Dreams of Gods & Monsters(120)
Author: Laini Taylor

—Pain is one way. The easiest and crudest. The pain tithe is… using a plow to pluck a flower. Is it all you know?

He nodded. It was unnerving, this speaking without speaking.

“Not all,” objected Scarab, aloud. “Or we wouldn’t be here.”

The way she looked at him, the blame. Akiva began to understand. “Sirithar,” he said, hoarse.

Scarab’s look sharpened. “So you do know.”

“I know nothing.” He said it bitterly, feeling it more keenly than he ever had before.

Sensing his distress, Nightingale came forward. She didn’t reach for him but he felt, as he had once before, a cool touch at his brow, and knew it had been she who had prevented him from drawing power in the battle of the Adelphas, and who had, so briefly, soothed him after. In the next instant, he knew something else, and it staggered him: The enigma of the victory in the Adelphas. It had been them, of course.

These five angels had somehow turned the tide against four thousand Dominion. Many times over the past years, Akiva had tried to imagine the magic of his kin, but he had never guessed at such might as this.

Nightingale spoke now aloud, putting no more into his mind, and Akiva was glad of it, especially when he heard what more it was she had to say.

No cool touch could mitigate this.

“ ‘Sirithar’ is the energy itself, the raw substance of the veils. It is… the shell of the egg, and the yolk, too. It protects and it nourishes. It gives form to space and time, and without it there could be only chaos. You asked what it is you’ve done. You have taken sirithar.” She sounded sad. “So much at once that to tithe for it would have killed you hundreds of times over, but it didn’t, because you didn’t tithe. Child of my child, you gave nothing, only took. It shouldn’t be possible, and this is a very grave thing. What Scarab said is true. We tracked you here to kill you—”

“Before you could kill everyone.” This from Scarab. No gentleness from her. It didn’t matter.

Akiva was shaking his head. Not in denial. He believed them. He felt the truth of it, and the answer to the question that had been gnawing at him. But he still didn’t understand. “I know nothing,” he said again. “How could I kill—?” Everyone.

Nightingale’s voice grew hoarse. “I do not understand why ananke guided my daughter to the creation of you. Why should the veils give birth to their own destruction?”

Ananke. Echoes and reverberations of fate. “Destruction?” echoed Akiva, hollow. All his life, it had been made clear to him that he was not his own, that he was only a weapon of the Empire, a link in a chain; even his name was only borrowed. And he had broken free, claimed himself. He had claimed his life as a medium for action—action of his own choice—and he had believed that he was finally free.

He didn’t understand yet what Nightingale was telling him, or why Scarab held his life in question, but he understood this: All along, he had been ensnared in a far greater web of fate than ever he had ever dreamed.

His heart pounded, and Akiva knew that he was not free.

“It shouldn’t be possible to take without a tithe,” Nightingale repeated. She said it heavily, significantly, as though to be certain he understood. There was consternation and wariness in her look, and other flickers—blame? Possibly awe? “It isn’t possible for anyone else,” she added, her stare undeviating, and a word came to him—from a sending or from his own mind, he couldn’t tell.

Aberration.

“But you’ve done it three times. Akiva, to take without a tithe thins the veil.” Her gaze flickered to Scarab. She swallowed. “By thinning the veils…” She hesitated. This was it, Akiva knew. Here was the truth. It lurked behind her eyes, and it was as deep and bleak as any story ever told. He caught echoes, shreds. He had heard them before. Chosen. Fallen. Maps. Skies. Cataclysm. Meliz.

Beasts.

Nightingale tried to shy away from the telling, but Scarab didn’t let her.

“You wanted to talk to him, didn’t you? So talk. Tell him what it is we do, hour by hour, in our far green isles, and what he has to thank us for. Tell him why we’ve come for him, and what he nearly brought down on us. Tell him about the Cataclysm.”

83

MOST THINGS THAT MATTER

Karou held a gavriel on her palm. Everyone was gathered around her in the grand cavern. Chimaera, Misbegotten, humans. And Eliza, whatever she was now. Karou looked to where the girl was standing back by Virko’s side, and she didn’t know what Eliza was, but that they shared this: They were neither of them quite human, but something more, and each the only one of her kind.

“What will you wish?” asked Zuzana.

Karou looked back down at the medallion, so heavy in her hand. Brimstone seemed to gaze back at her. It was a crude casting, but it still brought his eyes home to her in a rush, and his voice, so deep it had been like the shadow of sound.

“I dream it, too, child,” he’d told her in the dungeon as she awaited execution, and she wished she could show him what was before her now—though no wish could ever accomplish that. See what we’ve done. See how Liraz and Ziri stand side by side. She would bet anything that the skin of their arms, so close to touching, was electrified as her own skin had been earlier, when Akiva was near her. And there was Keita-Eiri, who just a few days ago had been flashing her hamsas at Akiva and Liraz and laughing. She stood beside Orit, the angel from the war council who had glared across the table, arguing with the Wolf about the discipline of his soldiers. And Amzallag, who was ready, in the body Karou had made for him—not massive and gray like his last, or horrifying—to go and draw the souls of his children out of the ashes of Loramendi.

They were solemn and united, comrades who had fought together and survived an impossible battle, and who carried with them the mystery of it, and even more than solidarity. After the Adelphas, there was a creeping sense of destiny.

Destiny. Once again, Karou couldn’t shake the sense that, if there was such a thing, it hated her.

As to Zuzana’s question, what was she going to wish on this gavriel? What could she wish that would bring Akiva back to her, that would quell this vicious feeling stealing over her that they might accomplish everything they had believed they needed to, and still not be allowed to have each other? Brimstone had always been very clear as to the limits of wishing.

“There are things bigger than any wish,” he’d said, when she was a little girl. “Like what?” she’d asked, and his answer haunted her now, this gavriel heavy in her hand, and all she wanted was to believe that it could solve her problems. “Most things that matter,” was what Brimstone had said, and she knew he was right. She couldn’t wish for the dream, or for happiness, or for the world to just let them be. She knew what would happen. Nothing. The gavriel would just lie there, Brimstone’s likeness seeming to accuse her of foolishness.