nearly succeeded once. He stepped across the hallway and closed the door to the stairway leading to the well. He didn’t want to think about what Nadya had done.
The crunch of bones underneath his boots was loud as he followed a hall to the sanctuary. He bypassed it, hoping to find a smaller room to hole up in until he felt warm.
Maybe he would never feel warm again.
It took time, stepping through rotting plants and brittle bones, to find the room that would have housed the caretaker of the church. There was an oven in the corner. Malachiasz filled it with shattered bits of furniture and reached for his spell book. It wasn’t at his hip. Neither was the dagger he’d carried for years. Frustration and anxiety and blistering fear overcame him all at once and he thudded heavily to the ground, squeezing his eyes shut. He let out a long, shuddering breath.
He buried his face in his hands and tried not to bring back the voice. He suspected the being was always there, watching. Waiting to overwhelm him further. Forcing his eyes closed did little, a cluster of them opening on his hand and disorienting him.
When he had snapped past the mortal bonds tying him to this realm of reality, a lot had been made clear that had been taken by the Vultures. Things he had lost. Was any of it real?
He remembered the boy with the scar on his eye. And dragging books into the boy’s room after a failed assassination attempt. Spending his days wandering the palace until the boy pulled him back to lessons.
His brother.
Serefin. His murderer.
Family was something Malachiasz had yearned for but now wished to forget. Better to have the false family he had built for himself to replace the one wrenched away. Reconciling this was too difficult.
His time in the forest was hazy. It had clawed at him long before they’d reached Tzanelivki. The moment they left the monastery and moved into Dozvlatovya, it began its assault, wanting to devour him. Serefin had been distant as they traveled through the forest, constantly taken by fits, his eyes bleeding. And if he—or Nadya—had shown signs of malicious intent, Malachiasz was too distracted to notice.
Yet he didn’t understand. Why had Nadya saved him when confronted by her goddess? Why let him taste the terrifying expanse of her magic?
Malachiasz had the power of a god but it was nothing, inconsequential, to what the Kalyazi girl with hair like snow could have if she knew how to wield it. The thought was as thrilling as it was terrifying. It would have been better had she not betrayed him. But he had betrayed her, too. They had spent the past year willfully kicking each other at any glimmer of weakness. She was the enemy, perhaps it had been foolish to think she would ever be anything else.
He tugged on a bone knotted in his hair. He still had a few relics, their power thrumming under his fingertips, and he could break them. Push past his consciousness, his mortal body. Transcend. But that was, quite possibly, the last thing he wanted to do.
He stared blankly at the cold oven, realizing he was useless without his spell book. But even if he had it, would it work? What had Nadya done?
Frustrated, he slashed the back of his hand with an iron claw, hoping he was wrong and that she hadn’t destroyed everything—hadn’t betrayed him so fully.
But there was no magic in his spilt blood. There was nothing.
He swallowed hard, staring at the blood dripping down his hand and fighting tears. What good was he without his magic? What was the point of him? He was nothing but a monster. He still had some magic, something far past blood magic, and he could feel it if he pressed. But using it was tapping into chaos and he wasn’t sure he had the control for it.
Malachiasz shivered. He was freezing and it was growing harder to ignore the ripples of pain each time his body shifted. At least it had quieted back down to what he was used to, eyes and mouths and twitching. No extraneous limbs or spines in the wrong places.
All his life he’d had a goal, for things to not be so bad, and he could always see that light at the end of the darkness, even as it grew farther away with each step he took.
Now it had gone out and he wasn’t sure what he was fighting