Opening the coffin had been as easy as commanding the stones of the mountain to move.
“What have you done?” Nesta said, silver fire flaring in her eyes, down Ataraxia’s blade.
The Asteri laid a hand on the unlocked coffin lid and began to push.
Like Hel would she face this thing unarmed. Bryce extended a hand toward Azriel, casting her will with it.
The Starsword flew from his hand and into hers.
Azriel started, shadows flashing at his shoulders, readying to strike, but Bryce said, “Theia showed me that trick in Silene’s little memory montage.” It was the feeling she’d been sensing, of the blade calling to her. Being willing to leap into her hand.
Azriel bared his teeth, but drew another sword that had been sheathed in a concealed panel at his back and hefted Truth-Teller in his other hand as Nesta lifted Ataraxia—
Bryce twisted to the coffin in time to see the Asteri slowly climb out, like a hatching spider.
Bryce’s chest provided the only light, making the monster’s pale skin even whiter, deepening the red of her lips to a near-purple hue. Her long black hair draped down her slim form, pooling on the stone beneath her like liquid night.
But she remained on the floor, hunched over herself. Like she didn’t have the strength to stand.
“You go left,” Azriel murmured to Nesta, power blazing around them.
“No,” Bryce said, not looking back as she approached the Asteri on the floor and sat down, setting the Starsword on the cold stone beside her.
To her shock, Azriel and Nesta didn’t attack. But they remained only a step away, weapons at the ready.
“Your companions think you mad for releasing me,” the Asteri said, picking at an invisible speck on her golden silk gown as she settled herself into a proper seated position.
“They don’t realize that you haven’t fed in thousands of years, and I can kick your ass.”
“We realized it,” Nesta muttered.
“Let’s start with the basics, leech,” Bryce said to the Asteri. “Where did—”
“You may call me Vesperus.” The creature’s eyes glowed with irritation.
“Are you related to Hesperus?” Bryce arched a brow at the name, so similar to one of Midgard’s Asteri. “The Evening Star?”
“I am the Evening Star,” Vesperus seethed.
Bryce rolled her eyes. “Fine, we’ll call you the Evening Star, too. Happy?”
“Is it not fitting?” A wave of long fingers capped in sharp nails. “I drank from the land’s magic, and the land’s magic drank from me.”
“Where did you come from, before you arrived here?”
Vesperus folded her hands in her lap. “A planet that was once green, as this one is.”
“And that wasn’t good enough?”
“We grew too populous. Wars broke out between the various beings on our world. Some of us saw the changes in the land beginning—rivers run dry, clouds so thick the sun could not pierce them—and left. Our brightest minds found ways to bend the fabric of worlds. To travel between them. Wayfarers, we called them. World-walkers.”
“So you trashed your planet, then went to feed off others?”
“We had to find sustenance.”
Bryce’s fingers curled against the rock floor, but her voice remained steady. “If you knew how to open portals between worlds, why did you need to rely on the Dread Trove?”
“Once we left our home world, our powers began to dim. Too late, we realized that we had been dependent on our land’s inherent magic. The magic in other worlds was not potent enough. Yet we could not find the way back home. Those of us who ventured here found ways to amplify that power, thanks to the gifts of the land. We pooled our power, and imbued those gifts into the Cauldron so that it would work our will. We Made the Trove from it. And then bound the very essence of the Cauldron to the soul of this world.”
Solas. “So destroy the Cauldron …”
“And you destroy this world. One cannot exist without the other.”
Behind them, Nesta sucked in a sharp breath. But Bryce said, “You gave this world a kill switch.”
“We gave many worlds … kill switches. To protect our interests.” She said it with such calm, such surety.
“Do you know Rigelus?”
“You speak his name very casually for a worm.”
“We’re closely acquainted.”
A slight pursing of the lips. “I knew him in passing. I’m assuming you wish to slay him—and have come to ask me how to do it.”
Bryce said nothing.
Vesperus leveled a cold look at her. “I will not help you in that regard. I will not betray the secrets of my people.”
“Was this sort of compassion the reason Theia didn’t kill you?”
Vesperus glowered. “Theia knew that for my kind, this sort of punishment would be far worse than death. To be confined, yet live. To neither breathe, nor eat, nor drink—but to be left in half slumber, starving.” That gleam in her eyes—it wasn’t solely rage. It was madness. “It would have been a mercy to kill me. Theia did not understand the word. I raised her from childhood not to. She would come down here every now and then and stare at me—I slept, but I could sense her there. Gloating over me. Convinced of her triumph.”
