Descent of the Divine

The Aspect of Change sat perfectly still. His sword was planted point-first into the riven marble floor beside his throne, both hands gripping the hilt like a lifeline. Every muscle in his frame was taut with the effort of remaining upright, his knuckles white.

Anastasia had faced Cyrus on more battlefields than she cared to count. He had always belonged there: reshaping the tide of war from the front of cavalry lines, staff raised high, his voice cutting through the chaos to rally broken formations, his magic bending reality itself to turn the impossible into inevitable.

Now he sat diminished and fading, a prisoner of his obsidian throne.

Torchlight glinted off her golden gauntlets as she approached, her slow steps accompanied by the faint murmur of perfectly fitted plates shifting against one another. Each piece was a masterwork of human artisanship imbued with ancient enchantments—forged when mages and non-mages finally united under her banner, ending an ageless feud that had doomed entire civilizations.

“What stills your hand, Witch Queen?” His voice was little more than a whisper.

That Cyrus could speak at all was a miracle, considering what she’d subjected him to: months of poison delivered by her most trusted spies, the fire she’d used to smoke him out of his stronghold, the battle that had finally brought him to his knees. Anastasia had come through unscathed—she knew his strategies too intimately to fall for his attempts at sabotage. And here he was: olive skin gone ashen with poison, black hair singed ragged, the silver phases of the moon that crowned his brow smudged with soot—looking up at her with those mesmerizing amethyst eyes, awaiting her judgment.

“A favor owed.” The calm confidence of the warleader cracked, and for a moment she let herself be the weary woman beneath.

She’d mourn him. Perhaps until she breathed her last.

“You shall not die in pain, Cyrus,” Anastasia vowed, sheathing her blade. She called on the magic she’d stolen from her foe well over a decade ago, summoning his own dagger from his belt and into her waiting palm.

The man’s shoulders fell. “I’ve not earned your mercy.”

“Twelve lives I have lived.” She placed the point under his chin, tilting his face to hers. “Ten of which ended by your hand, though you only denied me a quick death once.”

Amethyst eyes widened at her confession, but it was grief, not morbid satisfaction, that churned in her gut. Anastasia had finally shared the secret of her unwelcome immortality with another, but too soon Cyrus would die and leave her alone with its crushing weight once again.

She swallowed in an effort to exile her heart from her throat. “Peaceful rest, Cyrus—may you find solace in the great beyond.”

The dagger slid between his ribs effortlessly, drawing nothing from him but a soft exhale. Cyrus endured no pain; such was the nature of the incomprehensibly kind enchantment placed on the luminescent opal embedded in the weapon’s crossguard.

Anastasia resolved to bury it alongside him.

The fallen god fought against the blade’s magic, his gaze fixed on his executioner. Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth as he struggled to speak, his trembling hand rising toward her.

His fingers, once capable of remaking the world, could do no more than cup her cheek with the roughness of a man who had forgotten how to be tender. The touch was warm, desperate, and achingly familiar.

“Anastasia—” he choked out, her name a prayer on his lips.

The white gem pulsed with sudden, brilliant light. The last of the wisdom drained from Cyrus’s gaze, and the Aspect’s final words died with it.

His hand fell away from her face.

Anastasia caught his wrist before it could hit the stone, pressing his palm to her damp cheek, over her burning eyes, desperate to preserve his fading warmth for just a moment more.

It was over. At long last, it was over.

Every war fought anew, every friend who greeted her as a stranger, every death she’d risen from only to begin again—it had all led here. This time, the peace was hers to keep.

So why did victory taste like ash on her tongue? Why did her chest feel hollow, as though the blade had found her heart instead of his? She could barely force the sobs past her throat, barely see past the tears clinging to her lashes, barely think past the agony of slaying a man she loathed above all others.

The clash of steel and screams of dying men beyond the throne room walls cut through her paralysis. The Witch Queen didn’t have the luxury of succumbing to sorrow—not while her people still bled, not while the battle continued to rage.

The dead could wait. The living could not.

Anastasia reached for the symbol etched onto her gauntlet, eager to tell her generals that Cyrus had fallen and to put an end to this needless battle of kin against kin, only to have her fingers miss their mark. She stumbled to the floor and braced herself against the shifting stone as a violent quake rocked the throne room.

She tore at the clasps of her armor—too heavy to stand in while the ground still heaved—until the golden plates clattered to the marble. Then she staggered to the nearest balcony.

The sight that greeted her was nightmarish, but undeniably familiar.

Blood-tainted grass erupted in jagged fissures, as if invisible hands were clawing the earth itself. The chasms threatened to swallow whole the opposing forces who now clung to their enemies instead of fighting them. Soldiers disappeared into the abyss, and creatures slicked in black ichor climbed out—hungry, wrathful, and impossibly many. Fighters were eaten alive as more of the world fell apart and took her people with it.

Anastasia recognized this monstrous horde. She’d convinced herself it had been delirium after her ninth death, the mind’s last mercy before the darkness took her, but witnessing it twice left no room for doubt.

Oblivion. This was Oblivion.

And it had come the moment Cyrus died . . . had she just killed the one person standing between her world and annihilation?

He’d never said anything. Never warned her, never even hinted at a cost for the victory she so ardently craved. Not once, in any of her twelve lives—not in the ones they’d spent at war, nor in the ones where he’d come to her as something dangerously close to a friend.

Fury rose to meet the betrayal, but how was a dead man to pay for his sins?

She’d thought him a madman, willing to sacrifice humanity to undo the Calamity he’d wrought an age ago. He still was. But he’d known what awaited them all—the insatiable hunger that now consumed everything—and carried that burden alone. Just as she had.

Would she have even listened, had he tried to tell her?

The weight of yet another failure forced Anastasia to her knees. Below, the monsters poured from the earth like a black tide, and she could do nothing but watch as everything she had fought to protect was devoured. Her generals, her soldiers, Cyrus’s army, the innocents between them—all would die because she had been too proud, too certain, too foolish to see the truth.

She had failed them all. Again.

With a trembling hand, Anastasia summoned Cyrus’s dagger once more. The white gem pulsed weakly, as if sensing her intent.

She was so tired. Another life meant starting over with everything she’d built undone—every alliance, every friendship, every hard-won peace—and she wasn’t sure how much of her was left to give.

But Cyrus had kept his secrets for twelve lifetimes. He would not keep them for a thirteenth.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the empty throne room, to his memory, to the ghost of his touch still warm against her skin.

Anastasia claimed a shuddering breath, let her eyes fall shut, and plunged the blade into her own chest.