Goddess Liv Savell (best autobiographies to read .TXT) 📖

body was forced to a halt by rough stone. A week ago, it would have killed her. Now she only gasped for breath and dragged herself around to face her son.

He rose out of the crater he had created, magma dripping from every crevice in his skin, eyes pupilless onyx. The earth quivered in fear.

What had she created?

“You!” Mascen screamed at Enyo, lava and blood flying from his lips in long ropes. He looked like a creature maddened by sickness, wholly unhinged and capable of anything. “You should have stayed dead!!”

༄

Delyth did not realize what Etienne had done until she heard Maoz’s feral scream.

Battle was joined, the Gods already fighting to banish Mascen while still she wound through the maze of streets, kept safely away by Etienne’s guidance. She growled, so red with anger that it blinded her, filled her nose with its mephitic stench. “Etienne…” His name was a curse, low and wild, and in its wake, she scrubbed his mark from her skin, cutting off their connection.

He would not keep her from this battle. From her freedom.

With a savage leap, Delyth was in the air, her wingtips scraping stone. She ignored the pain. Reveled in it. Then she was free of the maze and winging towards the center of the city with desperate speed, wind whipping moisture from her eyes as she went. Calamity was already in her hands, as if answering some unspoken command, subdued at last by rage.

She came over the courtyard just as Mascen stepped towards Enyo, and eagerly she flung herself into his path.

Dripping with magma, Mascen threw up one whip-like hand and batted Delyth out of the air like a toy, sending her spinning into the cobblestones. There was a crunch, a barrage of pops that might have been sound or feeling. Her ribs, she thought, in a distant, distracted way. What did it matter? She had not lost Calamity, and after a few quick breaths, she pushed herself up in time to watch the red ooze drip down his wrist into a long rope, gaining structure as it solidified. First blade, then crossguard, then pommel until Mascen was holding a glowing sword made of his own volcanic flesh.

Delyth growled, too eaten up by battle fever to notice pain, and thundered forward again, pulling Calamity upwards in a strikeacross Mascen’s belly only for the black-pommeled blade to be stopped by his sword of rock and lava.

Calamity jumped free, and in the winged warrior’s hands, it struck again and again, snake-like in speed, leaving oozing slices in Mascen’s chest and arm that sent real blood sizzling amongst the magma. It was with a wild, angry sort of joy that she realized, for all his strength, the God did not have her art with the sword.

And all she had to do was hold him here to be marked, to be banished.

He got through her guard then, left a searing line of pain across one bicep, hot and blistering. Delyth only laughed in his face, urging him to greater fury. She threw herself at him again, her strikes growing wild, desperate. “Aren’t you supposed to be stronger than this?” she demanded. “Stop me!”

Make it stop.

Mascen snarled, and Delyth threw Calamity at him, opening a horrible, gushing slice in his side. And she didn’t stop, coming on after him, barehanded and crying from the sting of smoke in her eyes. He was screaming, or she was, but despite the injury, Mascen reached out and hauled Delyth up by her throat. She was smiling.

Mascen roared and flung her body, incongruously small in comparison, back into the streets beyond.

✶

With a cry, Etienne pulled his knife from his belt and cut a jagged line into the flesh of his palm. Mascen had Delyth by the throat, their figures so small in the distant courtyard, and he had but seconds to save her. Alphonse would never forgive him, not even in the peace of death, should he let the warrior fall.

With clumsy, hurried strokes, he drew out the first rune he could think of and grasped at the magic, flinging it artlessly at Delyth’s flying form with no direction other than to catch her, to see her safely to the ground.

The very air answered his call as though he were not some simple mage but one of the Gods himself, cradling her form with invisible hands. He guided her down with deliberate slowness, squinting against the distance until he could be certain she was settled, sprawled out on the cobblestones well away from the fray.

And then he sighed. He had done it, had stopped the fall from killing his best friend’s lover—his friend, after all they had been through.

Only, the magic still surged through him, writhing, angry ropes of the stuff, restless in so poor a container. They would not lie docile within the body of a mere mortal. Etienne struggled to give them direction, to think of some spell, but that moment of indecision was all it took. The magic tore out of him and into the world like a hurricane, scraping his throat raw as it went.

And then Etienne was falling, head cracking against the stone as he sank into quiet darkness.

❂

It was enough. Mascen had broken free, poisoned her.  He had ripped Maoz’s horn from his very skull and dashed Esha against the cobblestones. He had burned and torn his way through Rhosan and harmed her peoples and her plains. He destroyed everything he touched. Like the Overseers. Like the Cursed Realms.

It was all enough.

Enyo stepped forward to fill the void the priestess had left, and Mascen glared at her, bleeding sluggishly from the many cuts he had sustained. He panted but raised his hands, empty now. His brows were pressed together, the pale skin between them wrinkled just as it had when he was small. He had always been so determined. Her boy. So wild. So strong.

He lifted his hands to protect his face quickly enough that when she swung, he slapped her first and second blows away.