"He already has."

  "Out of all of the entities, Nolost was always the most anti-divine of them all. He'd destroy everything if he could. It was always our responsibility as gods to bring new life into being and to set that life with rules that it could follow and flourish under. To set Nolost loose on you is the deepest act of treason Taim could ever undertake!"

  "We're not too pleased about it ourselves."

  "Will none of the other gods help you? They could stand against him."

  "Some are helping us indirectly. They got us to Olastar, among other things. But they won't fight him openly. There's too much fighting among the gods already, it would make them too vulnerable. And frankly, I think they're afraid that they might die in the fight."

  "Not without reason. Such things have happened before."

  Blays nodded. "We've tried everything we can think of to stop this. In the end, we only had one choice left. To destroy Olastar, and with it, all the pathways Nolost is using to attack Rale."

  "And the means of destroying Olastar is to destroy me." Wessen considered the man speaking to him. "I will admit that's very clever. Or, it's almost very clever. But the 'almost' has made it very stupid instead."

  "Running off to fight a god is rarely a brilliant idea, I'll admit, but when it gets down to stupid or nothing, you have to go stupid."

  "What is it to kill me? To kill me is to remove me. If you wish to remove me, I suggest simply…removing me."

  Blays slapped his palm to his forehead. "You want us to cut you loose."

  "That possibility truly never occurred to you?"

  "I know we cut impressive figures, but we're winging everything at this point. We're lucky we still have brains left to come up with a plan as simple as murder." He gazed across the numerous red and blue beams lanced through the god. "At the risk of saying something even dumber, surely you must have tried to break them yourself at some point."

  "Countless times. Nothing worked. But much of my strength is exhausted just by being on the chains. Nor did I have a weapon such as yours."

  "Yeah, it's a pretty good one. Think it'll work?"

  "It might." Wessen looked across the four of them. "Once you were done with me, how did you intend to return home?"

  "We didn't."

  "You intended to die here?"

  "We intended to rip Nolost's gruesome tentacles out of Rale for good. Unfortunately for us, that appears to require going down with the ship."

  "So there is still nobility left in the worlds? Though I suppose it's much easier to sacrifice yourself when you know that you'll die anyway if you don't."

  "We've been forced into this position," Blays said. "Doing what we have to to get out of it doesn't make us noble."

  "But isn't that just the story of life? People are put into situations, that are often none of their own doing, and then must choose what to do in response. No more, no less."

  "Oh, don't get me wrong. If we pull this off, I'll pat myself on the back so hard my friend here will have to heal my broken shoulder blade."

  "Then why don't we make that happen?" Wessen stretched his arms and legs, though it must have hurt, making the beams passing through him tremble and sway. "Cut me loose, and I will open you a doorway back to Rale—and then I will open another to return me to the Realm."

  "You can do that? Open portals?"

  The god gave him a lopsided smirk. "I am the one who bends this world so its cracks can be connected to others. No one knows more about the doorways than I do."

  "Even so, I didn't think it was possible to make new portals to or from Pholos."

  "That's probably true of everyone who hasn't been in Pholos since the day of its creation. It is not true of me."

  Blays turned to the others. "Well?"

  "Can we trust him?" Dante said.

  "Worst thing that can happen is we cut him loose, he doesn't open us our portal, Olastar collapses, and we die with it. Which is the same thing we were expecting to happen five minutes ago."

  "All right. Let's do it." Dante pointed to a red beam piercing the god's left biceps. "Start with that one. But don't get too close to his—"

  A jolt racked Wessen as a blue chain strung through his right shoulder pulled taut. He bounced and twitched on the lines as they struggled against the warp of Olastar, his eyes squeezed shut, his teeth clenched so tight the mortals could hear them scraping against each other. Sweat shot across his brow while blood leaked from his shoulder.

  Dante looked away until it stopped. Wessen hung from his chains, breathing hard, head lolled forward, sweat-damp hair hanging down his face like it had when they'd first circled around him. After some time, he lifted his head and shook his hair to the sides, gazing at them with eyes as dull as soot.