A chill skittered down Bryce’s spine. “She kept you down here as a trophy.”
Vesperus’s chin dipped in a nod. “I believe she drew pleasure from my suffering.”
“I don’t blame her,” Bryce snapped, even as a sick feeling filled her stomach. Theia might have helped Midgard in the end, but she was no better than the monster who’d raised her.
“I have questions for you, too, mongrel.”
“By all means,” Bryce said, waving her hand.
“If we lost the war to Theia, if my people are now a mere myth, how is it that you know Rigelus intimately? Do the Asteri still dwell here?”
“No,” Bryce said. “I came from another world. One where the Asteri remain in control.”
“How long have the Asteri ruled?”
“Fifteen thousand years.”
“Rigelus must be very pleased with himself.”
“Oh, he is.”
But the Asteri looked from Bryce to Azriel and Nesta behind her, brows lifting. “Is life so unbearable under our rule that you must always defy us?”
Yes. No. For Bryce, life had been fine. Shitty in spots, but fine. But for so many others …
“Does it matter,” Vesperus pushed on, addressing Bryce once more, “that we take a little of your power? What would you even do with it?”
“It matters that we’re lied to,” Bryce said. “That our power is not yours for the taking. That your supremacy is unchecked and unearned.”
“There is a natural order to the universe, girl. The strong rule the weak, and the weak benefit from it. Everything in nature preys and is preyed upon. You Fae somehow consider this an affront only when it is applied to you.”
“I’m not going to debate the ethics of conquest with you. Rigelus and the others have no right to my world, but they’ve poisoned the water in Midgard—it’s full of some sort of parasite that leaches our magic and requires us to offer it up to the Asteri. How do I undo it?”
Vesperus’s eyes glowed with delight. “We’d hoped for something of this nature, rather than the Tithe, which required the consent”—she spat the word as if it tasted foul—“of our subjects, but we never figured out how … The water supply, you say?” A soft laugh. “Rigelus always was clever.”
“How the fuck do I undo it?”
“You seem to think me inclined to help you, when I would receive nothing in return.”
“I know what you want, and you’re not getting it.”
“And if I were to say that I have no wish to rule, only to live?”
“You’d still be a leech, who’d need to feed on these people. You don’t deserve to go free.”
“They have a place in this land for creatures like me. The unwanted. It is called the Middle. I have dreamt of it, seen it in my long slumber.”
“That’s not my decision to make.”
“Use the Crown that Made scum over there possesses.” Vesperus nodded to Nesta. “You could forge a path to enact your vision by clearing the minds of those before you.”
She had no idea what Vesperus meant, but Bryce countered coolly, “You guys had a long fucking time to figure out every way to justify your actions, huh?”
“We are superior beings. We do not need to justify anything.”
“You’d fit right in on Midgard.”
“If Rigelus has held on to his power for so long, then your world is firmly in his grasp. He will not abandon it. He will have learned from the mistakes my companions and I made on this world and on others.”
Bryce’s hand curled into a fist. The force of holding her power at bay sang through her.
Vesperus’s gaze darted to Bryce’s glowing fist. “Is it time for us to battle, then?”
Power thrummed from the Asteri, a steady beat against Bryce’s skin.
Even depriving Vesperus of her magic sustenance for this long hadn’t killed her. What would taking out that massive core of firstlight under the Asteri’s palace in the Eternal City do, other than remove their source of nutrition? It wouldn’t be enough.
So Bryce let some of her power shimmer to the surface. She could have sworn her starlight was … heavier. Different, somehow, with the addition of what she’d claimed from Silene.
“I know you can die,” Bryce said, and felt the power glowing in her eyes. “The Fae killed you losers once, and on my world, Apollion ate one of you.”
“Ate?” Vesperus’s amusement banked.
Bryce smiled slowly. “They call him the Star-Eater. He ate Sirius. I have him on standby, waiting to come eat you, too.”
“You lie.”
“I wish I could show you the empty throne Rigelus still keeps for Sirius. It’s sort of sweet.”
“What manner of creature is this Apollion?”
