by Jaymin Eve
I imagined the darkness as a thick curtain and started to roll it up. At first it was easy, but the more I rolled, the harder it got.
“Willa.” Aros’s voice sounded from close behind me. “Are you lifting the darkness?”
I nodded but didn’t open my eyes. I was almost done: the cloak of oppression was visibly reduced. Finally, with a long release of air, I managed to roll that last little section that I could feel with my energy. Hands wrapped around my arms, pulling me closer to them, and when I opened my eyes again I understood why.
I’d lifted the veil of darkness, but it was still above us, swirling, filled with sparks of colour and light. “What the hell is that?” I asked, relieved to finally be able to talk again? “Staviti?”
I was grasping, but I really didn’t want to be the one causing the world’s newest disaster.
“It’s not Staviti,” Coen said darkly, staring up, his eyes following the mass that swirled around us.
Gods everywhere did the same thing. None moved. They all just stared up and watched the darkness like it was the last thing they would ever see.
“Do you have a theory about what you did, Willa-toy?” Yael asked, somehow picking up on the tendrils of panic that were weaving through my thoughts.
“Uh,” I started. “I might have possibly … freedallthewraithsfromthebanishementcave.” My words were a fast rush, but they all understood me.
When they looked up this time, it was with a completely different expression across their faces. Fear. I’d never seen the Abcurses look afraid, not truly afraid, but I could tell that they feared what I might have done.
My nervousness had me starting to babble, because I was uncomfortable with all of the silence. “I was thinking about Jeffrey for some reason and then I held on to the thought of her tightly but instead I think I held on to Jeffrey’s wraith and yanked it here … along with all the other wraiths that had been trapped in there.”
I had broken the seal on the banishment cave, releasing that destruction into the world.
“Well, that was one thing on your to-do list,” Siret said, his expression was more relaxed than his brother’s.
“What do we do?” I whispered.
The sky above seemed to grow angrier by the click, and a loud crash rang across the land, almost knocking us to the ground. The gods broke free from whatever shock had held them and they turned to me almost in a single movement. It was probably the scariest thing that had ever happened to me, and considering recent events in my life, that was really saying something. I knew that this was the moment in which I had to make a choice. Did I cower and beg for forgiveness, or did I stand up and admit to what I had done? That this was something necessary to balance out the worlds? On one hand, I wasn’t even sure that what I had done was necessary for the balance of the worlds, but on the other, I couldn’t think of any other reason why I would have been spurred to do it. There had to be a reason.
That last thought seemed to come out of nowhere, but it felt right as soon as I acknowledged it. Trapping whatever remnants of soul that the servers possessed in the cave—binding them there and turning them into lost wraiths—was one of Staviti’s larger atrocities. It had to be contributing to the imbalance: souls didn’t belong trapped in a cave, not even partial souls. I’d wanted to free them the first time I’d landed amongst them, but the Abcurses had warned me that in doing so, it would release their destructive force upon the worlds.
“What have you done?” a tall brunette goddess asked.
She wore robes of lilac and had the largest blue eyes I think I’d ever seen. It was almost comical, but she still somehow pulled it off without looking like a bug.
“I have freed the banished servers,” I said, my voice much louder than usual, even though I hadn’t actively tried to project it. “The broken souls that were rejected and sent away by Staviti, by all of you. The souls that should never have been stolen in the first place.”
“Why would you do that?” a dark-skinned man in bright cerulean robes demanded. “You have brought about the end of the worlds.”
I cleared my throat a little, stepping away from the protection of my guys, standing as tall as I could in a small patch of grass.
“The imbalance must be repaired,” I stated simply. “Topia is dying. Minatsol is dying. One has taken for too long from the other.” Cyrus joined me on one side, and I found myself turning to him. “This is why you built your home near the banishment cave,” I said, feeling somewhat certain of that fact. The more my power filled me, the more in touch with it and the land I was becoming. “Because you knew there was an imbalance there; something you needed to fix.”
He nodded. “Yes, but I never knew how without destroying everything. So I remained where I was, watching … waiting.”
My eyes lifted again. The darkness swirled, but it didn’t move.
“Have I contained them?” I asked.
It was the only thing that made sense to me. The curtain I’d rolled up had trapped the wraiths within the folds, keeping them from spreading.
“Try and will the darkness somewhere,” Cyrus suggested. “See if you can move it.”
The mass above us was huge, easily the size of ten marble platforms. I decided to see if I could just shift it a few dozen feet further away from us, toward the snow.
It didn’t move.
“I think it’s trapped within the garden,” a breathy female voice said from close by, and I turned my head to find Pica there, her jewels even more blinding up close. “It loves the garden.”
“It’s got to be a combination of Willa’s Creation and the garden’s ancient magic that allows her to contain them,” Aros said, his lips pressed into firm lines. He looked pretty upset and I hoped that there was nothing else going on that I didn’t know about.
“Do you think this is a good time to ask the gods if they want to side with us?” I asked half-jokingly.
