Ra had stopped glowing.
It was a small thing, the dimming of one lamp, but it was the first time in his long life that the Sun had been afraid, and the fear showed in everything. His falcon head hung low and his beak trembled. His golden skin had turned the gray of old stone, and in the garden's gloom his light barely reached his own feet.
Zeus stood beside him with a bolt of lightning held limp in his fist, as if he had forgotten how to throw it. Odin stood on the other side. The old god's single eye had gone wide and wet.
"He is not tired," Zeus said. His voice was hoarse. "Look at him. He is not even breathing hard."
"No," Odin said. "He is not."
"Twenty gods. We came here with an army that could burn a world, and he is..." Zeus choked on the word. "He is harvesting us."
"We should have known." Odin's voice was very low. "Do you remember the war, Zeus? Do you remember what our father brought out when he decided to break the Nine Realms?"
"Ashborn," Zeus whispered.
"Ashborn. The favorite son." Odin gave a short, bitter laugh. "I always believed it was love. The Sky Father's pride in his adopted boy. It was never love. He was chosen because Anu needed a weapon that could fell whole worlds, and in all of creation there was only one thing that could."
"Ashborn is dead."
"Ashborn is in him."
Silence fell across the three of them. Something moved in the dark ahead. None of them turned to look.
"I will not die in the dark," Ra said suddenly. His voice cracked. "I am the Sun. I will not die like a man in the dark. I am the Sun!"
He threw himself into the air.
Light blazed up from his body one last time and he rose, tearing a bright seam through the black ceiling. High above the lake he gathered every ember of himself into a single point and screamed, and a sphere of golden fire swelled out of nothing. It was small, as suns went, no larger than a house. But it burned with the full fury of a true star. The grass beneath it blackened. The lake began to boil. The waterfall turned to steam before it reached the rocks, and a thick white fog rolled out across the whole garden.
This was Ra's son.
He had made it eons ago, when the world was young, a child born from the fire of his own heart because he had no other. It was his last defense, a refuge no god had ever dared to approach. Nothing could reach him inside. The heat alone would unmake a body a hundred paces out. Even if an enemy knew he was within, there was nothing to be done. It was a sun, a tiny one, a true one, and as long as it burned, Ra would live.
He sank into it with a sob of relief.
In the blazing heart of the thing he curled up and shook and told himself it was over. Beneath him the garden was dark. No one was following. He was safe.
Then the sun dimmed.
It was a small change, at first, like a lamp's flicker. Ra frowned and pushed more of himself into the fire. The light swelled, then shrank again. At the edge of the corona a thin shadow was creeping across, thin as a thread, then thick as a rope, then thick as a river.
"No," Ra whispered. "No, no, no."
The sun cracked.
It split along a line of black that ran from pole to pole, and from the crack poured darkness like blood from a wound. It ate the light. It ate the heat. The shadows spilling out did not fall away from the flame. They tore it apart in long ribbons, as a child unwinds a spool of golden thread, and the whole bright globe unspooled into the night and was gone.
Ra fell. He did not fall far. A hand caught him by the throat before he had dropped three feet.
He looked up.
He had seen the shadow in the garden. He had seen the man who walked through it with daggers in his fists. But he had never seen the man's eyes, and now he did. They had once been many colors, a shifting storm of gold and green and violet that mirrored whatever they looked upon. They were not many colors now. They were one. Black from edge to edge, deep as a well, with no bottom and no light and no end. Around the man the shadow armor moved like a living thing, flowing across his chest and shoulders in slow, patient coils, sliding up the arm that held the god's neck.
Ra had stood at the dawn of the world. He had watched the first mountains rise and the first rivers run. He had never once looked into the face of a thing that truly did not care whether he lived.
"Please," he said.
The hand tightened.
"Please. I am the Sun. There is no day without me. The world will go dark. I am the Sun, I am the Sun, I..."
He could not finish. His voice was cracking and his body was shaking and he was crying openly, wetly, like a child, tears running down his falcon cheeks. He clawed at the arm that held him. He might as well have clawed at a mountain.
"Please," he whispered. "Please don't."
Damien did not say a word. He only watched. His grip closed slowly, with no more effort than a man crushing an empty cup, and the breath rattled in the god's throat and went still. Ra's eyes stayed on his face the whole time. They were gold and bright and frightened, then gold and dim, then no color at all.