“We call them demons, but you probably know them by some other name. Your kind tried to invade their world, Hel. It didn’t go well for you.”
“Then Hel and this Apollion shall pay for such sacrilege,” Vesperus hissed.
“Somehow, I don’t think you’ll be the one to make him.”
Vesperus’s fingers tapped her gold-clad knee. Her eyes guttered to midnight blue, promising death. She braced her hands on the ground and began to push upward—to stand.
“Don’t move,” Bryce warned, hand closing around the Starsword’s hilt. Azriel and Nesta pointed their blades at the Asteri.
But Vesperus completed the motion. Stood to her full height. Bryce had no choice but to shoot to her feet as well. Vesperus swayed, but remained upright.
The Asteri advanced a tentative, testing step. Bryce held her ground.
Vesperus took another step, steadier now, and smiled past Bryce. At Azriel, at Truth-Teller. “You don’t know how to use it, do you?”
Azriel pointed the dagger toward the advancing Asteri. “Pretty sure this end’s the one that’ll go through your gut.”
Vesperus chuckled, her dark hair swaying with each inching step closer. “Typical of your kind. You want to play with our weapons, but have no concept of their true abilities. Your mind couldn’t hold all the possibilities at once.”
Azriel snarled softly, wings flaring, “Try me.”
Vesperus took one more step, now barely a foot from Bryce. “I can smell it—how much of what we created here went unused. Ignorant fools.”
Bryce let her magic flow. A thought, and her hair drifted around her head, borne aloft once more by the currents of her power, still amplified by what she’d seized from this mountain. She angled the Starsword before her, light rippling along the blade.
Vesperus backed up a half step, hissing at the gleaming weapon. “We hid pockets of our power throughout the lands, in case the vermin should cause … problems. It seems our wisdom did not fail us.”
“There are no such places,” Azriel countered coldly.
“Are there not?” Vesperus grinned broadly, showing all of her too-white teeth. “Have you looked beneath every sacred mountain? At their very roots? The magic draws all sorts of creatures. I can sense them even now, slithering about, gnawing on the magic. My magic. They’re as much vermin as the rest of you.”
Bryce carefully didn’t glance at Nesta, who was creeping around the crystal coffin. Nesta had claimed earlier that the Middengard Wyrm had eaten her power—was that the sort of creature Vesperus meant?
And perhaps more importantly: Was Nesta still weakened? Or had her power returned?
Bryce clutched the Starsword tighter. Its power thudded into her palms like a heartbeat. “But why store your power here? It’s an island—not exactly an easy pit stop.”
“There are certain places, girl, that are better suited to hold power than others. Places where the veil between worlds is thin, and magic naturally abounds. Our light thrives in such environments, sustained by the regenerative magic of the land.” She gestured around them. “This island is a thin place—the mists around it declare it so.”
Bryce continued, buying Nesta more time to get closer to Vesperus, “We don’t have anything like that on Midgard.”
But didn’t they? The Bone Quarter, surrounded by impenetrable mists, held all that secondlight.
“Every world has at least one thin place,” Vesperus drawled. “And there are always certain people more suited to exploit it—to claim its powers, to travel through them to other worlds.”
The Northern Rift was wreathed in mist, too, Bryce realized. A tear between worlds—a thin place. And the riverbank where she’d landed in this world … it had been misty there, as well.
“Theia had the gift,” Vesperus said, “but did not understand how to claim the light. I made sure never to reveal how during her training—how she might light up entire worlds, if she wished, if she seized the power to amplify her own. But you, Light-Stealer … She must have passed the gift down to you. And it seems you have learned what she did not.”
Vesperus peered at her bare feet, the rock beneath. “Theia never learned how to access the power I cached beneath my palace. She had no choice but to leave it there, buried in the veins of this mountain. Her loss—and my gain.”
Oh gods. There was a fucking firstlight core here, far beneath their feet—
Vesperus smiled. “You really should have killed me when you had the chance.”
Light shot up the Asteri’s legs, into her body. A blinding flash, and then—
Vesperus’s red mouth opened in joy and triumph, but no sound came out. Only black blood.
Bryce blinked at the crunch. The wet spray. The glint of silver that appeared between Vesperus’s shining breasts.
The firstlight flowing up the Asteri’s body shivered—and vanished.
Nesta had plunged Ataraxia right through Vesperus’s chest.