“I’m surprised they haven’t all stepped through a pocket and disappeared,” Emmy snort-laughed. “Because this is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“No pockets,” Rome said shortly. “We’re all blocked. Cyrus has forbidden everyone … and he’s pretty good at enforcing rules.”
A flapping sound drew my attention—for some reason I heard it before everyone else, but within a few clicks, all the gods were watching the large herd of panteras descending on us.
Leden! I thought happily. Her reply came almost instantly.
Willa, release the souls!
I coughed, trying to figure out if I’d misheard her. Release them? That might end the world.
The panteras landed in the snow field beyond our garden, beyond the darkness above.
It is not our place to interfere, Leden replied. But these souls are already harming the land. They are harming us all. They are being tortured, tied to a world they don’t belong in. If you want to stop the cycle of pain, you will need to release them. Trust that they will find their way. Trust that those freed from pain will not wish to inflict more. Trust the nature of the souls that once were.
The panteras didn’t come any closer, but Leden’s familiar shiny coat came into view as she stepped forward from the others.
We are here as their final guides, her voice told me, and her words from only a moment ago entered my head again.
“They can’t interfere,” I muttered. “But they can guide.”
My chest got tight then, just knowing that the wraiths wouldn’t be trapped any longer. It filled me with the sort of emotion I wasn’t sure I’d experienced before. I’d never worshipped the gods, not in the same way that most sols and dwellers did, but I did feel a spiritual urge to release the wraiths.
Why did you never free them yourselves? I asked Leden.
That would have been interfering, she said simply.
I sensed she was done talking and wanted me to get on with it, so I released my hold on the darkness. The curtain I’d rolled up unravelled quickly, but the darkness didn’t drop over ou
r eyes like before. I’d contained the wraiths in the sky, and it was there they stayed for a few clicks, swirling around with flashes of brilliant colour. Now that they were no longer trapped, the beauty of their souls became clear for all to see.
The rustling of wings had me turning to find the panteras taking to the sky again. Moving as a large mass, they reached the darkness in less than a few micro-clicks. Light spread from their bodies, subtle at first but it was soon cutting through the souls and breaking them apart, freeing them in a way that I had not been able to. I might have been a Creator, but I wasn’t a source of power like the panteras or the Garden of Everlasting. They had both proven to be far stronger than me.
Did that mean the land could restore itself if enough power was returned to it? I hoped so, for everyone.
Wraiths attached themselves to the panteras, who began to lift them higher and higher. For just a moment, I got to witness the transformation of colour as the darkness seeped away and brilliant blues and greens and reds swirled around. It was hard to make out exact shapes because the sunlight soon blinded us to the final journey of the souls, and then the next thing I saw was a bright and clear sky, with no remaining hints of darkness.
The panteras appeared again, descending slowly until they landed in the snow-filled field beyond the garden. I wanted to reach out to Leden and ask her for guidance, but she had already made it clear that they weren’t able to get involved. Many times. Asking her for help now would feel like an abuse of my special connection to her. So I kept the questions from my mind and searched out Yael, who I had been doing a terrible job of keeping an eye on. After surmising that he was completely unscathed, I did a quick check of the others because I couldn’t help myself. Everyone was closing in around me, unable to spread out the way we had originally planned. Even Pica was looming close, hovering not far from Cyrus and Emmy. They were all watching me as I watched them, and I gradually became aware that the silence had grown, if possible, even more tense than before. I was confused, because the darkness had lifted and the souls had been carried away.
“What is it?” I whispered to Siret, though my voice carried in the eerie silence.
“They’re waiting,” Siret muttered back. “You just broke Staviti’s hold over thousands upon thousands of hostage souls … there’s no way you don’t have his attention now.”
I glanced back to Leden and the herd of panteras gathered patiently beyond the garden. They were also waiting; everyone was holding their breath and withholding their support until I had proven myself to them—and nothing short of an actual confrontation with Staviti would convince them. They didn’t care about Emmy’s ability to make flowers bloom, and my show of almost destroying the worlds had done nothing more than alarm them and make them feel unsettled. Not that I needed their approval to know that I had done the right thing, to know that I had made a small difference … but I did need their approval to go against Staviti. If I were honest with myself, there wasn’t anything I could do to convince them to revolt against Staviti without revolting against Staviti myself. I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath and sensing for a sudden surge of power—as I assumed that was what it would feel like when Staviti appeared. Feeling nothing, I wove my way through the people and back to the stage.
“I am not asking you to follow me,” I shouted, since I had no control over the voice-projection thing that I had managed to pull off earlier. “I’m just asking you to wake up, to open your eyes, and to step out from below Staviti’s leadership—because he does not care to lead you anywhere but into destruction.” I took a deep breath and closed my eyes again, willing my voice to project strongly, to reach each person. “I. Do. Not. Want. To. Lead. You.” I punctuated each word, allowing the finality of my statement to settle over everyone. It was important for Topia to be rid of Staviti—but not so that I could take his place, because that was only removing a bad system and replacing it with exactly the same system.