  "Wessen?" Blays said. "Is that, ah, you?"

  A block of nether cohered alongside the god's head.

  "Wessen!" Gladdic barked. Ether burned from his uplifted hand. "Look into the light and return to it. Soon, you will suffer no more."

  Wessen shifted his gaze to Gladdic and the ether. The dullness faded from his eyes until they were alive again, the light of the ether reflecting within them.

  "There shouldn't…" He coughed, lips staining red with blood. "Shouldn't be another quake for a while. You should begin your work on the chains."

  "Sure thing." Blays seated himself in the boat. "Just tell us if anything starts to go wrong, will you?"

  Kelen conjured up the soma and steered them around to run along the underside of the chain Dante had indicated. Once they'd gotten a safer distance from Wessen, Kelen slowed and brought them up higher until they were hanging some nine feet beneath the beam.

  Blays stood and moved to the prow. He gripped the spear and stared up at the half-translucent line of neuma. It was wider across than the onas. "If I stab this, we're sure it isn't going to explode or something?"

  "I'll keep close watch on it," Kelen said. "Be ready for the onas to start moving very fast."

  Blays gave a distracted nod. Dante suddenly realized that nobody had any idea what was about to happen and so he pulled a cloud of nether to himself and spread it above them like a flock of birds frozen in flight. Blays muttered something under his breath, adjusted his grip one last time, then stabbed the spear upwards and out in front of them.

  The tip sank into the beam. Light flashed within the maroon chain as if through murky water. Blays retracted the spear, waiting in case a lethal blast of neuma was about to spray everywhere. Though the cut remained open, nothing came out of it. Blays cocked his head and struck again, slashing at the beam this time. The spear's bladed tip slid through the beam like it wasn't even there, opening a cut in it a foot deep. Blays drew back his weapon for another slash.

  The beam heaved upward. Blays threw himself down into the onas as Kelen kicked it forward as fast as he could, scooting away from the chain. They'd only gotten a few feet from it by the time it settled down, though, hanging there just as it had before.

  Blays glanced over his shoulder. "You all right?" he called.

  Wessen laughed. It wasn't a happy sound. "I've had worse a million times before."

  Something sank in Dante's stomach as he realized that rather than being the exaggeration it sounded like, it might actually be a gross underestimate of the number of times the god had been tortured. Dante couldn't even conceive of the pure length of time that Wessen had spent here, let alone what had been done to him across that span. As he dwelled on this, Kelen brought them back to where they'd been before. Blays hefted the spear and took another swipe across the gash he'd started cutting into it.

  The chain bucked again. Kelen was more ready this time, and sped them away from it as soon as it so much as twitched. Perhaps it was an overly cautious move. But it turned out to be a wise one. For as they coasted to a stop, and Kelen began to turn the onas around, a burst of red light shot down the beam toward Wessen, traveling faster than any arrow. When it struck him, he gave out a long scream of agony.

  Kelen had moved them further from the beam during this, and Dante had been dazzled by the surge of crimson light. So it was a few seconds before he got a good look at the beam.

  "Did it just…heal itself?" he said. "And get bigger?"

  "I was afraid of this outcome." Wessen's shoulders heaved. "The chains repair themselves, just as my body does. That is how both they and I last eternal."

  "Should I stop?" Blays said. "That one sounded like a bad one."

  "I will live." The god rubbed his face into his shoulder to wipe the tears from his cheek. "You must try again. Sever it as fast as you can, before it has the chance to undo the damage."

  "Right," Blays said when Kelen had brought them around to the chain. "Well, here we go."

  He slashed quickly at the beam above them, his methods less like a warrior fighting off foes and more like a hunter flensing the hide away from the meat it's adhered to. After his fourth cut, the neuma thrashed about like a living thing, dropping so close to the onas that they were almost absorbed in it. The hair lifted on Dante's arms and head.

