The Serpent's Curse by Lisa Maxwell (read an ebook week .TXT) 📕

“No,” Esta protested, desperate to reach Harte. “You’ve allowed him to twist you and your plans into something else. You want to take your revenge on Thoth, fine. Take it. Death—worse than death—it’s only what he deserves. Jack as well. But the whole world?” Esta’s voice broke at the thought of it. She thought of Maggie, who would be waiting for North, not knowing what had happened. She thought of Everett, who’d been willing to risk everything and had lost even more. She thought of Viola and Jianyu—of all the Mageus in the city and across the land who would be destroyed by Seshat’s anger. And the Sundren as well—deserving of such a fate or not. They were not hers—or Seshat’s—to judge. To condemn. “The world doesn’t deserve your wrath.”

“Does it not? Once I felt as you do now. But can you not hear the cries of the people around you?” Seshat asked, her eyes narrowing. “You must see their hate here in this place, clear as the night above us. Do you not feel their loathing, hot and thick in this room, as they demand your end? And still you would save them?” There was a note in her voice, Esta realized. Anger, yes, but also something more. Something that sounded strangely like confusion. Maybe even curiosity. “They would kill you—each and every one of them would gladly take your life if given the chance.” There was a question hanging in the air between them.

“Maybe they would,” Esta admitted, still trying to sense Harte beneath the nearly impenetrable illusion Seshat had spun. “But this one room isn’t the entire world. There are those who would stand by me, those who would give their lives to fight next to me—to protect me. North did. Just tonight he gave himself so others might live. He gave up everything for a chance at a different future. If you rip the world apart, his sacrifice was for nothing.”

“What do I care of the sacrifice of one man?” she sneered.

“Why did you do it, then?” Esta asked, pleading. “I’ve seen your heart as well. I know that you were trying to save magic. Why do any of that if you only meant to tear the world apart in the end?”

“Because I did not understand until it was too late. There is no saving magic,” Seshat said, her eyes flashing dark and eternal. “I thought to preserve the promise of the old magic through writing. By stabilizing its power, I thought to protect it from time’s devouring jaws, but I only succeeded in weakening the old magic further—faster—instead. Magic was always destined to die away, but by taking a part of it, I made everything worse. Just as taking the affinity of a Mageus to create an object of power can destroy a person, taking a part of magic’s own heart only served to hasten the end of everything—chaos and order, magic and reality alike.”

“But you made the Book,” Esta pressed, refusing to believe that this could be true. “You used your affinity to create an object outside of time to protect the beating heart of magic.”

Seshat’s eyes glinted, and something like sadness—maybe even regret—shadowed her expression. “But it did not work. Because of Thoth, I could not finish what I had started—I could not complete the ritual, could not reinsert the protected piece of magic back into the whole of creation, and those failures left the last piece of pure magic even more vulnerable. To time. To weak and craven souls who would use the power for their own. Maybe long ago, I could have corrected my mistakes. Now it is too late. Now there is only one answer. To preserve magic, we must destroy time. It is the only way.”

But destroying time meant destroying reality itself. “Maybe it’s magic that should die,” Esta realized, her heart clenching at the thought. “Maybe it should simply fade away, and the world could keep spinning.”

“Do you really think it’s so easy?” Seshat scoffed. “You have seen the image of the serpent devouring its own tail.…”

“The ouroboros,” Esta said. It was the symbol Dolph had taken, and the Antistasi as well.

“Yes. It’s a representation of balance, but such balance comes at a price. It is the serpent’s curse to continue on for infinity, devouring itself and holding all that is—and all that is not—in perfect equilibrium. Now it is my burden as well. You see, I disrupted that balance when I created writing, and in doing so, gave time a victory over the power of magic. My actions caused the old magic to die even faster. I created the Book because I thought I could replicate the balance of the ouroboros. I believed that if I took a piece of pure magic outside of time’s grasp, then magic could not die.”

“The Book,” Esta realized. “Thoth showed me what it could do, the way it could hold the dagger. He said that the dagger existed and yet didn’t all at once—that it was outside of time and reality.”

“Yes,” Seshat said. “I thought I could hold back time’s fanged jaws with the creation of the Book, because I knew even then how essential the old magic was to the very existence of the world. Everything in the world—the sun and the stars and even time itself—it all begins and ends with magic. I knew that if the old magic dies, time is doomed as well, and the world with it. And it will not be an easy death. It will be a slow and terrible unmaking that will spare no one and nothing.”

Esta thought she might understand what Seshat meant. Hadn’t she herself felt the horror of being pulled out of time? Of nearly being unmade by time? But what Seshat was describing would be far larger, far more terrible. “But you stopped it by creating the Book. You did preserve that piece of pure magic. Why destroy everything, when we could destroy Thoth instead?”

“You