“Then who will lead us?” a man called back.
“Are you not gods?” Cyrus asked, his voice dry. “Must you really be led?” His words didn’t carry as mine had, but a few of the gods closest to us chuckled.
Some of the tension eased, then, as though they finally understood what I was trying to orchestrate. I didn’t just want to protect myself from Staviti. I wanted to be free of him, and I wanted everyone else to also be free of him—whether that was possible to achieve without a fight wasn’t for me to decide.
“What if we don’t want to be free?” someone else asked, and the crowd parted around the voice.
Suddenly I was staring down a long stretch of grass at a man I had hoped never to see again. Crowe was wrapped in black robes, his features heavy and his expression mild—though there was something in his movements as he made his way down the cleared path toward me. The other gods shifted uneasily, and I realised that they had stepped away at the sound of his voice out of fear. I shot a quick look to Yael, even though I could feel him well enough to know that he was fine without even looking. Siret’s hand landed on the small of my back, a comforting reminder that even though they were letting me do this alone—I would never actually be alone.
“Do you want to be in service to Staviti?” I replied calmly, when Crowe was before me.
Instead of answering my question, his dark eyes shifted over my shoulder, scanning the faces of those who hovered around me.
When he paused, I glanced in the direction of his gaze and found Pica standing alone, a peaceful smile on her face. The woman needed to learn how to read a room. Seriously.
“I am surprised to see you’re in support of this, Pica,” Crowe stated loudly, drawing a few murmurs from the gathered people. “You have long been Staviti’s favourite creation.”
“Staviti has been lying to us,” Pica replied happily. “I love all ways of expression … but … his lies have cost me an even greater love. The love of my child. If Staviti is forced to relinquish control over Topia, there would be no further bans on god children.”
“Is this true?” a woman asked, sounding confused. “Is it not the way of the land that our children cannot survive?”
“It is not,” Pica confirmed. “And it is not the way of the land for our immortal souls to remain separate, to not love or join other souls in relationships. If that were true, why would I be allowed to exist?” She tossed her hair from her shoulder, grinning at everyone in what actually seemed to be a condescending way. As though they should have all reached the same conclusion by now.
Judging from some of the faces I could see they had already reached the same conclusion. So people weren’t immune to Staviti’s lies—in fact, the Abcurses had told me that many gods disobeyed the relationship rule, which meant that they had already started rebelling against Staviti in small ways long before I came onto the scene. I seized this information now, directing my attention at Crowe.
“Do you want to remain under Staviti’s control?” I asked him, my voice stronger this time, my question demanding an answer.
His eyes flicked back to mine and held, a quiver of power passing briefly between us. It was a strange kind of acknowledgment, as though his energy had reacted to the strength of mine. I only ever felt that sort of reverberation from a few others: Pica, Terrance, Abil, Adeline, and Rau. Each of their energies had set off a visceral reaction in my skin that remained unmatched by any of the other gods.
No … that wasn’t right, I thought, my attention skittering to the large hand that was still shaped tightly to the curve of my back. I had felt it with the Abcurses as well, and Cyrus. It must have been in direct correlation to the strength of each of the gods, or perhaps their connection to Topia—and how deep the source of their power ran. The Original Gods were the most powerful, and the Abcurses were somewhere between an Original God and a created god, if such a thing existed. They had been born of a god union, but they had also been “gifted” life by Staviti. They were as original as Staviti was—seeing as he had been born of human parents but transformed by
the waters of Topia.
If I truly was the daughter of Jakan, then the only person with a stronger connection to Topia would be … me.
Nine
As Crowe stared at me, trying to formulate an answer to my question, I noticed that the panteras were still waiting beyond the garden. I wasn’t sure exactly how Staviti was keeping an eye on the party, but I was sure that he would never have just allowed this to happen unmonitored. I was also sure that he hadn’t actually turned up himself. It made me uneasy, as though we had walked into a trap of some kind even though this had been our idea.
“What would happen to our world—to us—if Staviti’s control over Topia was relinquished?” Crowe finally responded to me, though he only gave me another question. “You are young, and in your mind you are still a mortal. You do not understand. You could never understand. He is our creator, so what are we without him?”
“He didn’t create your souls,” I responded, remembering what Terrance had told me not so long ago. “He shaped your bodies, gave you powers, gave you purpose—but the land itself is what gave you a life force. A soul. Your soul is what shaped who you are as a god; it even shaped how your gifted power would manifest. Did you see what remained of the faulty servers that Staviti had imprisoned?” I asked, waving my hand up above us to where the dark mass had hovered. “He couldn’t properly rid himself of them because he didn’t own all of them. He could damage their souls, but he couldn’t destroy them. Not completely.”
“There was something wrong with those souls,” Crowe argued, and a brief shadow passed over his face. He had been disturbed by the wraiths.