  "We can't let it touch us!" he yelled.

  Kelen drove their vessel downwards, giving them multiple feet of clearance while staying close enough to the hitching chain for Blays to continue to strike at it. He swung the spear back and forth as fast as he could, ripping into the underside of the beam, but sometimes it jerked the part he'd been working on away from him, forcing him to start carving a new section up from scratch, while at other times it pulled the beam out of reach altogether. Blays was still gouging manically into the neuma when light flashed from up the chain.

  "Get down!" Dante said.

  Blays hurled himself into the hull, shrinking the spear as he did so to avoid cutting the boat in half. Kelen drove downward from the chain. Dante threw a nethereal shield above them just as a shock of red light pulsed along the beam overhead. The light struck Wessen with a grotesque sizzle. It was only then that Dante realized the god had been screaming the whole time.

  The beam was now completely undamaged. And it appeared slightly thicker than before. They stared at it in frustrated silence while Wessen recovered enough to lift his head.

  "It won't work." His voice was little more than a whisper. "We're only making them stronger."

  "Is there any way to hold them still?" Dante said. "Can you…pull them tight or something?"

  Wessen laughed at this. "If I could do that, I could stop them from hurting me altogether."

  "Surely there must be another way."

  "There is. You already know what it is. Bring me to my end."

  "What?! We can't do that."

  "It was only a few minutes ago that you were creeping up behind me with the intention of stabbing me in the back of the head."

  "Yeah, but that was before we spoke to you. And learned there might be another way."

  "That way has failed. This is all that remains."

  There was a moment of silence that quickly became several moments of silence.

  "Are you sure about this?" Dante ventured.

  "Today I felt hope for the first time in an eternity. It was the sweetest thing. I had forgotten just how sweet it is. It reminded me of what life itself is like. You take yours for granted, I expect. Perhaps not so much at this moment—I believe you when you say you'll give your lives on this venture—but surely before it; and surely you believe that if you make it through to the other side, then order will return to your lives soon enough, and you will return to the normal things of life: you will eat your meals, laugh with your friends, raise children, make visits to the market, watch the sun rise, feel the bite of winter's eve, a woman's hand in your own…" Wessen laughed softly. "But I don't need to go on about such things. You all must know them quite well."

  He narrowed his eyes, peering into the distance, as if he might catch a glimpse of the things he spoke of. "For me, however, those minutes of hope I just felt were only a reminder that I have nothing approaching life. The closest I come is the delusions my mind shows me when I slip into madness. We gods fear death far more than you mortals, for it's not supposed to happen to us. But even death must be better than the sickly shade of my existence, where I am not a being, but a helpless instrument—and will never be anything more again."

  He smiled then, and seemed surprised by that. "Besides, there is comfort in it, too. Let me be sacrificed to save your world; that's a fine thing. But I think I will take even greater pleasure in knowing that I will finally have my vengeance on those that put me here. Everything they built will be cleaved apart, with no way to put it back together—unless they decide to sacrifice another one of themselves to the chains."

  "That separation will be unfortunate for us, too," Dante said. "But after learning how the doorways are kept open, I'm less sad about closing them than I was before."

  Silence overtook the lot of them. Wessen shrugged his shoulder that wasn't shot through with a chain. "There is nothing left to say, then. Let us do what must be done."

  Blays gazed down at the spear in his hands. "How would you like me to…?"

  The god's eyes glinted with amusement. "It doesn't matter. There is no pain that can be worse than what they've already done to me. The heart, I suppose."

  Blays nodded. "Kelen, if you'd, uh, bring us forward."

  "Not so fast. I can't open your portal for you after I'm dead. Tell me where in Rale you want to return to and I might be able to remember it."

  "I can do better than telling you about it," Dante said. "I can show you it."