It took a long time. Damien did not look away once.
When the body went limp he opened his hand and let it fall into the shallows. A god of the sun had been choked to death like a common man, in the dark, with no one to see.
On the walls of Orario, the soldiers watched pale gold light bleed through the edges of the great black rectangle in the sky. It flickered. It faded. It went out.
Zeus and Odin stood back to back at the edge of the lake.
Neither had spoken for a long time. Zeus held a bolt of lightning that crackled uselessly in his fist. Odin held his staff in both hands, the runes along it glowing very low. Behind them the waterfall had gone quiet. The flowers had stopped glowing. The shadows pressed close.
Each of them was praying, in his own way, that he would not be next.
They had always been proud gods. Odin had hung nine nights on a tree for wisdom, and Zeus had overthrown his own father to take the sky. They had seen kingdoms fall. They had never, not once, been prey.
"Odin," Zeus said quietly.
"Yes."
"If I am to die here, I want you to know..."
"Hush," Odin said. "Do not give him the satisfaction."
Then the dark tore open.
It happened above them and to the left, a long ragged seam running through the black like cloth being ripped from the inside. Light poured through, gray and cold and flat. Something about the light was wrong. It did not illuminate. It only made the garden look as though it had always been small and false, a painting on the inside of a box.
Two figures stepped through.
The first wore dark robes and carried a cup of wine in his hand. Zeus knew him. Odin knew him. They had spent weeks learning a dead craft at his feet.
The second was harder to look at. Odin tried to hold the shape of him in his mind, and the shape slid away like water through fingers. A man, tall, in plain dark clothes. A face. Eyes. The harder Odin looked, the less there was to see, as though the figure had been drawn on glass and breathed on until it fogged.
Damien came out of the dark on the far side of the clearing, daggers dripping. He stopped when he saw them.
He knew the mage. He had read the descriptions in Freya's reports and seen the sketch her spies had made of the dark sorcerer who had taught the gods their avatar craft. The face was the same. It was a very ordinary face.
"What," Damien said, "are you doing here?"
"SERATNA!" Zeus's voice cracked across the clearing, high and wild with relief. "Seratna! Get us out of here! Now! Do it now!"
Damien's eyes narrowed. "Seratna?"
He did not get to say more.
The second figure moved. Damien never saw him cross the distance. One moment the shape stood beside the mage, and the next it was in front of Damien, and a fist was buried in his chest.
It went through everything. The shadow armor that had turned back lightning and sun and the arrows of gods peeled apart like wet paper. The blow went into his body and out the other side. It lifted him off the ground and threw him the length of the garden, and the garden broke around him. He crashed across the lake, skipping over the black water like a stone, and slammed into the cliff beside the waterfall. The rock split. He plowed a trench down the cliff face and came to rest in a crater of smoking stone at its foot.
Damien lay on his back and looked up at the dark.
He tasted blood. It was a strange taste, thick and old. He tried to remember the figure's face, the cut of the jaw, the color of the eyes. There was only a slow, sliding blank, like trying to recall the face of someone from a dream.
He rolled onto his side and began to push himself up.
On the far shore, the mage who had been called Seratna stood with his cup in his hand and looked toward the crater where Damien had fallen. For a moment he said nothing. Then he turned and looked at Zeus and Odin, who stood side by side with wide eyes and white lips.
He smiled.
The robes began to change. The dark wool lightened and hardened, flowing into plates of reddish silver with a high collar that framed the neck. A tailcoat of reddish brown unfurled behind him like wings. His hair lengthened and darkened and turned to flame. A short red beard grew along his jaw. His eyes, which had been pale and ordinary, burned open in two points of red, and the air around him groaned under a weight it had not been shaped to carry.
He had been a mage. Now he was a king, tall as a doorway, with the patience of a mountain and the hunger of a wolf.
"Hello, gods," said Antares, King of Dragons, Monarch of Destruction. "How have you been?"
The color left Zeus's eyes. It left Odin's eyes. It drained out of both of them at once, until they stood there, two gods at the edge of a quiet lake, looking at the one thing in all of creation they had never once thought to fear.
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