Chapter 153

There were too many questions and no clean answers.

Why were the Weeping Gallows - born from the **** of the goddess of truth through pain - also portals to Earth? Were there other worlds? How many gates were out there? Did they all lead to the U.S., or were they scattered across the globe?

How many Gallowborn were still on Earth? What was the Covenant of Mercy really building? They’d infiltrated at least the police and the FBI in Philadelphia. There was no way it stopped there.

And Unity…

Why did it have its own Faith? Why had destroying it opened a breach into the Interstitium? That wasn’t how this worked. It hadn’t happened when Urzan-Brak died. Or Zelmyra. It hadn’t happened when I burned my own Faith to raise the wall between the Iron Nation and Arvellia. It hadn’t happened when Nyssira drove her knife into me and tried to burn me out from the inside.

So why then?

Had any Myrddin slipped through? I didn’t think so. But I hadn’t thought so the first time either. That time, I’d felt them - pressing, clawing, racing each other to be the first through the breach. A frenzy of hunger and hate.

This time… nothing. No presence. No pressure.

Had Nyssira coordinated them back then? Given them warning when I fought Brand? Were they unprepared now? Or had I missed it - and Earth was already being eaten from the inside out?

And that thing from the portal…

What the hell had that been? It moved like a Myrddin - but it wasn’t one. Silver, not black. Fractured, not singular. It didn’t radiate that suffocating, endless hatred. But it still knew where to strike.

It had gone for the weakest first. Thrown them into a place that should have killed them. Would have killed them. If not for my Faith.

Was it Adhaneth? Could she have survived the **** on her children?

There’d been no sign of her for years. I’d looked. As much as I could. The Interstitium wasn’t somewhere I could stay - not for long - but I’d tried.

And at the end…

Had it touched me? Settled in me? That silver tendril - it had come from me. Reached out. Grabbed Clo when I couldn’t.

The timing had been too perfect. Too precise. Like it knew what I was about to do before I did.

And why did I feel so hollow inside? What had happened to me - to my Faith? It was still there. I could feel it. I could still step. Still shape the demesne. Nothing was gone. But something was wrong.

It felt… compressed. Like everything I was had been crushed down into something no bigger than a marble - something dense and heavy - rolling loose inside a space far too large to hold it. Every shift, every movement, it rattled around in the emptiness. It didn’t fit. It wasn’t supposed to feel like this.

My Faith-scape still bled through into the world, layered over everything I saw. The beacons burned around me - steady and unavoidable - I couldn’t shut them out, couldn’t dim them no matter how hard I tried.

At least the rest had settled. The fractures in my perception had collapsed back into one. I wasn’t being torn across a dozen viewpoints anymore. The world had stopped splitting apart every time I tried to look at it.

But that didn’t make it right. Something in me had shifted. Something I didn’t understand.

And I didn’t have answers. Not for any of it.

So I did what I could. What mattered.

I knocked softly on Issa’s door, then eased it open.

She was curled in on herself on the bed, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. She’d been through hell. And I wasn’t here to fix it.

I closed the door behind me, crossed the room, and lay down beside her. I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close.

This wasn’t a moment for anger. Not for lectures. Not for ‘I told you so’.

She was hurt - deeply. Maybe more than she ever had been. She needed time. Support. Love.

After the fight, she’d made it back - reached for the demesne and come straight to Elise. Between Elise and Naevira, they’d pulled both Ishaan and Sszarik free from the Weeping Gallows and gotten them to Grams. Alive - barely.

Skrimma had mobilized the guard, swept up Mal, Ron, Eira, Kip, and Fizzi.

Ron broke first. He admitted that he and Sszarik had attacked a traveler on the road a week ago. Killed him. That’s where the flesh for the marriage rite came from.

They’d all consumed some of the poor man they’d killed. A shared initiation - something about ‘earning their scales’.

Ishaan told a different story. Sszarik had lured him out to the Gallows. Beaten him. Left him for the tree as punishment.

He confessed that the reason they’d come here in the first place was because the old ways were coming back among the naga. Quietly for now. Eating the flesh of other races. Old rites. Old beliefs.

Ishaan was uncomfortable with that. He didn’t want that for his son. Didn’t want him growing into it. So they left.

Sszarik hated leaving. Hated losing his place, his people. He believed those old ways made the naga strong - and he’d already taken part in them before they left.

But none of that mattered right now. What mattered was that Issa was alive. That she was given what she needed to heal. And that she knew that there were people out there that loved her.

So I stayed - held her while she cried. And didn’t let go until she finally fell asleep.

* * *

I checked on everyone in the morning. Lilae. Mirri. Ashlara. Serah. Issa. The ferals had already gone - each returning to their own demesne, but I checked on them as well.

Then I went to see Grams. And Ishaan.

His wife, Zathi, hadn’t left his side all night.

