Blessed Monsters Read online

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  For Thao, who said,

  “I think Malachiasz should get a book.”

  prologue

  THE BOY EATEN BY THE WOOD

  This was a mistake.

  Rashid was alone, in a dark forest that pried and pulled and tried its very best to rip him to pieces, and all he could think was, This was a mistake.

  Don’t worry, it only wants those of us with magic, Nadya had told him, in a tone he did not want to contemplate, her gaze pinned on Malachiasz.

  This was a mistake.

  He had buried it deep—long abandoned, but never forgotten—that was a mistake, too. It was too late for regret. Too late to wish that he had taken a different path. When Parijahan had shaken him awake to run, he should have said no. If only he had remained ignorant to politics and its intricacies, remained what he was supposed to be: a guard and a captive, nothing more. The if onlys spread out like a spiderweb, a hundred thousand different avenues where he could have chosen differently, and he wouldn’t be here. He wouldn’t be remembering what he had forced into darkness, waking it from its slumber.

  He kept moving, boots crunching through underbrush, wishing he had a torch or a fancy blood mage spell to spin light into the air. He paused and grazed upon that sleeping power but pulled away.

  No magic. And of no consequence. A guard and a captive and a boy from the desert who was in over his head.

  If he stopped, the vines would curl around his ankles, tightening, whispering that it was better to stay. Wouldn’t he like to learn, finally, what it was that settled beneath his skin, waiting to break forth?

  He slashed at a vine and kept moving. No and no and no. The trees—broad and vast as the eighteen pillars in the temple where he had been hidden away as a child—were slowly closing in. The spaces between them becoming so narrow that soon he would be trapped. Dying here would be his fate.

  Rashid had wanted to die under the sun.

  He flinched at a shivering underneath his skin, slithering within his forearm. He swallowed back bile as something broke forth. Green and wormlike and splitting across his arm. He blinked. A stem. Flowers burst forth, crimson and burgundy and pale violet and dripping with blood.

  Rashid refused to let the whimper that had settled in his chest escape.

  Crack. He whirled, coming face-to-face with a creature that he could not immediately put a name to. He didn’t know the monsters that lurked in Kalyazin’s corners, but this one was familiar. Hunched over, just shy of walking upright. Long claws tipped humanlike hands, and it walked on deerlike hooves. The head was that of a deer skull if deer had that many … teeth. Flowers, acrid and rotting and roiling with maggots, dripped from its antlers.

  Oh. The word came to him.

  Leshy. A forest guardian. One of Nadya’s preferred threats—to leave them all to the leshy that she claimed one of her gods commanded.

  Rashid couldn’t fathom any god commanding this being. He couldn’t fathom this not being a god itself. But he had a very wobbly understanding of what the Kalyazi considered gods.

  He took a step back, knocking into a tree. The openings had closed. Nowhere to run. He pressed flush against the trunk.

  Words came crawling and scratching out of a throat dormant for centuries. They were strange and uncomfortable and unfathomable to him, yet they pierced deep into his core.

  Escape was no longer possible.

  His fate was sealed.

  The forest only feeds on those with magic.

  The forest would eat every single one of their doomed group before it turned on the rest of the world. Because they had set it free from its prison and it had been waiting a very long time to feed.

  1

  MALACHIASZ CZECHOWICZ

  There is music at the end of the universe. Chyrnog’s songs that push like roiling worms into the brain and slowly take apart the mind. A weakening before consumption.

  —The Volokhtaznikon

  Malachiasz Czechowicz woke up in bloodstained snow. The cold of death was a needle that dug deep into bone, and he remained still, eyes closed, ice soaking into the last tatters of his clothes, until his skin warmed.

  He shivered only once, as the cold from the snow became more present than that of the grave, doing his best to shove past his disorientation. Had he—?

  Yes.

  He had died. The last thing he had seen was Nadya, streaked with blood and tears, churning with spent power and clutching him. Then darkness, but not quiet. No peace.

  He was afraid to move, afraid to disturb whatever tenuous silence had wrenched him away from the ledge. He shouldn’t be breathing.

  His fingertips were blackened with what he hoped was magic and not frostbite. He let his iron claws slide back into his nail beds and nearly cried with relief that he could. He didn’t feel like himself, but he hadn’t felt like himself in a long time.

  He was going to die here.

  He blinked. Considered how he already had. He touched the wound at his chest. It wasn’t bleeding, but it was certainly a gaping hole that led straight to his heart.

  He shouldn’t be alive.

  At his edges were echoes of transcendence, and he wasn’t prepared to return to that state. Becoming a god was a bit of a lottery, he had found, and chaos was a not entirely pleasant lottery to win. As sweet as the thrill of power might have been, the pain of his bones shattering only to reform only to break free of his skin was a little too near for his taste. If he pressed out—just a bit—he could feel where he became something more. It was a series of steps before the fall, and the illusion that he was consciously in control of it was one he would like to maintain for as long as he could.

