WATCHING Oli shut down as she speaks to her bond still sends the same ripples of unease and frustration through my gut as it always has, but I try to distract myself by speaking with my own bond instead.
My least favorite thing to do.
But my feelings don’t matter right now, because as much as I have always fought with the thing that lives inside of me, I will do whatever it takes for my Bonded to be safe. Knowing that there are gods living in each of us means that it’s time to get over my own feelings and start working with it to get through this, especially if there is a precedent of us losing this battle.
I’m never going to lose Oleander again.
Do you call her the Eternal as well?
It answers me quickly enough, clearly listening in on this conversation, though it hadn’t made itself known to me. My bonded is Eternal, always.
And what do they call you? You must all have names if you’ve been around that many times.
The Crux. My brother’s name is the Corvus. There’s also the Soothsayer, the Cleaver, and the Draconis. They have all woken, finally.
The Soothsayer.
That’s what Oli had called Gryphon’s bond.
How are we going to keep them alive? What is your plan for the Eternal and my Bonded that it lives within?
I’m not sure what sort of a response I’m expecting from it, but I’m happy with what I get. Beyond happiness, the relief it fills me with is enough that maybe, just very maybe, I might start speaking to the god a little more often.
They are both mine, as they are yours. There is no distinction. When our enemy comes, as they always do, we will defeat them all. We are unmatched now.
I open my eyes and glance across at Nox to find him already staring at me. I give him a simple nod before he turns back to Gryphon’s bond.
The Soothsayer.
I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from smirking, already knowing that my Bonded is going to have a lot to say about the names of the gods, but I also find myself happy with the one chosen for her bond.
The Eternal.
Without question, she is eternally and completely mine. The center of our Bonded Group, eternally the one thing that we can all agree on and come together for, all of us working together to keep her safe.
That’s the difference, my bond says. That’s how we are going to make it through this time, all of us together.
“What’s going on?” Gabe mumbles into the silence of the room, and I answer back without any attempts at secrecy.
They have no place here.
“My bond’s name is the Crux, yours is the Draconis. Atlas is the Cleaver, and Nox is the Corvus.”
I’m expecting some sort of reaction from them, especially my brother, but Nox merely shrugs back. “The Corvus makes sense. They both link back to the Draven name. What if all of the reincarnations of the gods with shadows are born to our family bloodline? Father had them too.”
I groan and rub a hand over my face. “Don’t you think we would’ve heard more about all of this if that were true? That maybe we wouldn’t have had to look so hard to find the gods?”
“Did you, though? I mean, I know a lot of the books are rare and out of print, but it sounds like these things were hiding in plain sight… If they were ever hiding at all,” Gabe says, still looking incredibly green around the edges, and Atlas gives him a pat on the back with a sympathetic grimace.
The budding friendship they’d shakily started has turned into one of deep respect, and seeing the lengths that the dragon had gone to to keep the masses of Resistance soldiers away from Oleander was inspiring, to say the least. Atlas himself had mastered the Cleaver’s powers in such a short amount of time, thanks to the urgency of the fighting.
All in all, we’d walked away from everything relatively unscathed, only the now-healed bruises and scratches on my Bonded to show for it. Fighting in the Wasteland had taken too long and we’d come too close to losing her. The moment the shield had snapped into place around Oleander, separating her from the entire Bonded Group, I thought we’d lost her. It had only gotten worse when Nox’s shadows had filled the space, obscuring her from our view as she’d fought her torturer off.
I don’t know what I would’ve done if my brother hadn’t made it in there to get to her.
“Do we need to be worried about that?” Atlas murmurs, running a gentle hand down Oli’s cheek, but Nox only shrugs.
“She’s always had a close relationship with her bond, even when she was scared of what it could do. Whatever it’s showing her right now, it’s important for her to see.”
Any distraction to keep her from thinking about what had happened on the battlefield at the Wasteland is a win in my opinion. When we’d returned to the Sanctuary, it was only the distraction of Gryphon’s bond that had kept her from falling apart.
The moment we had returned here, I could see the cracks beginning to show on her carefully pasted-together facade. No matter how righteous she may feel in her work now that she is doing so to defend her Bonded Group and the community itself, it still takes a toll on her that no one understands as well as I do.
Her kill count in the Wasteland was only rivaled by my own and Nox’s, the sweeping clouds of our Gifts flooding over the soldiers and tearing them apart in the most vicious and violent ways. There isn’t an inch of remorse in me, but still, the cost of that power is heavy on my shoulders. It’s part of being a human with a soul, I think. Knowing that the weight of that choice is yours alone to carry.
I might believe in my abilities to tell right from wrong, but there’s no denying that to the Resistance and families of the East Coast, I’m the villain for what I can do, a role I’ll gladly play again and again for our safety and freedom.
“Are we going to remember the past lives as well? Am I ever going to remember what it was like to be a dragon back then?” Gabe asks, and when I look up, he’s staring at the Soothsayer.