Her eyes were swollen and raw from crying, her face drawn tight with worry and grief. Her deep green hair hung in tangled strands, and her scales - sea-mist green, softer and paler than Sszarik’s - still held a quiet, careful sheen despite everything. She was lean, like Ishaan, though when she’d first arrived she’d been gaunt - worn down by a life that hadn’t given enough. Now, she was filling out again. Healing.

Ishaan was still pale. Still weak. His eyes were red, his face hollow with exhaustion. His wounds were gone, but that didn’t mean he was whole.

I didn’t know what he’d gone through in that tree. Or maybe I did.

My own time in the Weeping Gallows had been… gut wrenching. Not pain in the way I understood it. Not physical. It was worse. Something that reached in and pulled at you - peeled you open and made you look at things you didn’t want to see. Things you were. It had shaken me in a way nothing else had.

And I’d been through a lot - if what Lunythera told me was true.

That my swarm form was built from self-loathing. Anxiety. Depression. Imposter syndrome. That I’d taken in the pain of dozens - maybe hundreds - of people… and turned it inward.

I still didn’t know if I believed her.

It didn’t matter. She was dead. And there were few left to ask.

I met with Skrimma after that - got the full report on what had happened. I made it clear I wasn’t getting involved in Sszarik’s judgment. There were too many conflicts.

And more than that - I couldn’t do that to Issa. She was raw. Fractured. Hanging together by threads. The last thing she needed was me standing in judgment over someone she’d loved. So I stayed out of it.

It wasn’t until evening that I finally made my way down to the containment chamber.

Nyssira was still bound within the rings of wards - but something had changed. Her face had… grown. It filled most of the space now, warped and distended like I was looking at her through a fisheye lens. Her body remained the same size, seated in the center - but her head had swollen to nearly ten feet across, her features stretched across it in ways that shouldn’t have been possible.

Her face was a constellation of stars drifting across a blank, featureless plane - slow, deliberate movements that felt like thought made visible. The stars were spread wide and still expanding, as if I was travelling through space.

When she saw me, it collapsed. Her head shrank back to normal, the vast field of stars compressing into a single point of light - sharp, focused, and fixed directly on me.

She sat cross-legged, perfectly still. Watching.

I raised an eyebrow. “What’s the word, hummingbird?”

As usual, there was no answer.

The point of light tracked me as I crossed the room, unblinking.

I grabbed my journal, pulled a chair closer, and sat down across from her. “Do I have something on my face?” I asked.

Silence stretched. Then the point of light burst outward again, unfolding into her regular, slow-moving constellations.

“No,” she said.

I opened the journal. “Then tell me what’s on your mind.”

The stars tightened slightly, her head tilting in a way that felt… curious.

She rose without using her hands - legs unfolding, lifting her smoothly to her feet without any shift in balance.

“How,” she demanded.

I blinked. “How what?”

Her expression twisted. “How did you do it again?” she screamed, hurling herself at the first containment ring.

The wards reacted instantly. Chains snapped taut, yanking her back and slamming her to the floor, pinning her in place.

I closed the journal and stood, moving closer to the outer ring. “Do what?” I asked, genuinely unsure.

She thrashed, screaming, fighting the bindings for several long heartbeats before the strength bled out of her. She went still, chest rising and falling in sharp, ragged breaths.

I crouched, lowering myself to her level and softened my voice. “Tell me what I did.” It came out more like a question than I intended.

She turned her face away, refusing to look at me.

“Nyssira, please,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Help me understand.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about…” she echoed, mockingly.

I exhaled slowly, lowering my head as I tried to piece it together.

It had to be my Faith. It always came back to that.

She was older than me. And not just older - formed differently. A true god, in the way I wasn’t. She’d come into being already understanding what she was, how Faith worked, how the world fit together. And she’d had fifteen hundred years to refine that.

On top of that… she’d done something no one else had. She hadn’t just absorbed Faith. She’d taken aspects. Intercepted them. Claimed them. Merged them into herself.

She’d broken the rules. Gods were supposed to be bound by their aspects. Defined by them.

She wasn’t.

As the goddess of veiled secrets, she shouldn’t have been able to tell a complete truth. As the goddess of revealed truth - Elyndra’s stolen mantle - she shouldn’t have been able to lie.

Both at once should have meant silence.

It didn’t. She’d lied to me. More than once. Had she ever told me a full truth? I didn’t know. Letheris’ name was the closest thing - and even that felt… incomplete.

Eventually, I stood. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “It’s been a long couple of days.” I ran a hand through my hair. “My Faith feels… strange. There’s something wrong with it and I don’t know what.”

I sat back down and opened the journal again.

“I would like to hear your thoughts on it,” I said. “You’ve done things no other god has. You understand this in a way I don’t.”

She didn’t move. Didn’t respond. Just lay there, turned away from me. Silent.