Dreadgod (Cradle Book 11) (61)

Suriel almost said she couldn’t have done that, but he forestalled her.

“I know! They were killed by their enemy in Cradle, and I was playing by the rules when I set the events in motion. It would have been more of a deviation to resurrect them than to leave them dead. Even so, I wanted to ask. But I didn’t. I stayed the course.

“Having failed once, though, gave me something of a…fatalistic humor about the whole situation. If I was going to try anyway, why not have some fun with it? And over the years, a crazy thing happened: I did have fun.”

He gave her a smile that invited her to join him. “Just because the job is grim doesn’t mean you have to be, does it?”

Ozriel had said that to her already, centuries ago. He had joked around more than any of the other Judges she had ever known, but always with an…edge. A palpable sense of sadness that hung behind every smile.

Now, it felt like he had pushed some of his burden aside.

She envied him for that.

“Did you succeed?” Suriel asked him. It was a foolish question. She was better able to answer that question than he was, since she could look into Fate, but she wanted to know what he thought.

“In part, that’s up to you,” he said. “In part, it’s up to my students.”

Suriel thought of Wei Shi Lindon and felt a heavy regret. She knew Ozriel had deceived the entire Court, but she still took it as a personal failure that she had been staring at him all this time and still missed him. Since his return, she hadn’t looked for Lindon even once.

Somehow, she felt like she’d failed him too.

Ozriel saw her expression but continued happily. “I guess everything comes down to you and me, doesn’t it? Isn’t that comforting!”

Suriel looked back over the world that was destined to destroy itself out of greed and ambition. She couldn’t fix them. She couldn’t even save them. The best she could do was speed their path so she could save others.

“I hope it works,” Suriel said.

“So do I.” He watched a moment longer and then conjured a pair of cups from another world. “Tea?” he offered.

Silently, she accepted.





10





The Sage of Red Faith crouched in midair in his laboratory, suspended in a cocoon of cloud madra and surrounded by shadow so he would not be distracted by physical sensations.

Instead, he immersed himself in Yerin’s memories.

Her most personal recollections were vague, which he found frustrating. What was the point of privacy when it inhibited accuracy? It wasn’t as though he cared about her relationship with the young Void Sage or with anyone else.

Though he did consider requesting more memories of Eithan Arelius. He had only restrained himself so far because he didn’t want to reveal his intentions openly to Yerin; his impression of her from the beginning had been one of unnecessary defiance, and her memories had only reinforced that conclusion. If she knew he wanted her knowledge of Eithan, she would begin withholding it out of sheer spite.

But as irritating as it was to have potential information denied by petty personal concern, he still had plenty of material to work with. He had brought Yerin in for six sessions of memory recording now, and while some of the information was redundant, there was much to learn even from overlapping accounts.

Mind-spirits buzzed around his head, echoing his own thoughts and keeping him focused, and he had elevated his own consciousness with an elixir.

Thanks to those constructs, he knew that he was approaching a conclusion.

He was also fully aware that he was trying to escape that conclusion.

The Sage of Red Faith tapped into a stored memory, reliving his own relationship with his Blood Shadow. After working in the labyrinth and studying the original nature of the Phoenix, he had withdrawn one of its eggs for his own examination.

He had intentionally created a Blood Shadow and established a symbiotic relationship with it, confident in his willpower. He was more aware than anyone else of the spirit’s mutability; it would take on the traits of whatever it fed upon, and he could think of no better model than himself.

Red Faith had developed the cycling patterns to feed the Shadow his own excess dream aura and blood essence, even pieces of his lifeline. When it needed raw material, he would kill one of his enemies, feeding the choice pieces of them to his Shadow.

For years, he had thought that was his mistake. He should never have supplemented its diet with others, which had corrupted the copy of him he was cultivating.

The Shadow grew more and more unruly over time, unwilling to become the subordinate copy of himself that it was created to be. Even as they grew into a pair and dominated other Sages and Heralds—even challenging Monarchs, at the height of their power—the Shadow became less willing to admit that Red Faith was the host, the original, and it was his will they shared.

Now, the Sage of Red Faith could not escape the clear contrast between his relationship with the Blood Shadow that would become Redmoon and Yerin’s relationship with the Blood Shadow that would become Ruby.

When the time came for him to merge with his Shadow, each had attempted to dominate the other. They tried to take as much as they could with minimal concessions.

Yerin and Ruby, by contrast, had reached the same conclusion at the same time. They had cooperated perfectly, willing to give up control to the other to accomplish a mutual goal.