  He lifted his right hand and filled it with nether, sending the shadows into the air between them and Wessen. He hadn't been practicing his illusions as much as he should have, considering how useful they could be—it just wasn't a skill he enjoyed—and he found it harder than it should have been to wrestle the nether into the shape of their destination: the norren town of Cling, just to the east of Gallador, where Nak had chosen to lead their people to in hopes it would be less chaotic there than it had been in Gallador. It had been years since Dante had last been to the town, but he still remembered the pitch of the norren roofs, along with the forests that surrounded it.

  Wessen stared at it, frowning slightly, then nodded in recognition. "Yes, I remember this place. But when I knew it, there was no town there. No forest, either."

  "But you're sure it's the same place?" Dante said.

  "I helped create it. We all did. Something no mortal can truly understand is that when you create a world, it becomes a part of you. With enough time, I could remember every hill and valley in Rale."

  He looked up then, his amused expressing growing steely. He pulled back his shoulders and splayed the fingers of his right hand. Ribbons of red and blue light wrapped themselves around his knuckles. One of his chains began to shake. Others followed. It wasn't as violent as when Pholos heaved and wrenched him, but blood began to seep from the points where he was impaled.

  He didn't seem to notice. He sent the soma and neuma streaming out before him. Fifty feet away from him, the two energies seemed to hit an invisible wall, spreading out across a flat plane, weaving themselves together in designs that were not the clean angles of geometry, but organic tangles and graspings, like vines overtaking the wall of an old house.

  It spread into a circle thirty feet wide and stopped. The two forces blazed painfully bright, then faded into ashes and peeled away, revealing a hole into nothing, one that made Dante feel like he would fall down it if he kept looking into it for too long.

  Wessen grunted as two of his chains yanked him forward. Dry thunder rumbled about them as a dark shape sped toward the other side of the hole in the air. It struck the back of the hole in silence, vanishing. As the chains continued to pull at the god, stars sprung up across the face of the doorway.

  The thunder dwindled to nothing. The chains grew still. Wessen was doing some wincing, and his forehead had broken out in sweat, but he wasn't in bad enough shape to need time to recover.

  "There you are." He smiled at the portal. "One last work of creation."

  "Thank you," Dante said, then hesitated, not quite sure how to proceed.

  "Stop being so sentimental, we only just met. Get on with your business."

  Blays tapped Kelen on the shoulder. Kelen piloted the onas forward until they hovered in front of his chest. Patches of his skin were visible through the rips in his shirt, enough for Dante to see his chest thudding with the beat of his heart. A heart that was probably massive enough for Dante to climb inside.

  "Sorry for this," Blays said.

  "It's fine." Wessen closed his eyes. "Put me to my peace."

  Blays drew back the spear, whispering something to himself. He took aim and drove it straight at the heart of the god.

  Wessen's eyes flew open. He blinked down at his chest. "Can't you stab me any harder than that?"

  The spear had only sunk an inch at most into Wessen's flesh. It probably wasn't even enough to fully pierce the skin. Blays withdrew the spear and, with a funny look on his face, punched it forward with all of his might. This time it produced a small flash, and a brief but not especially loud crack. It looked to have pierced slightly deeper, but the difference was so little it was impossible to be sure.

  Blays braced his feet against the hull and leaned forward, straining all of his muscles behind the spear. It dug no deeper. He withdrew it and rammed it forward again, and again, at first measured and methodical, but becoming increasingly wild, almost frenzied.

  He stopped, breathing hard. He'd done an impressive job of shredding a tight circle out of Wessen's shirt, but he'd only drawn a few dribbles of blood. After catching his breath, Blays struck a few inches to the left of his first efforts, presumably on the theory that he might have accidentally been trying to stab through a rib or some unknown piece of extra-tough divine anatomy. But none of the blows he landed there dealt any more damage than his previous attempts.

  He withdrew again, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his arm. Recovering himself, he leaped forward, thrusting the Spear of Stars into a stretch of exposed skin that hung between two visible ribs. He exhausted himself again without producing more than a few more scratches.

 

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