  He had only killed one god.

  There were many more to go.

  “Well, boy.” A horrible voice slithered through the back of Malachiasz’s skull. His vision blanked out. No bleak mountainside of white and white and white. No more anything. Only darkness.

  Malachiasz had known horrors. He knew the sounds of nightmares and chaos. The feeling of burning coals raked over skin, of knives under fingernails, of living shadows taking him apart and putting him back together in the wrong order. He knew pain. He knew chaos. He was chaos.

  But chaos—chaos was small and rational at the foot of this.

  This was all those terrors combined and wrapped into something much worse. Two words, small, insignificant, yet with them came an invisible shackle binding his wrists, a collar around his throat. A promise.

  Well, Malachiasz replied, trying to be the Black Vulture and not the terrified boy. This won’t do at all.

  It was the wrong move, and the voice gave a scraping laugh. A starburst of pain rattled across Malachiasz’s vision, sparking the darkness with bursts of light. He was so young before whatever had taken him.

  “I am tired of mortals who think they can fight me,” the voice said. “I have been waiting a long time for you. But there will be time for that, time for eve
rything, time for exactly what I wish. This is our introduction, you see.”

  Malachiasz’s heart was pounding so hard he thought it might give up in his chest, and at least that would stop the horror.

  Hard to have an introduction when I don’t know your name.

  “Earn it.”

  * * *

  Malachiasz didn’t know how he had made it off the mountain. He was outside the strange church, every part of him aching, the forest creeping, taking, rotting within him.

  He had grown used to his vision splitting every time a cluster of eyes opened on his body. He was used to his shifting chaos. But this pain was darker, and there was nothing for him to do but grit his teeth and press through it.

  The church was made of wood—had it been stone before? He needed a place to get out of the cold, to feel something. The door opened easily at his touch. He closed it behind him, relishing the silence.

  Moss crept along the floor and up the walls over the old icons. He could feel the forest pulling at his fraying edges, trying its very best to unravel him, as it ate and ate. It had nearly succeeded once. He stepped across the hallway and closed the door to the stairway leading to the well. He didn’t want to think about what Nadya had done.

  The crunch of bones underneath his boots was loud as he followed a hall to the sanctuary. He bypassed it, hoping to find a smaller room to hole up in until he felt warm.

  Maybe he would never feel warm again.

  It took time, stepping through rotting plants and brittle bones, to find the room that would have housed the caretaker of the church. There was an oven in the corner. Malachiasz filled it with shattered bits of furniture and reached for his spell book. It wasn’t at his hip. Neither was the dagger he’d carried for years. Frustration and anxiety and blistering fear overcame him all at once and he thudded heavily to the ground, squeezing his eyes shut. He let out a long, shuddering breath.

  He buried his face in his hands and tried not to bring back the voice. He suspected the being was always there, watching. Waiting to overwhelm him further. Forcing his eyes closed did little, a cluster of them opening on his hand and disorienting him.

  When he had snapped past the mortal bonds tying him to this realm of reality, a lot had been made clear that had been taken by the Vultures. Things he had lost. Was any of it real?

  He remembered the boy with the scar on his eye. And dragging books into the boy’s room after a failed assassination attempt. Spending his days wandering the palace until the boy pulled him back to lessons.

  His brother.

  Serefin. His murderer.

  Family was something Malachiasz had yearned for but now wished to forget. Better to have the false family he had built for himself to replace the one wrenched away. Reconciling this was too difficult.

  His time in the forest was hazy. It had clawed at him long before they’d reached Tzanelivki. The moment they left the monastery and moved into Dozvlatovya, it began its assault, wanting to devour him. Serefin had been distant as they traveled through the forest, constantly taken by fits, his eyes bleeding. And if he—or Nadya—had shown signs of malicious intent, Malachiasz was too distracted to notice.

  Yet he didn’t understand. Why had Nadya saved him when confronted by her goddess? Why let him taste the terrifying expanse of her magic?

  Malachiasz had the power of a god but it was nothing, inconsequential, to what the Kalyazi girl with hair like snow could have if she knew how to wield it. The thought was as thrilling as it was terrifying. It would have been better had she not betrayed him. But he had betrayed her, too. They had spent the past year willfully kicking each other at any glimmer of weakness. She was the enemy, perhaps it had been foolish to think she would ever be anything else.

  He tugged on a bone knotted in his hair. He still had a few relics, their power thrumming under his fingertips, and he could break them. Push past his consciousness, his mortal body. Transcend. But that was, quite possibly, the last thing he wanted to do.

  He stared blankly at the cold oven, realizing he was useless without his spell book. But even if he had it, would it work? What had Nadya done?

