by Sara Raasch
Bioseia was a constant growl in the back of her throat, an animalistic sharpness that took hold of her senses, heightening sight and sound and smell. The arena stank of body odor and metallic blood, of fear that smelled acidic and grief that smelled sooty and pain that smelled like bile. She could see everything, everyone, and hear the thrum of their heartbeats, a swelling whir like the agitated wings of a hummingbird.
Aereia and bioseia clicked into place with the floreia, hydreia, geoeia, and igneia.
Six energeias that had once been one.
Ash felt them unite inside her. She felt the aereia breathe life and the bioseia form it and the floreia grow it and the hydreia water it and the geoeia build it and the igneia detonate it. One energeia, one sprawling blanket that connected every part of her body and every person on this earth, Divine and Undivine and god.
Tor had worried this much power might kill her. Ash knew now that it was a foolish fear—this power was life. This power was death. This power was everything, and she understood now why a mortal had to die before holding such infinity.
A tear tracked down Ash’s cheek. How had all the gods grown so far apart? How had they forgotten how much they needed each other?
How had Anathrasa corrupted the crystalline beauty of anathreia?
Ash turned. Barely a moment had passed in her revelation, all of time holding its breath as it waited and watched a new Mother Goddess form.
Off to Ash’s left, Aera lay in the puddle of her water prison, screaming in fury. Hydra was fending off the soldiers.
There were no gods to worry about now.
Except one.
Anathrasa matched Aera’s frustrated howls. “You fool!” she cried at Madoc. “You will watch your family die!”
She contracted her hand and the vines squeezed. Ava screamed in terror while Danon wept and Elias squirmed, his cheeks purpling. Only Ilena still didn’t react, her face wearing that delicate sheen of controlled acceptance.
Ash lifted her hand. Stop.
The vines froze solid, the water deep in their pores quickly setting.
A flick of Ash’s arm, and every vine withered, sliding Madoc’s family to the soft, churned golden sands.
Anathrasa’s eyes were wide and manic, a sign of how close she was to the edge even as she laughed. “You think you can challenge me, mortal? I am ageless. I am eternal. I will be here long after your bones turn to dust and you—”
Ash flared her hands palm-out and sent a whip of fire snapping into Anathrasa’s chest. It threw her back against the swelling press of the army still bent at her command. Hydra was holding off the worst of them, but people poured in from every doorway, filling the arena, pulled by Anathrasa’s call.
No more.
Ash closed her eyes.
No more.
She heard their minds. The same thought connected each soul to Anathrasa, like a tapestry fraying out its threads from a single point. Anathrasa’s command fueled them: Stop the God Killer.
She had forced herself on these people. They were mortal and hadn’t had a chance against a goddess.
Ash opened her eyes and released the hold Anathrasa had on them. You are yourselves again.
Instantly, raised weapons paused. War cries tapered to nothing. People blinked and looked around as awareness seeped back into them. Ilena was one of them, gathering her children into her arms.
Ash heard weeping from every direction, cries of confusion, pleas of surrender. But she smiled.
Anathrasa could not control these people anymore.
And now Ash would kill her.
Anathrasa righted herself from where Ash had thrown her. She bellowed in rage and the ground began to shake—great, mighty oaks burst up through the sand, pulled by Anathrasa’s will. Their branches were jagged and sharp and skewered whoever happened to be in their wake, eliciting wails of pain and horror.
Ash punched her hands in two directions, one to push the floreia away from Madoc’s family, and one to keep him and Hydra safe as well. She couldn’t react fast enough to save everyone, and screaming dug into her ears, breaking past the battle-ready fog of concentration that was keeping her heart beating.
The roar of the growing trees settled, and where the arena had once been was now a deadly forest. Soldiers from the former army struggled to extract themselves from the twisted limbs and sharp branches. Blood dripped from the trees, falling like leaves.
Ash couldn’t spot Anathrasa.
The screams of agony cut through the stillness that a forest couldn’t help but bring. It was a nauseating contrast, peaceful floreia and so much pain.
