I could see him, I realized. He had begun to glow, god-power rising as he committed himself to protecting me.
Dateh bared his teeth and spread his arms. “Get out of my way,” he snarled.
I blinked, squinted, flinched. He had begun to glow as well, but with a jarring, sickening clash of colors, more than I could name. It made my stomach churn to look at him. The colors were bright, though, so bright. He was more powerful than I had ever dreamt.
I did not understand why until I blinked and my eyes made that strange, involuntary adjustment that hurt so much—and suddenly I saw Dateh, through whatever veil he’d cast around himself with his scrivening skills.
And I screamed. Because what stood there, enormous and heaving, rocking on twenty legs and flailing with as many arms—and oh gods, oh gods, his FACE—was too hideous for me to take without some outlet for my horror.
Shiny rounded on me. “Do as I say! Now!”
And then he charged forward, blazing, to meet Dateh’s challenge.
“No,” I whispered, shaking my head. I could not take my eyes from the great gabbling thing Dateh had become. I wanted to deny what I had seen in Dateh’s face: Paitya’s gentle smile, Dump’s square teeth, Madding’s eyes. And many others. There was almost nothing left of Dateh himself—nothing but will and hate. How many godlings had he consumed? Enough to overwhelm his humanity and grant him unimaginable power.
No one could fight such a creature and hope to survive. Not even Shiny. Dateh would kill him and then come eat my heart. I would be trapped within him, my very soul enslaved, forever.
“No!” I ran for the wall of the bubble, slapping its cold shimmering surface with my hands. I could not think through my terror. My breath came in gasps. I wanted nothing more than to escape.
My hands suddenly became visible. And between my hands, something new flickered into view.
I stopped, startled out of panic. The new thing rotated before me, flickering faintly, a bauble of silvery light. As I stared at it, I realized there was a face in its surface. I blinked, and the face blinked, too. It was me. The image—a mirror reflection, I realized, something else I had heard of but never seen—was distorted by the bubble’s shape, but I could make out the curve of cheekbones, lips open in a sob, white teeth.
But most clearly, I could see my eyes.
They were not what I expected. Where my irises should have been, dull disks of twisted gray, I saw instead brilliance: tiny winking, wavering lights. My malformed corneas had withdrawn, opening like a flower, to reveal something even stranger inside.
What—?
There was a cry behind me and the sound of a blow. As I turned, something streaked across my vision like a comet. But this comet screamed as it fell, trailing fire like blood. Shiny.
Dateh uttered a rattling hiss, raising two of his stolen arms. Light, sickly mottled, dripped from his hands like oil and splattered the floor of the Empty realm. Where it fell, I heard hissing.
The small bubble winked out of existence between my hands.
Escape and strange magic forgotten, I ran to where Shiny lay, not so shiny now, and not moving. He was alive, I found as I pulled him onto his back; breathing, at least, though raggedly. But crossing his chest from shoulder to hip was a streak of darkness, an obscene obliteration of his light. I touched it, my hand trembling, but there was no wound. No magic, either.
Then I understood: whatever it was that made demon blood negate the magic of a god’s life-essence, Dateh had found a way to channel it—or perhaps this was simply the culmination of what he had become. Not just a demon but a god whose very nature was mortality. He was turning Shiny back into an ordinary man, piece by piece. And once that was done, he would tear Shiny apart.
“Lady Oree,” breathed the thing that had been Dateh. I could no longer think of it as a man. Its voice overlapped upon itself: I heard him echo in female registers, other males, older, younger. It wheezed as it lumbered toward me. Perhaps it had developed multiple lungs, or whatever godlings shaped within their bodies to simulate breath.
It said, “We are the last of our kind, you and I. I was wrong, wrong, wrong to threaten you.” It paused, shook its massive head as if to clear it. “But I need your power. Join me, use it for me, and I’ll do you no harm.” It took a step closer, six feet shuffling at once.
I did not, dared not, trust the Dateh creature. Even if I agreed to its plan, its sanity was as distorted as the rest of its form; it might still kill me on a whim. It would kill Shiny regardless, I was certain—permanently, irreversibly. What would happen to the universe if one of the Three died? Would this god-eating madman even care?
Unthinking, I clutched at Shiny, a bulwark against fear. He stirred under my hands, semiconscious, no protection at all. Even his light had begun to fade. But he was not dead. Perhaps if I stalled for time, he could recover.
“J-join you?” I asked.
Dateh’s form shivered, then resolved again into the ordinary, mortal shape that I had known in the House of the Risen Sun. It was an illusion. I could feel the warped reality still present, even if it had found a way to fool my eyes. Dateh was like Lil, safe on the surface, horror underneath.
“Yes,” it said, and this time it spoke in a single voice. It gestured behind itself, toward the corpses I knew were there. “I could train you. Make you st-st-strong.” The Dateh-creature paused then, eyes unfocusing for a moment, and there was that curious blurring again, the outward mask cracking for an instant. The effort needed to hold that mask in place was a taut, palpable thing. No wonder the Dateh-creature hesitated to devour me; one more heart, one more stolen soul, might be too much to contain.
Shiny groaned, and the creature’s face hardened. “But you must do something for me.” Its voice had changed. I choked back a sob. It spoke with Madding’s voice, gentle and persuasive. Its hands flexed from fists to claws and back. “That creature in your lap. I thought he had no true magic, but now I see I underestimated him.”
My vision blurred with tears as I shook my head, and I reached across Shiny’s body as if I could somehow protect him. “No,” I blurted. “I won’t let you kill him, too. No.”
“I want you to kill him, Oree. Kill him, and take his heart.”
I froze, staring at Dateh, my mouth falling open.
It smiled again, its teeth flickering from Dateh’s to Dump’s back to Dateh’s. “You love too many of these gods,” it said. “I need proof of your commitment. So kill him, Oree. Kill him and take that shining power for your own. When you’ve done it, you’ll understand how much more you were meant to be.”
“I can’t.” I was trembling all over. I barely heard myself. “I can’t.”
The Dateh-creature smiled, and this time its teeth were sharp, like a dog’s. “You can. Your blood will work, if you use enough of it.” He gestured, and a knife appeared on Shiny’s chest. It was black, shimmering like solid mist—a piece of the Empty given form. “I will have your power one way or another, Lady Oree. Eat him and join me, or I eat you. Choose.”
You may think me a coward.
You’ll remember that I fled when Shiny told me to, instead of staying to fight at his side. You will remember that throughout this final horror, I was useless, helpless, too terrified to be any good to anyone, including myself. It may be that by telling you this, I have earned your contempt.
I won’t try to change your mind. I’m not proud of myself or the things I did in that hell. I can’t explain it, anyhow—no words can capture the terror that I felt in those moments, faced with the starkest, ugliest choice that any creature on this earth must face: kill, or die. Eat, or be eaten.