“No. I want to show you a door. But first, pay attention to the floor. The way it slopes. It will guide you through the many passages, taking you deeper into the realm.”
“Deeper?” Iris’s pace slowed.
The walls began to waver. One color was bleeding into the next.
“Don’t think too hard about it, Iris,” the woman said, her raven hair shining blue in the strange light. “Or else this will break.”
Iris nodded, trying to relax. They finally reached the door. It was tall and arched, its lintel carved with runes.
The woman touched the iron knob and paused, as if lost to memory. “When I dwelled here, there were no locks. I could come and go anywhere in the realm, as long as I didn’t return to my life above. My husband thought he was granting me freedom, but it was a cage.”
Iris felt a flare of dismay. “Who was your husband?”
The woman looked at Iris, but she only said, “Beyond this door is the heart of the realm. A wild yet vulnerable place. It is here that my music was strongest, perhaps because of the risk. But you will need a key to unlock the door.”
“Where do I get a key?” Iris asked, her head beginning to throb.
The woman didn’t reply, but when she pushed, the door opened. Iris followed her, surprised when the dank air of the tunnel became warm and bright again.
They stood on a grassy hillside. Around them was a landscape of flower-speckled vales and bluffs that rolled into distant mountains. Clusters of pines and a river that flowed along a valley bed.
“It has been a very long time since I could stand here and soak in this view.” The woman’s voice was soft with nostalgia. The wind touched her with a sigh, gathering her long hair like a loving hand. “You asked me if I was from Oath. I am not, and I once roamed these hills with my family. Anywhere I could see the sky, any horizon I could chase. The freshly churned ground of graveyards. That was my domain, and yet I surrendered it when I exchanged a vow with Alzane, all because he feared my growing power. Since then, I have been beholden to Oath. I cannot leave the city, or else I would have met him in the west when he woke.”
“Met who?” Iris whispered.
“Dacre,” the woman said. “He can mend what he breaks but I am music and knowledge, rain and harvest. I am nightmares and dreams and illusions. And if he were to kill me as he longs to do, then he would take all my magic into himself. There would be no end to his power, and he would feast on mortal fear and service. He wants to conquer this realm. He wants you to worship him and him alone.”
“But if you have such vast magic,” Iris began, “then shouldn’t you be able to conquer him? If you are illusions and nightmares and—”
“Oh, but that is the cost of it,” the woman gently interrupted, a wistful expression on her face. “I took the other three’s powers not because I was hungry for them, but because I didn’t want him to harvest such magic when he woke. But little did I know that doing so would weaken what was mine to begin with.” She lifted one of her hands, and Iris could see her swollen knuckles. “I can still play my harp, but not without agony.”
The sky overhead had turned overcast and dour. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the wind howled with a hint of rain.
“Please help us defeat him,” Iris whispered.
A look of compassion stole over the woman’s face. She reached out to trace Iris’s cheek, her fingertips cold as river water in winter.
“I have given you all the pieces that you need to vanquish him,” she said. “I confess that if I am the one to face him, my hand will be stayed. I won’t be able to plunge the sword into his neck, even after all the enmity that has grown between us. He will tear me to pieces and glean my powers. Then he will be the only divine remaining in the realm and, at some point in time, whether it is within your generation or another, a mortal will be brave enough to end him, burying him headless in a grave. When that happens, magic will also die, because there will be no more gods walking among you or sleeping beneath the loam. Once we are dead, it will all fade away.”
A knot pulled tight in Iris’s chest. It almost hurt to draw air, to think of what the woman described. A world in a cage. A world culled of freedom and magic, a memory of what had been.
It made her think of her typewriter. The enchantment in small, ordinary things. She thought of the letters she had passed beneath her wardrobe door to Roman. Words that had spanned kilometers and distance, grief and joy, pain and love. Words that had made her drop her armor after years of clutching it close.
Kitt.
Iris gasped. Her mind was sharpening as she remembered who she was, and the world around her started to melt. The mountains and the sky, the valleys and the wildflowers. Stars she had not even known existed. All of it was draining away like water in a bathtub, but the woman held firm before her, flowers blooming in her dark hair.
Not a woman, but a goddess.
“I don’t want you to die. I don’t want magic to fade, but I am not as strong as you,” Iris said. “He will surely defeat me.”
“You are capable of far more than you know. Why do you think I look at you now and marvel? Why do you think I draw close to your kind? I have sung many of you to eternal rest after death, and I have found that the music of a mortal life burns brighter than any magic my songs could stoke.”
She leaned forward to kiss Iris’s brow. For a split second, she looked like Aster—long chestnut hair, a quirk to her lips, a dusting of freckles on her nose. Tears burned Iris’s eyes when she realized that all this time, she hadn’t been dreaming of her mother but of this goddess.
Before she was ready for the dream to break, Iris startled awake.
She was sitting in a leather chair, the museum office limned in predawn light. A cup of cold tea was beside her, a warm blanket draped over her legs. Her right foot was bandaged, and she took a moment to catch her breath, still tender from the dream.
She noticed there was a set of boots on the ground before her, unlaced and polished. A clean outfit, of a knee-length skirt and a forest green blouse with pearl buttons, folded on the chair beside her. A pot of tea, steaming in wait for her to pour.
Iris threw off the blanket and rose, minding her foot although there was only a whisper of pain when she stood on it.
“Enva?” she called.
There was no answer. The air was heavy and quiet.
“Enva!”
She was wondering if it had all been a fever-struck imagining, a way for her mind to make sense of the world after surviving the bomb, when a flash of gold caught her eye. Iris turned to see a sword with a jeweled hilt leaning against the wall, its steel hidden within a scabbard. It was the very blade Enva had shown to her in the dream. Draven’s sword. The one that had killed many divines in the past.
Iris walked to it. She hesitated, replaying everything Enva had said and shown her. The sword, the door, the words.