“Ash.” Hydra ran up to her and grabbed her arms. “Where did she go?”
“I don’t—”
“Use the anathreia,” Hydra coaxed.
Ash shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself. The trees blocked out the sun. They blocked out the sky. There were people impaled on their branches.
She couldn’t break. She couldn’t get distracted, not now.
She had to kill Anathrasa.
Eyes pinched shut, Ash pushed out the shouts and blood, the thundering of these hundreds of abused hearts and the fear in these innocent souls. She widened her awareness.
There was so much pain in this arena. It had already been a place of death, and agony was soaked into every particle of sand.
Ash grimaced and tore her eyes open. “I can’t! We have to help everyone here—I can’t see past the suffering.”
She yanked her hand and sent a tree back into the earth, freeing the people stuck in it. Anathrasa had the bulk of Florus’s floreia while Ash only had a small gift of it, but she would still be able to send this forest away, tree by tree.
Hydra grabbed her shoulders. “Not now. I need you to be single-minded Ash again. I need you to be action-first-questions-later Ash. You can take care of this entire forest once you stop her. You need to find Anathrasa and eliminate her now.”
Ash writhed, gasping. Anathreia was so much. It was all too much. The beauty in it was blinding, too bright, too expansive. There were thousands of people in Crixion alone, and they were hurting, scared, and Ash could feel it all—
“Let me.”
A warm body pressed against Ash’s back. Hydra released her as arms came around Ash’s stomach, tightening, Madoc holding her to his chest.
His forehead rested on the back of her head and he looped one arm across her chest while the other kept her hips pinned against his. She could feel his anathreia, the essence at the core of him. He was scared, yes; he was tired; he’d been wounded somewhere on his side. But beneath all that, he was resolute, and he wasn’t letting go of her.
She leaned into him, her body arching back so her head fell against his shoulder, and she knotted her fingers around his wrists.
“Breathe,” he whispered. “Build a wall in your mind. One thought, then another, things you can use as anchors in the noise.”
One thought. She just needed one to start.
She reached—and a searing pain came from one of the soldiers in the trees. She winced, shaking her head, whimpering. “No—it hurts, Madoc, it all hurts—”
“I know.” He pulled her tighter, taking her weight. “Think about Tor. He’s your anchor. Think about Taro and Spark. Think about Igna. Think about—” His voice hitched, breath hot on the side of her neck. “Think about us, Ash. I’m not leaving you. I love you. Think about that, and anchor yourself to it, and use it to come back to yourself. Remember? We’ll always come back to each other.”
Ash reached up to touch Madoc’s cheek, her fingers slipping down to hold his neck.
She loved him, too. She loved him, and that had saved her through this war, time and again.
It would save her now.
Ash stretched her mind. Anathreia swelled, bubbling up and out and scrambling across the arena.
Souls cried. People wanted and they ached—
Ash bit down on her tongue. Madoc. Madoc holding her, and his heart beating against her bac
k.
Her anathreia searched and searched, scrambling through souls.
“When I find her,” Ash started, her tongue dry and gritty, “what then?”
“Then you take the energeia in her body. Take it until there’s nothing left. It’s a hunger.” She felt him swallow. “And it must be fed.”
And then? Ash wanted to ask. What happened once she had Anathrasa’s power? What did she do with so much anathreia?
Her awareness caught on someone behind her.
Ash’s eyes flew open.
She whirled and shoved Madoc aside as Anathrasa charged out from behind one of her trees. A wave of vines carried her, one tendril licking the air ahead of her with a talon-like thorn at its head.
That thorn stabbed the space where Madoc had just been. Ash spun her hands and cut the vine in half, letting the two pieces fall harmlessly to the sand.
Anathrasa kept charging. Ash braced her feet and planted her arms up so when Anathrasa reached her, the two of them slammed to a halt, Ash with her hands on Anathrasa’s chest, Anathrasa snarling and spitting down at her.
“You will not take my victory!” Anathrasa shrieked, and then she pulled.
