of a dry glance.
“I thought that was what everyone else thought, too,” Nadya continued. “Because no one talks to me anymore.”
“You don’t want to listen.” Myesta shrugged. “And, for a time, you were unable. That Vulture is trouble. But Marzenya was afraid of you. I think we have a lot to talk about, don’t you?”
Nadya frowned and sat at the feet of the goddesses. “Why tell me now?”
“You weren’t ready before. You would have balked at the well of magic, at what you are, at what you could be. You may still, but things have changed. Your enemy is so much greater than a country of heretics,” Myesta said. “Marzenya wanted to keep you quiet, small, and that worked for her, for a time. She knew what you were capable of and how it could shake the world to its very foundation if you decided to go against her.”
“But I did what she asked. I chose her.”
“Did you?”
Did she?
“You don’t seem particularly troubled by her death,” Nadya noted.
“We die. Sometimes our deaths are quiet; sometimes not,” Alena said. “Marzenya is a goddess of rebirth. She’ll find her way back to us in time.”
A terrifying thought.
“Sometimes those of us we thought were dead come rising to the surface. The oldest of us, long since turned away from the world, deciding they want a piece of it once more.”
Nadya frowned. “The fallen gods?”
“An annoyance. Peloyin and Marzenya cast them out for a reason,” Myesta said, waving a hand.
“I never knew about Peloyin,” Nadya said. He had never spoken to her.
Again, that weird feeling of the goddesses exchanging a glance. Sometimes they had limbs—almost human—but mostly not. Nadya saw every animal in creation shifting within their depths.
“No, we speak of older than even them.”
“Chyrnog?”
“The world eater,” Myesta said, a musing hum. “He’s not the only one, but he is the one who has claimed a mortal and thus can move against your world.”
“Why are you telling me if I’m dead?”
Alena laughed. “I forgot how dense mortals are.”
Nadya had forgotten how circuitous talking to gods could be.
“Marzenya was afraid of you because you and the world eater are made from the same stuff,” Myesta said blandly, as if giving Nadya a benign piece of information she already knew.
Nadya suspected that if she wasn’t already dead, she would feel like the world was falling out from underneath her.
“A mortal child born with the blood of the gods. Her power twisted down and carefully molded so that it was only used when Marzenya would allow it.”
“What am I?”
Alena shrugged—if it were possible for her to shrug. “You are an enigma. A problem. A child. You are not the first to be born this way, there have been other clerics like you, but those never set their power free. The others never spilled their divine blood for magic.”
There was no distaste in her words. Like the goddess cared little for the heresies of the Tranavians. Nadya had thought all the gods cared so much about blood magic and it being an abomination. Even here, dead, her hand was monstrous.
“Why are you telling me this?” Nadya whispered.
“Because if entropy is not stopped, there will be nothing left. We can fight him in our realm, but he will merely call upon his siblings, as old and terrible as he, and we will be lost. If our world falls, so too will yours. If your world falls, we will not last long after.”
How was Nadya supposed to stop an old god? She hadn’t been able to stop Serefin from setting a fallen god free. She had set a fallen god free from his prison, starting it all. She wasn’t the one to save the world. She was the one to ruin it.
“Daughter of death, you have come so far,” Myesta said. “You may fail at this.”
“Also, I’m dead.”
That was ignored.
“But why not give you the chance? You cannot do this alone; you will need help. Luckily, there are plenty of you mortals running around, blood tainted with the divine.”
Nadya frowned. “But what about everything else? The war? Tranavia?”
“Do you think I care about Tranavia and their mistakes? Do you think I care what the Akolans do with the blood they spill across the sands? Do you think I care what the Gentle Hands do to the mages of Česke Zin and Rumenovać? What those people do with our bones? You mortals and your magic are your own problems. It is all insignificant,” Alena snapped.
“Then why did Marzenya care so much?