Page 89 of The Endless One

She wasn’t far. The Crone had her in her clutches, though, and the Sun God was still trying to catch her with the mist that was spewing from his mouth. Where was Ajax? His brother couldn’t be that far from all of this.

“What?” she shouted back, and magic speared out of her again. The Crone was caught up in those sharp shards, her voice hissing out.

“I can see their power. Kill the body, and I will contain the god.” He could do this.

The Mistress of Night laughed against the knife, twisting her body as she sawed through her own flesh, illuminated from the inside still. “You cannot contain a god, Deathless One!”

“But I can,” he hissed. Because he had contained the gravesingers. He had spent countless years learning how to capture supposedly endless beings, and all he had to do was the same thing to them.

He plunged his hand into her chest, feeling that wriggling energy against his palm. It really was like a worm. A parasite that lived inside the body it inhabited.

It was perhaps too easy to take that magic and slam it into his realm. The chains that were waiting there had been made out of years of frustration. Years of anger. Years of mistreatment by those who were meant to protect him.

He threw them around the image of his sister, giving her a form made out of shadows and darkness. And even then, he looped more chains around her neck, her back, forcing her down onto her hands and knees in the water where they had all cursed him to live for centuries. Because they had. Because they hadn’t tried to help him.

Not the first time the witches had sacrificed him, and not any of the times afterward. They left him here, alone, without ever trying to even give him company.

“Rot,” he snarled before going back to Jessamine.

She had somehow tied the Crone onto the ground, and his eldest sister was still rolling against the sharp shards of Jessamine’s spell, trying her best to get free while also slicing her new body to ribbons. But his brother had successfully filled the entire clearing with so much smoke that it appeared many of the humans had broken free from Ajax’s curse to…

Gods, they were fucking. So many of these humans were trying their best to fight it off, but the Sun God had always been far too tempting to them.

He had walked into a veritable orgy.

“Enough!” Jessamine’s shriek was so loud, so thunderous, Elric clapped his hands over his ears as they started to bleed.

It kept going. The fury, the horror, the sheer frustration that burned through everyone in the clearing. He looked up, squinting his eyes through the pain to see the smoke had frozen in place, no longer even moving with the breeze until it turned to ash.

His brother’s jaw dropped. “How are you doing that?”

Elric needed to warn her that she was using too much power at once. He was too far away, but he could see the sweat on her brow. She was pushing herself too hard, using too much magic. She could burn herself out like that, and a physical form could only take so much magic without breaking. Already he could see that it was causing her some pain.

Then light speared out of her again, those wires wrapping around the Sun God. But they weren’t manifested now. They were coming out of her. The wires were threads of herself, ripping out of her being and holding them in place. Like she was slowly unraveling herself.

“Jessamine!” he shouted, heading her way.

“Get rid of them,” she snarled. “I want them out of my kingdom for good.”

Elric hesitated for a brief moment, just long enough for Ajax to show up. His brother appeared in the pantheon in full God King glory. He wore all his old gleaming armor, so tall he must have made himself ten feet at least. He looked like one of his own statues had come to life. In one hand was a spear taller than the largest human, and in the other, a shield so wide it could have been used as a boat.

“Jessamine Harmsworth,” his brother shouted. “You could have been so much more than this! At my side, we would have ruled in golden glory!”

His nightmare snarled like the feral creature she was. “And I still would have killed you in the end.”

“Jessamine, you can’t fight him on your own,” Elric shouted.

“Take care of them, my love!” There was no arguing with her tone, not when she lunged away from him, and not when the two golden gods locked together in a light so blinding, he had to shield his eyes from the sight.

The faster he got this over with, the faster he could return. So he plunged his hand into the chest of the Crone and the Sun God and hurled them into his realm.

It took time to chain them. Precious time that he feared he did not have.

He hadn’t been gone that long, just a few heartbeats, but when he returned he was struck by the image of two invincible beings fighting each other to the death. In all his years, he never could have imagined both Jessamine and Ajax to be equally yoked. But they were. Their powers damn near matched. Though Ajax had many more years of experience in spell casting, Jessamine wanted her revenge far more.

He watched as spells dripped from her tongue, sending raw magic into the air. These weren’t spells to make things grow, to bind, or even to injure. No, the words that came out of her mouth were a reckoning. It was a curse that wrapped around Ajax, one that stole his breath every time he tried to cast a spell.

For the first time in many, many centuries, perhaps the first time ever, Ajax looked afraid. His eyes were wide beneath the safety of his helmet. His movements were rushed, sloppy. Even the ancient language seemed to come to him slowly as he fought her off.