The energeia in Ash’s chest rebounded, banging inside her as it fought against Anathrasa’s incessant call.
Ash growled and fisted her hands in the collar of Anathrasa’s gown. “This is not your victory,” Ash spat back and scrambled through the Mother Goddess’s body for the final remains of her soul.
Anathrasa felt Ash pulling at her energeia and redoubled her efforts. Her eyes strained, veins bulging in her face, sweat beading. Her smooth skin wrinkled and aged before shifting to become young again, a warring tangle of power and weakness as they each pulled the other’s energeia.
An oily, horrifying thought wiggled into Ash’s mind—she wasn’t strong enough. Anathrasa may not have had her full power, but she was ancient and resilient all the same, and Ash barely knew how to use the power she had just gotten.
One of her feet slipped, sending her lurching back through the sand. She gritted her teeth and pulled at Anathrasa’s energeia, harder, with everything she had—everything that still wouldn’t be enough.
“Take it!” Ash heard a cry behind her. Hydra? “Madoc, take my hydreia and give it all to her, now!”
A hand touched her back, and water gushed through Ash’s body. Cool and refreshing, it chased the other energeias in her soul and infused the hydreia already waiting there with extra power.
Something else came, too. Something still and sturdy and familiar.
Madoc was giving her his own anathreia.
She wanted to tell him not to. She wanted to stop him, but it filled her before she could protest, an effervescent burst of anathreia. It was small against the power Ash had—but it was enough.
Like the final surge of a wave against a weakening tide wall, Ash threw the extra power at Anathrasa.
A moment of tension, and then it gave. It gave and gave until Anathrasa’s soul went limp and surrendered to Ash’s grasp.
Ash stumbled back. Everything was sunlight. Golden rays cascaded over the arena, the forest, the world, threads of connection, pulses of energeia.
All she could see was golden power.
The knowledge came, sure and strong: no one had ever been this powerful. No being, no mortal, no god. Ash was something bigger than all of that. Something darker, and brighter, terrible and wonderful all at once.
She could rule it all. The world would bow to her, and those who wouldn’t bow in honor would bow in fear. She was a goddess of goddesses and she was everything.
Ash breathed too fast and her heartbeat thundered.
Anchors in the noise.
Tor hugging her. Taro and Spark, smiling at her. Madoc, his lips on hers, his laugh.
Char.
Ash bent over with a cry.
No, Ash.
The voice came from a darkness. A space between spaces.
We are not meant for this power, the voice said.
An overwhelming embrace of love wrapped around Ash, softening her, warming her more deeply than any igneia. This wasn’t like when she’d seen Char under Florus’s poison.
This was real.
Ash wept. “Mama—”
Let the power go, said the voice. Let it go, my fuel and flame.
Ash screamed.
Anathreia was everything. And so Ash put it back into the everything that it had made.
She screamed louder and, as she had taken Anathrasa’s soul out of her body, she pushed the energeias out into the ether. Floreia went into the trees, pulling them back beneath the earth and freeing the people trapped in them; hydreia went into the water; geoeia went into the stones and bioseia to the animals and aereia to the air—and igneia. Ignitus’s fire flickered in protest, a scorching pulse in Ash’s chest, and she sobbed as she pushed it out into the flames of the world. It was mingled now, one energeia made of six parts, and she had to break it all out of her soul.
When it was gone, Ash fell to her knees, sobbing, helplessly exhausted.
But she blinked, and the golden power was gone. The world was itself again, the fighting sands littered with the former army now freed from the floreia forest—
And Anathrasa was on the ground before Ash. The Mother Goddess gawked at her shaking limbs, her skin gradually shriveling, becoming old and mottled.
Ash could feel Madoc and Hydra behind her, pulling out of their own shock. But Anathrasa came to first.
“No,” Anathrasa gasped, “no!”
She staggered to her feet. Ash didn’t have the strength to retreat, her own body shaking as well, and she steeled herself with clenched fists.
But a figure moved behind Anathrasa, and Ash smiled.
