But not dead.
Lore couldn’t make sense of it, not at first. Rock was something in which she always reliably felt Mortem: unalive and with no hope of being different. But the stone plants had a buzz of life around them, muted yet undeniably there, threaded through with just the barest hint of Mortem.
It felt… peaceful. The aura of the garden was one of rest, of sinking into a soft bed at the end of a long day.
Next to her, Gabe’s shoulders loosened, tension sieving out of him like rain down a gutter. Maybe she looked relieved, too. Maybe both of them were always walking around like there were weights tied to their feet, and they’d never even noticed until someone cut the strings.
The garden he’d brought her to was in a courtyard against the Church wall, guarded from the interior Citadel grounds by a tall, ornate fence with a tall, ornate gate. It was small enough for Lore to see every corner from where they stood by the entrance, the walkways between the flower beds laid out in a neat grid that reminded her of Dellaire’s streets. In the center stood what looked like a well beneath a peaked golden roof. The well was closed, covered with a large circle of wood. A small statue of Apollius stood on top of the wood, as if to hold it down.
Looking at the well interrupted the sense of peace from the rest of the garden, made a chill crawl down her spine. She averted her eyes.
Tentatively, Lore reached out and touched one of the stone roses. The texture was surprisingly smooth, still petal-like. “So this is what you channel all that Mortem into?” She’d heard the tales, how the Presque Mort were skilled enough to channel Mortem into plants without killing them. But hearing about a stone garden hadn’t prepared her for how uncanny seeing it would be. The expectation was harsh and brutal; this was beautiful instead.
Gabe nodded. Next to him, flowers layered on top of one another, striations of rock and leaf, the new garden continuously grown atop the old.
“How?” A gust of wind made a living rose bend her way, tiny thorns catching on her sleeve. Gently, Lore unhooked them, let the rose bob back upright. “I mean, I know how, but how did you make them… I mean…”
“Carefully.” Gabe snorted. “We channel the Mortem into the barest surface of the thing. It doesn’t overwhelm the Spiritum, just… shrouds it. Puts it in stasis, somewhere between life and death.” He gestured to the garden, almost proudly, meandering down the path. “We could reverse this, if we needed to. Channel the Mortem through us again, put it back into something dead, and release the flowers to what they were before. It’s a kind of death, but it isn’t permanent.”
Lore stared at the roses a moment longer, watching them wave back and forth in the sunlight. Then she caught up with Gabe, who was still ambling good-naturedly along the cobblestones. He walked like a different person here, like he carried less. She wondered if he looked like this all the time when he was just a monk, when he was able to exist without reminders of who he could’ve been in the eyes of every courtier.
“Seems like cheating.” Lore couldn’t match his stride, but she did her best to keep up, two steps to one of his. “Going back and forth from death to life with no consequences.”
“Consequences like what happens when you take poison?” Gabe shook his head. “Anyone who does that deserves what they get. Humans have been given the time they’re supposed to have; trying to cheat it isn’t part of Apollius’s plan.”
Lore wondered if he’d noticed the smell of August’s flask. What he made of it. “Have you ever tried this with a person, then?” She waved her hand at the garden.
He froze, a horrified light in his blue eye. “No one would do this to a person.”
Her brow furrowed, and Lore stepped back, guilt teased to life by his stricken expression, resentment rising to meet it. “I’m not implying that you have. I’m just curious, Gabriel.” She swallowed. “You’ve had years to learn about this power, with someone actually teaching you. I’ve just been trying to survive it.”
The monk looked at her for a moment that stretched, face inscrutable. Then he turned, started walking again, though it was stiffer than before. “No one knows how channeling Mortem this way into something souled would affect them,” he said finally, sidestepping the matter of Lore’s ignorance entirely. “The position of the Church is that it would send your soul to the Shining Realm—or one of the myriad hells, I suppose, depending on how you’d lived. Once you were brought back, it’d pull you out of your afterlife, with knowledge no mortal should have.”
Raising a person from the dead didn’t bring back their soul, just their body—that’s why you had to give them direction. But an insatiable curiosity about the afterlife had been what led to a rash of practicing necromancers right after the Godsfall. People who could channel enough Mortem to raise the dead did it to find out what happened after. To know the secrets of where you went once your body was done.
The Church hadn’t liked that, even though it never really worked. No one had ever gotten a straight answer from a corpse.
Her eyes flickered to Gabe. “You really believe in the Shining Realm?”
“I’m a member of the clergy. Believing in the Shining Realm is quite literally in my job description.”
Lore knocked her shoulder into his, companionably. After a moment, he gave her the smallest edge of a smile.
The path took them by the well. The statue of Apollius was more austere than most, plain stone with no garnet adornment. Lore eyed it warily. “What’s that?”
“Catacombs entrance.” He said it with such nonchalance, Lore was convinced for a moment she’d heard him wrong. But he shot her a wry look, shrugged. “We open it every eclipse, let out the Mortem, channel it into the flowers. It’s efficient, and probably why we haven’t had a significant leak in so long.”
The mention of an eclipse made her press her palm to her thigh, hiding her scar. “When’s the next one?”
“Midsummer. A solar eclipse, so the Mortem will be particularly strong. Nyxara blocking Apollius, and all that.” He raised a brow. “Isn’t that right around your birthday?”
Her twenty-fourth birthday. Her Consecration. Lore masked her unease with a guileless grin. “Are you planning to get me a cake?”
“Maybe. Depends on if you’re nice until then.”
She rolled her eyes and took his arm, falling into step with him again as they walked away from the well. Still, pensiveness made her chew her lip. “Does it worry you? When there’s a solar eclipse and the Mortem is stronger?”
“I try not to worry until Anton tells me to.”