It stares back at him with its blank and soulless eyes as though it has no intention of answering him, but Gabe stares back at it with that open and easy way of his. Whether or not it’s that that breaks the god-bond down, he does eventually answer. “If the Draconis chooses to share it with you, then yes, but it has always only ever communicated with the Eternal. It’s only ever wanted her.”
Gabe nods for a second and then shrugs. “It communicated well enough with us both when she jumped into my dreams, so I’m not worried. I don’t have to remember the past lives to know that everything is okay.”
I hope it’s really that easy.
I shut my eyes again, rubbing a hand over them more out of irritation than anything else, and my bond speaks once again.
I will show you. I will show you what happens if we fail.
I’M SURROUNDED by a sea of cobblestones and bodies. Underneath my feet, there are rustic wooden slats with nails sticking out everywhere, as though the platform had been thrown together in a rush with whatever materials were on hand. The buildings around me look like quaint village houses rather than any of the modern architecture that I am accustomed to, straw rooftops and roughly hewn stone walls everywhere. It’s as though I’ve been thrown hundreds of years into the past in the blink of an eye.
I guess I have been, in a way.
I don’t know where I am or what time it is, but I glance over and find my brother standing with me.
That one thing has stayed true, no matter what.
He doesn’t look like Nox, of course. His face is so different, but I get the same feeling from him as I do from Nox. It’s the protective urge to kill anyone who might want to harm him and a sense of familial connection, the need to make it out of this situation alive for him as much as for myself and my Bonded.
For him to find happiness and contentment.
I feel all of that for myself as well, for all of us to make it through this hellish experience that I’ve found out we’re stuck in, both back at the Sanctuary and here in this memory.
The cheering and shouting around us is my first clue that that isn’t going to happen.
I look down at my hands, but they are bound together in front of me with iron chains. The skin all the way up to my elbows is black, the same blackness that it changes to when I call on my shadows, but they’re nowhere to be seen. I haven’t run out of power for my Gift. I can still feel it there, but there’s a block inside of me, something stopping me from accessing it, even though I can feel the shadows pounding beneath my skin to come out, to devour, to kill and to protect, to stop this from happening.
I glance around, but my Bonded isn’t here with us. It’s just me and the Corvus standing on a platform in the middle of a rudimentary village, facing a crowd of Gifted and non-Gifted staring up at us as though we are monsters.
It’s not something that I’m unaccustomed to. I’ve spent my whole life bearing the Draven name and the legacy that comes with it, but the fear in these people’s eyes is so stark, the hatred all-consuming, that there’s no doubt about why we’re up here.
A man steps forward onto the platform with us and addresses the crowd in a booming voice. I don’t recognize the words that he’s speaking, a language ancient and long-since dead, but I still know what he’s saying.
He’s sentencing us to death for the crimes of our shadows.
I can feel my bond’s indignation at this, but at the same time, it’s resigned to this fate. It doesn’t want to put up a fight. It doesn’t want to find a way to survive here. It just wants all of this over with already.
As I look out over the rooftops of the small houses, my eye catches on the blood covering the stones out further past the crowd. With a sense of dread in my gut, I follow that blood, follow it all the way down until I find the large and scaled body of the dragon.
If the sheer amount of blood covering the streets wasn’t enough to convince me that it’s dead, the spear skewering the large animal’s body straight through the chest and digging around as though they were attempting to spill its guts out would be a sure indicator.
I can’t look away from it.
The more I stare at it, the more horrifying the vision becomes. One of the wings has been partially cut away, the other in shreds from where arrows have gone through the thin membrane. Its jaws are wide open, and I can see where teeth have already been removed, as souvenirs, I’m sure.
Its eyes have rolled back in its head, but the blood that has oozed out of the socket is black, as though the voids themselves have spilled down and onto its cheeks.
We’re powerful in these forms, but without the Bonded Group together and the power of the Eternal pumping through all of us, we’re not invincible.
If there are other gods here who have woken earlier, then we just don’t stand a chance.
We never hunt them like they hunt us. We hunt for our Bonded, and for each other, so that we might live in this existence without the crushing loneliness we face when we cycle all by ourselves. I don’t know what has happened to the other gods to make it so that all they care about is destruction. What twisted and dark things must have occurred in their cycling for them to care about nothing but blood and death and destruction. However, that is the reality we face until the Bonded Group is completed.
We will know no peace until the Eternal has all five of the gods who belong to it by its side. We will live this hollow and painful existence again and again until the end of time unless we do.
Finally, I look down at my hands again to find that in the center of one of my palms is a lock of hair tied in a ribbon. It’s white, the same unnatural color of Oleander’s hair due to her Gift and the power it takes for her to Soul Rend. I know without having to speak to my bond that this version of her, from this time, is already dead.
My bond won’t fight back because it doesn’t want to exist without her.
The Corvus’ dead, void eyes next to me say the exact same thing.
It might pain me to know that his death is imminent, but I wouldn’t wish another day on this earth without her or him any more than I would myself.
Without her, we are nothing.