Anathrasa took her grin as taunting. “How dare you!” she bellowed. She hobbled forward, aging more and more by the second. “You will pay for this, mortal. I survived this trick once, and I’ll survive it again!”
“No.” Ash shook her head. “You won’t.”
Before Anathrasa could respond, her body arched backward. The tip of a blade poked through her chest, blood glinting in a ray of sun.
Ilena’s face appeared over her shoulder. “This is for my family.”
She pushed, and Anathrasa’s body toppled to the sand. Dead.
Ilena’s eyes met Ash’s across the space between them, and when they both smiled, it was exhausted, and it was relieved, and it was as many things as anathreia was. Everything all at once.
Twenty-Five
MADOC
MADOC FELT WEAK, shaken. As if Anathrasa was still controlling his body. He didn’t know where to look—at the Mother Goddess, lying dead on the ground, appearing more like Seneca, their old neighbor, than the ruthless goddess who’d captured Deimos—or to his mother, standing over her.
Ilena had done it.
They’d all done it.
He could hardly believe he was alive. He wouldn’t have been, had he not channeled his anathreia into Ash. The link between him and Anathrasa would have killed him.
Ilena stepped back, instantly wiping her bloody hands on her dusty white robes. Long streaks of red lined her sides, but she didn’t seem to notice them. She was staring at Anathrasa, her mouth, still marked with chalk, set in a tight line, her eyes hard with anger.
“Mother,” he said.
Her gaze flicked up. Met his. Steadied.
She nodded.
Cassia’s vengeance had been delivered by the one person who needed it most.
He stumbled toward her, feet pedaling through the sand. Behind her, the people who’d been trapped in the branches of Anathrasa’s forest looked around, calling for help and searching for a way out. The remaining Laks and Cenhelmians looked to their gods for answers, but Biotus was dead, pulled apart by the crowd, and Aera, as powerless as any Undivine, was kicking in rage at the sand beside his body. Voices were raised in confusion, yet Madoc couldn’t feel their panic or their pain. He could feel nothing but his own
battered body and the wonder and relief that they were still alive.
His anathreia was gone. He didn’t have to call on it to know. The power that had been growing inside him since the war between Geoxus and Ignitus was silent now. It demanded nothing—not to tithe on emotion or injury, or feed on another’s energeia. Without his intensified intuition, he felt untethered, unable to gauge the intentions of those around him. Unable to truly grasp their victory.
But he also felt . . . free.
“Madoc,” Ilena said as he approached. “You’re all right?”
“Yes.” He took her hands, finding them cold and shaking. He pulled her close, remembering the way Cassia had fit against him. Wiry. Small.
Stronger than stone.
“Madoc! Mother!” Elias was running toward them, and with a sob, Ilena pulled him into their embrace. Danon and Ava weren’t far behind—Ava shoved her way between their legs to be in the middle of the huddle, while Danon kept pointing at Madoc, brows drawn in confusion.
“Did you just—to a god?” he was saying. Madoc just laughed.
“My children,” Ilena said, over and over, and somewhere, Madoc knew Cassia was smiling.
Over Ilena’s shoulder, he spotted Ash embracing Hydra. Saw Hydra laugh and wipe away a tear. Tor had arrived as well, and was running toward them, and when Ash leaped into his arms, he let out a holler loud enough to make Madoc laugh even harder.
She smiled at him then—the warrior who could kill gods and hold six energeias inside her. The girl with the fist around his heart.
He moved toward her, but she was already coming to him. He didn’t know whether to pull her into his arms, or kiss her, or tell her the hundred things he’d been wanting to say since they’d last spoken. In the end, when they stopped toe to toe, he said, “Thanks for bringing me back.”
She bit her lip. “You brought yourself back. I just reminded you what you were missing.”
“Keep reminding me. Every day.”
She blew out a slow breath. “That sounds like a lot of work.”
“You won’t regret it,” he said. She laughed, and he cupped her cheeks in his hands and drew her close. But he paused a breath away at the drop of her gaze.
