remember you,” he whispered.
He turned and ran.
CHAPTER 47
ALL
Dark flame burned inside Jonnen’s chest as he watched them crash against each other, shattering the world around them. Each of them part of a god unleashed, the moon made manifest beneath their Mother’s sky. They were giants now, the dark about them growing and flaring. Their wings brushed the edges of the broken hall, the dark flames burning at their crowns were tall enough to scorch the ceiling. But if he squinted hard enough, through the storm of black, the bodies wrought for them of living shadow, the boy fancied he could still see faint impressions of the people they’d once been.
His father. His world. The man he’d dreamed of being. The god he’d worshipped, now taken on the guise of a true divinity, corrupted and rotten through. Rage and hatred and misery, seeking only to hurt the way it had been hurt in kind. The boy could understand it. Because looking from his mother’s broken body to the thing his father had become, he knew what it was to hate the one who’d made you.
But his sister. His de’lai. A girl he’d never met until a few months ago, and yet had somehow always known. Brave in a way he’d never been. Dark and bloodstained and scarred to the bone. She had every reason in the world to be nothing but rage and hatred and misery. But he knew, as much as she tried to hide it, she hadn’t let life turn her cold. She loved with a heart as fierce as lions. Gave in a way that left her bleeding, but never broken. Because even with all she’d lost, all she’d sacrificed, all the hurt heaped upon her shoulders, she’d still come back.
She still came back for me.
He could feel it, burning out in that storm of rage and shadows. The love she felt for him. Too bright to smother, even beneath the power of a god.
But a fragment of that power burned inside him, too. He could feel it reaching toward the other pieces of itself, even now, longing to be made whole. A hunger filled him, scorched him, bottomless and ravenous. He wanted to join them, he realized. Be swept up in the totality, many made one, ascending to his rightful throne in the sky.
He tore at the shadows that hemmed him in, tried to bend them to his will. His father and sister ripped at each other, shaking the first Rib about them, all the darkness howling. Mia’s daemons tore through the air like a hurricane, smashing themselves against his father’s skin. Her claws cut great gouges through him, black spraying upon the walls. But the longer the battle wore on, the more they tore off each other, the more Jonnen realized they were equals. Each a dark opposite of the other. It was like watching someone fighting their own reflection—every inch claimed was also lost, every hurt inflicted was another gained.
They were so alike in so many ways, the two of them. O, Goddess, the things they could have done if he’d loved her like a father. But there was too much between them now—too much blood, too much hate, too much darkness. And so each railed against the other, tearing and cursing and gaining nothing at all. All about them, the dark whispered a prayer, a plea, ringing in the dark inside his heart.
The many were one.
THE MANY WERE ONE.
But Godsgrave was being torn to pieces.
The earthquakes were almost constant now, keeping Jonnen on