  Frustrated, he slashed the back of his hand with an iron claw, hoping he was wrong and that she hadn’t destroyed everything—hadn’t betrayed him so fully.

  But there was no magic in his spilt blood. There was nothing.

  He swallowed hard, staring at the blood dripping down his hand and fighting tears. What good was he without his magic? What was the point of him? He was nothing but a monster. He still had some magic, something far past blood magic, and he could feel it if he pressed. But using it was tapping into chaos and he wasn’t sure he had the control for it.

  Malachiasz shivered. He was freezing and it was growing harder to ignore the ripples of pain each time his body shifted. At least it had quieted back down to what he was used to, eyes and mouths and twitching. No extraneous limbs or spines in the wrong places.

  All his life he’d had a goal, for things to not be so bad, and he could always see that light at the end of the darkness, even as it grew farther away with each step he took.

  Now it had gone out and he wasn’t sure what he was fighting for—if there was anything to fight for.

  Taszni nem Malachiasz Czechowicz.

  He couldn’t let himself fall—he didn’t know if he could return from that place of chaos—but his edges were fraying, the presence sliding forward with a scrape. And there was no stopping it.

  * * *

  The dark was far past that of the Salt Mines—that place where no light touched. This was destruction. This was entropy.

  Awareness was a transient concept. Unimportant. Insignificant. The god had pulled him here. Call it what it was, he supposed. His ideals might have to be compromised. But he knew with perfect clarity that this was not one of the gods he had declared war against.

  “No.”

  Then what?

  “Older, greater, far more powerful.”

  His bones cracked as he was forced into chaos. Breaking only to be reforged. Steel puncturing through his skin. Teeth slicing through him. Eyes blinking open and fractured vision and how far could it go? How much more could he withstand? How much could he be altered until nothing left of him was human?

  “Fighting is hardly in your best interest. We will work so well together, you and I.”

  Malachiasz didn’t know how to respond—he had no mouth to speak in that moment. He only had panic and fear and clarity—perfect clarity.

  Let this play out. Let him hear what this god had to say.

  “Ah, surrender—I knew you were clever. I knew if only you listened, you would see.”

  It wasn’t surrender; it was biding time. Malachiasz knew what to do with those who thought themselves capable of manipulating him. He’d known how to handle Izak, and he could handle this.

  Except … he had not known how to handle Nadya. An error of a heart he did not know he still possessed. No more mistakes with that—not with her.

  But he could make this look like a surrendering of will. He could play this game.

  He also had no way to argue. Chaos was an entrapment, it forced him into its will and he was powerless before it. He had known what transcendence could do to him. He had studied enough to know it would either kill him or turn him into something so much greater, but there was no way to predict the result. And the chaos, it was fitting, but it was a punishment, a prison.

  Malachiasz did not allow himself the luxury of regret, and, forced back into divinity, his body breaking under the weight and power of this being, this god, he let himself taste it. He had made so many mistakes, told so many lies, and here he was at the end of the universe—a god in power. A boy, broken. So damn tired.

  “I know what you want. Listen. It would be less painful for you to not force my hand.”

  What did Malachiasz want? Once, it had been clear, but then his path had crashed into a girl from Kalyazin who was clever and vicious and nothing like he’d thought tho
se backward people were, a girl so wrapped around the finger of a goddess who only meant to use her, and Malachiasz’s grand ambitions had altered. He hadn’t killed Marzenya because he’d wanted to topple Kalyazin’s divine empire, he had done it because she’d forced Nadya to watch him break into pieces. Because she had led Nadya to her own destruction—merely her tool to wipe the magic from Tranavia. Because he couldn’t stand to watch as the goddess snuffed out Nadya’s vibrant spark because she had dared turn it in a new direction.

  Nadya would never forgive him, but he didn’t know if he could forgive her, either.

  Maybe this was all that was left. He had killed one god and he would kill more.

  And so, he listened.

  “Very good.” The god’s voice was marked with approval. “Together, we will plunge this world into darkness in order to bring the light.”

  What is it you want from me?

  “You have power—divine and mortal—and I need it to remake this world anew before I scatter your bones on the edges of my domain.”

  Oh good … I have only ever wanted to bring peace to my country.

  “Is that all you wish?”

  So much had changed, so much of him had changed. What had always seemed clear was murky. But, in the end, yes. He yearned for the same thing, no matter its shape. He wanted peace. He wanted no one else to suffer in the acutely specific ways he had. Not with the Vultures—they weren’t going anywhere—but because of this war, this unending madness.

  There was more he wanted, quiet things he couldn’t admit, because to admit them would be to tempt fate against them. Except there was nothing left for him with Nadya. He needed to close off the shattered pieces of his blackened heart. If he didn’t, he would find his way to her again. If she had been willing to take everything away from him, and he had been willing to take everything from her, what was left?

  I only want peace, he finally repeated.