A punishing blast of lightning turns the already charred circle around Kato and me into a deep crater of boiling dirt and stone. Heat cooks me where I lie, and I can’t move a muscle, paralyzed by the unending, catastrophic boom. If the city weren’t already flattened, the God Bolt would have leveled it. The merciless strike deafens me, hollows me out. No one is left standing. Not dead, I somehow know, but knocked out. Limitless and vast, foreign and final, the magic overloads my senses and without any words explains to me just how puny and powerless I really am.
The cold determination I felt just moments ago burns away as my helplessness to alter Kato’s destiny sinks in. This is a lesson in mortality, in humility, delivered by Zeus himself. The message is brutally clear in the monstrous amount of power still searing me through deep layers of my skin: my human side is no small part of me, and I can’t seize from the Fates their ultimate control over the tapestry of life and death.
My eyes burn from the heat. Bitter tears evaporate before they can fall. Lying over Kato, I grip him to me, trying to shield his body from the scorching, angry, roaring power of Zeus. I hold on to him, because how can I ever let go?
A sharp crack hits my ears. A flash blinds me. With a sudden lurch, I drop face-first onto the battered cobbles of the street. Gasping, I push back up and stare in horror at the empty space beneath me.
I lost him. I lost Kato. He’s gone!
Only the ancient and crushing magic remains. Suddenly, that vanishes as well. Stillness replaces everything, a shocking backlash to the raging storm. My ears can’t adjust. They throb for sound, but there’s nothing to hear except for the heavy pounding of my own broken heart.
I turn my head, and my eyes meet Griffin’s. He’s on his knees, mouthing something to me from across the still-boiling circle around me. He lifts his hand, reaching for me, his lips moving frenetically, his face full of pleading and devastation and panicked fear.
I shake my head. I can’t hear him. I don’t understand a word.
My hair lifts straight up as a great force abruptly pulls at me like a breath sucking me in. I clutch the blood-slicked cobbles, suddenly sick with fright. My nails break, my grip slips, and my fingers pop off the stones. Screaming, I shoot upward, still reaching out and kicking as I go.
My desperate shout makes no noise. Griffin, Sykouri, then Fisa and all of Thalyria spiral away, tunneling to a point beyond my vision. A vast and quiet darkness inhales me, swallowing me whole. The stars and I whirl in an endless loop, their far-off flickers of light the same gold I saw reflected in the swirling depths of the Chaos Wizard’s timeless eyes.
There’s no breath. No light. No sound. I don’t hear my heartbeat anymore, or feel anything at all. Somewhere in the ether, I close my eyes and go weightless, anchored only by the terrifying realization that I didn’t just lose Kato today. I must have lost myself.
CHAPTER 23
I come awake to shadows. That’s all I see. Around me. In me. I still can’t hear, and my head pounds like it’s been kicked and kicked and kicked and will never recover. Not from this.
I look around, but I already know that Griffin isn’t here. No one I love is, except for the tiny person I carry inside me.
I lower my hand to my belly, and for the first time ever from the outside, I feel Little Bean kick.
Her tiny life force flutters steadily as I stare blankly at a horizon of granite and cloud. I’m high up on a cliffside with a somber valley below. The cliff continues upward, sheer and soaring above my head, and my shelf of rock is small—no more than a few paces in any direction. There’s no way off.
Well, there’s down. But my wings seem to have disappeared again, and without them, down isn’t much of an option. At least my shoulder is healed.
I can’t be dead or else my daughter would be, too. And I’ve seen the steps a person takes to the Styx—a series of events that had nothing to do with this. The dreariness here reminds me of Asphodel, but there’s neither the same sense of finality for what once was nor the implicit potential to move on to the next phase of existence. This feels stagnant and stale, like nothing ever alters in this place.
I fit right in with the bleak landscape, just another shadow along with the rest. I breathe and have a pulse, but there’s no hunger or thirst. I doubt there ever will be. This doesn’t seem like a place for mundane, mortal needs. This seems like a place where scary things crawl out from under rocks.
Even that thought doesn’t bother me. I’m numb except for the very real physical ache in my head. Numb even to Little Bean’s tender stroke.
A cool, damp breeze sends my hair swirling around my head. It’s shorter than I remember, and the ends look like they’ve been burned off. For some reason, there’s only one dagger left in my belt. I slide it free, fist my hair in my other hand, and then shear it off at my nape. I open my hand, and the light wind takes the scorched ends away, sweeping them off into the deep, dark gap. I drop the dagger by my knee. It hits the stone shelf in total silence.
No sound. No needs. No emotion. Maybe the three go hand in hand.
I stare blankly ahead into a thick bank of clouds. Across the valley from me and on both sides, they drape the hills and craggy mountains like colorless garments and misshapen hats. Fog clings to rock, obscuring the closest peaks and even the cliffside right next to me. My shelf is open and clear, though, just like the valley below. There’s a path right to me, cut through cloud. There’s nothing natural about it, but I can’t bring myself to care.
I sit and watch, although there’s nothing to see. At some point, a swarm of small black birds swoops through my field of vision, breaking the monotony with the brisk fluttering of hundreds of wings. I don’t startle at the unexpected sight, or wonder at the utter silence of it. Dulled inside and out, I watch the birds dive back down into the valley and out of sight.
Staring into the endless gray, I eventually debate letting feeling back in—if I even can. It’s the only way for the rawness of loss to settle into me, like a stepping-stone. My existence is built on them. On these blocks of death. If I climb it, then I’m accepting losing Kato, like I eventually accepted that knife in Eleni’s heart. I don’t want to do that. Not when I could have brought him back. If Zeus hadn’t stopped me, I would have brought Kato back.
But he did stop me. Zeus wrenched from me all that power I was finally ready to embrace. He took my wings. He brought me here. And now I’m a shadow, like everything else. Gray rock. Gray ground. Gray sky. Gray me.
It’s better that way. To see in color would be too painful. To live in color would be a betrayal of those I couldn’t save.