“I’ll remember that.”
I walked over to the altar, dusting myself off. After everything we’d gone through, it was about time to see exactly what those Sentinels had been protecting in here.
Chapter Twenty-Five
On the altar were just two objects: a pair of shiny silver gauntlets and a kusarigama, a kind of weapon I’d trained with before but never had the privilege of owning. The kusarigama was made entirely of bones, with tiny bones bonded together in links forming the weapon’s long chain, and the sickle section made of larger ones. The sickle blade, though, was made of some sort of black metal. I picked the weapon up, and the instant my fingers touched it, a jolt of power coursed through my body. I gave it a test swing, and its balance was magnificent.
A gasp of shock came from the hall below, and I turned around to see Isu staring in shock at the kusarigama.
“You look surprised to see this, Isu.”
“I am. I last saw this weapon hundreds of years ago, when it was wielded by one of Xayon’s champions.”
“I can feel that it possesses a potent magical power,” I said. “But, strangely enough, I feel like it’s… my magic.”
“That’s because it is. This weapon is imbued with Death magic, as well as a touch of Wind magic. I should know; I forged this weapon myself.”
It was my turn to be surprised.
“Why would you forge a weapon for one of Xayon’s champions?”
“The Wind Goddess and I used to be allies, once,” she said bitterly. “A long, long time ago. But all that… it’s in the past now. Ancient history.”
“These gauntlets are part of Xayon’s suit of armor,” said Rami, interrupting us.
I turned and saw her examining the gauntlets with a look of awe on her pretty face.
“I never dreamed the day would come when I would look upon these, let alone hold them in my own hands,” she murmured.
I put the kusarigama down and walked over to Rami.
“Mind if I take a look at these?” I asked.
She handed the gauntlets to me, and as soon as my skin touched the gleaming silver, I felt it: a presence. I knew the feeling well by now, from my experience with Isu.
The presence that I felt now was not Isu’s, however. As if an unseen presence was guiding me, I slipped the gauntlets onto my hands. As soon as I did, I heard a woman’s voice in my head. It was faint, though, and muffled, as if she was trying to speak to me through a thick stone wall. I could barely discern what she was saying.
“Excuse me, everyone,” I said quickly. “I need a moment… alone.”
I strode out of the chamber and hiked a short distance through the passage until I was out of earshot of everyone else.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“I am Xayon,” the voice answered, “Goddess of Wind.”
“I thought so. Well, Xayon, I’m—”
“Lord Vance Chauzec, the new God of Death,” Xayon answered.
“How did you know that?”
“One god knows another,” Xayon said. “You will learn this soon enough.”
“I guess I will. There are plenty of things I still have to learn about being a god. There is something I want to ask, though. Since you’re a god, you’re able to make a friend of mine Fated, right? A devotee of yours. She’s traveled a very long way to find you. What’s left of you, anyway.”
“I cannot, Vance. I’m not strong enough to make any mortal Fated. I need to grow stronger… and I’m not. I’m fading away. I’m almost gone…”
“But you’re talking to me. A part of you is still alive.”
“My soul is, but my body has been dead for hundreds of years.”
“I resurrected Isu, and I’m pretty sure I can do the same for you. These gauntlets... I can use them like I used Grave Oath, right? They’ll point to your spirit in the Sea of Souls, and I’ll be able to travel up there and pull you back.”
“You need a body to pull me back into, Vance.”
“All right, well, I’ll just kill some asshole who deserves to die anyway and put you in their body.”
“It doesn’t work like that. I can only be resurrected into my own body.”
“But you said you’ve been dead for hundreds of years… Surely, all that’s left of you now is a bunch of dusty old bones?”
“Yes, that is all that’s left of my body now. But if you were to gather all the pieces together and perform the resurrection correctly, my body would be regenerated. New flesh and skin would sprout from those old bones, and they would be filled with marrow once more. I would return to my physical prime and occupy the same youthful body that last existed hundreds of years ago, when I was murdered.”
“Murdered?” I asked.
“Would you call the Purge anything else? There’s no point in sugarcoating what those zealots did. They murdered us, plain and simple. And the monsters who did it didn’t stop there. Pieces of my desecrated body were scattered all across Prand. I, the Goddess of Wind, was thrown to the winds… a cruel irony.”
“Wait a second,” I said, “if your body was hacked up, and all the pieces scattered all over Prand, then how am I ever going to resurrect you? You said that your skeleton needs to be intact for this to work.”
“You have my hands, now,” she answered.
“I have gauntlets, not hands.”
“Look under the altar, and you’ll see an old wooden chest. In it are the hands that once wore these gauntlets.”
“And the rest of your body? The hands are just a start, and look what it took to find my way into this place. It’ll take me decades to find all the rest of you!”
“It would,” she answered, “if they had not all been collected already.”
A flame of hope flared brightly within me. I noticed, though, that Xayon’s voice was growing fainter and
