“He’s confused,” Gabe said, backing up another step. Anton hung limp, eyes cast upward, as if in prayer. “He’s just a man; take his position, give it to someone else, but don’t kill him!”
“I’m the fucking Sainted King.” It wasn’t a scream. It was barely more than a whisper. Still, it reverberated against the hiss of the fire, and when Bastian tilted up his head, the flames seemed to make a halo around his head. “I will kill whoever I please.”
“Then you’re no better,” Gabe snarled. Fire leapt behind him, as if his anger stoked it higher. “No better than him, no better than your father.”
Beyond Gabe’s shoulder, Lore could still see the silhouette of her mother, shimmering against the flames. “Listen,” she murmured, stepping between him and Bastian, “everything that’s happened tonight has been pointless violence, we don’t have to—”
“Not pointless,” Anton murmured. “Not unless you count stopping an apocalypse as pointless. Her power will keep growing, Bastian, especially now that she can channel Spiritum, too. It will infect her mind; Nyxara will infect her mind. Give the girl death now, or watch her beg for it later, when the world falls down around her as Apollius makes it His.” A low, wheezing laugh hissed through Anton’s teeth, his eyes arcing heavenward again. “The cycle has begun, and you are all caught in its weave, forced into a caring that has ruined you before and will ruin you again.”
Tension ran through Lore’s shoulders, echoed in Bastian’s; the tip of Gabe’s knife wavered.
“It’s been prophesied, but none wanted to believe it,” Anton rasped. “None except I. Hear me, Apollius! Hear how I warn them of the coming age, of what happens when new gods rise and try to stand against Your will!”
Gabe stumbled, trying to keep a grip on the mad old man who’d been a kind of father, the only kind he could keep. His eye darted to Bastian, pleading.
The Sun Prince—no, the Sainted King—watched on, implacable. His hands kept flexing, back and forth, working up more golden light. “You’re going to give us another solution, old man,” Bastian murmured. “Don’t make me cut it out of you.”
Gabe looked away, but his dagger didn’t waver.
“There is one.” Lore stepped forward, shaky; her wound was healed, but still sore. Her hair had fallen down, hung around her face in gold-brown strands made darker by blood. “I learned to guard my mind from Mortem before. Gabe taught me. It can’t be that much different now. I can keep myself from sensing power, from growing stronger. Keep myself…”
She trailed off, not sure how to finish. Not sure if she needed to. It was a whole thought on its own.
Anton laughed again. “You always were willing to do anything to save your own skin.”
“You don’t know me,” Lore said.
His one eye narrowed, glittering with the same cutting light as Gabe’s blade. “Are you so sure?”
“What do you need to do?” Something had changed in Bastian’s manner, in his carriage. Gone was the languid prince; he’d fully stepped into being the King. It was the other side he’d shown her that night in the alley, the night she told him her history. A King had always been waiting. A brutal one.
Lore glanced at Gabe. He was trying so hard to keep his emotions off his face, trying and failing. Pain lived in the furrows of his brow, the fierce curve of his mouth around his bared teeth. But there was hope, sparking to life when their gazes met. Hope that he could yet save the wretched man he held so close, the man who’d only sought to use him.
“I can teach her,” Gabe said. “Teach her to guard her mind even more fully. Make sure nothing like the villages happens ever again.”
He’d done it once already, she suddenly realized. That night she woke him up, made him sit with her and concentrate, soothing the darkness until sleep could come peacefully, without those strange dreams. There’d been no death that night.
But Anton shook his head, mindless of the blade still against his neck. Gabe tried to move it; he didn’t in time, and a thin line of crimson creased the old man’s skin. “It won’t last,” he rasped. “These roles are fixed. To let the girl live is to invite oblivion, for the world, but for yourselves most of all.”
“Spare us your religious bullshit,” Bastian hissed.
Another braying laugh from the Priest Exalted. “Oh, nephew, that’s the one thing you can’t be spared. You’ll learn.”
“Lore.”
The Night Priestess’s voice was quiet; still, it echoed. Her face was emotionless, though something like resignation lurked at the corner of her mouth, in the shine of her eyes. “Things have progressed more than we thought,” she said softly. “I see that now. I can’t make you choose death.”
“Damn right,” Bastian snarled, shouldering in front of Lore.
“I was too weak before,” the Night Priestess continued, ignoring Bastian. “And for that, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for letting me live?” Lore’s voice came out ragged. “Sorry for saving me?”
Her mother lowered her chin, her long, pale hair almost covering her face. “But you can be strong now,” she said, as if Lore hadn’t spoken at all. “You can make the right choice.”
“You’re asking her to die, and you think you’re in the right?” Gabe nearly spat it.
But the Night Priestess didn’t respond. She looked only at Lore, only at her daughter.
“It all springs from this choice,” she murmured. “You are the seed of the apocalypse.”
And it was true. Lore didn’t know how, not yet, didn’t understand the intricacies. But she felt the truth.
But it was also true what she’d told her mother. Lore was selfish. If it came down to her or the world, Lore chose herself.
The Night Priestess sighed. Nodded, knowing Lore’s answer though she didn’t speak. Then, in a quick movement that the flickering flames bisected into strange jerks, she climbed up onto the lip of the well and descended the spinning stairs into the dark.
Bastian moved forward, as if he’d follow and extract some kind of revenge, but Lore put her hand on his chest. “No,” she murmured, and had nothing else to add. “No.”
He listened.
“You’ve chosen your path, the three of you,” Anton murmured. “Woe betide us when the rest follow.”
Bastian looked at Gabe. Flicked his hand. “The old man will live, Gabe.”
Shoulders slumped in relief, Gabe finally took his dagger from Anton’s throat. He stepped back, letting the Priest Exalted stand on his own.
Bastian’s hand moved, twisting in a graceful motion that looked near impossible. Golden swirls carved through the air, coalescing around his fingers, threads spun from the sun itself.
Then Bastian thrust his handful of gold toward Anton.