A presence whispered inside Sorrow. It sounded like an echo of the cantankerous brute she loved.

Garrett was saying goodbye.

Sorrow/Glory reached for the ghost of Garrett/Jonathan Stead, refusing to let him leave. The gateway between life and death was her realm. During the millenniums when she suffered, tied to mirrors and unable to live or die, she had resonated with people on the cusp with her. She had visited countless dying souls. The rarities who survived remembered her for the rest of their days.

Back then, she had wielded no power. All she could do was watch, helpless, as others escaped the dark solitude that was her existence.

But Sorrow had power now. She was Glory as well as Sorrow.

She grasped the unseen presence of Jonathan Stead. She willed him to stay in the realm of the living with her. He was a consummate hero. He had acted nobly. He was her touchstone in this brave new future, the only man who understood her, the only person who cared about who she used to be and she would someday become.

But the remnant of Garrett slipped away.

He was gone over the unknown horizon where all dead souls went. Even her power had limits. Glory was alone with overwhelming Sorrow. And Vy.

This was not the first time Evenjos had failed, yet her own unheroic nature was a shock. Her failure was so huge and unavoidable, she wasn’t sure she could bear it. She sobbed. She floated in space as the asteroid broke apart, as decompression sucked enemies and allies away from her. She was ice. She was nothingness.

Garrett would have done what needed doing.

Evenjos tried to pull herself together. Thomas was probably safe in his dragon armor, but Vy lacked an air tank. She needed to serve as life support for Vy, no matter how much she was hurting, no matter what devastation was tearing her apart.

She enveloped Vy’s dying body.

She conveyed molecules of air into Vy’s lungs, giving the mortal woman a chance to survive. She tried to become a microcosm of warmth and air rather than a failure. She would not let Ariock return to loss.

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But how long could she hyper-focus on feeding Vy air molecules and containing her fragile warmth?

Evenjos sensed the immensity of Thomas’s mind on the periphery of her awareness. He radiated competence whereas Vy emanated fear.

But there was something else in Vy, something odd. Determination?

Vy was trying to reach Evenjos in an intimate bond. She wanted to link.

Well, why not? Nothing mattered much anymore.

Evenjos suffused Vy with the dark energy matrix that comprised telepathy gas. Her power surged. She had been dust. Now she was supercharged fermions and charm quarks. She was a nexus of cosmic power. She might be able to rearrange matter and birth stars. Her focus and her awareness remained the same, but her abilities increased by an unknown magnitude.

Glory was eternal.

Glory was invincible.

But none of that was what she wanted!

Sorrow had borne witness to countless departing souls. She wanted to follow the ghost of Jonathan Stead and catch up with him and join him on the far side of the border between life and death. She wanted to go where she had never been able to go before.

That was all she wanted.

Sorrow experimentally tried to pull away.

If she unlinked from Vy, she knew it would mean death for the human. They shared one body. Vy’s cells were currently suffused with Glory’s cosmic dust. Only the prosthetic leg was not part of the merge. That artificial body part remained keyed into Vy’s nervous system, responding to Vy’s neural impulses.

Even their brain was shared. It was Sorrow, Glory, and it was also Vy.

I’m sorry, Vy thought, her mood laced with shame and terrible resignation. Am I a parasite?

Vy’s terror was sharp and acrid. She wanted a long future with Ariock. She wanted marriage and maybe children and adventures. She hadn’t done enough. She hadn’t seen enough.

An eruption of anguish tore through Evenjos. As her own self was binary and fully merged with Vy, she knew there was a danger of losing herself. If she let herself become subsumed in Vy, she would lose her memories of Garrett and all that come before.

Unless.

Unless she entirely gave up the part of herself that was Glory, and went with Sorrow instead.

She could let Vy have Glory.

?!

Vy tried to understand what was happening. She felt the binary goddess pull away…

…and now no one else shared her mind.

Sorrow floated in the cold void of nothingness. She still overheard the thoughts of her former self. Vy felt strange. Every cell of her body was infused with glorious power. She did not need to breathe. She was healthy despite existing in a vacuum, her clothes frozen stiff.

She had fully become Glory.

Sorrow relinquished the last bits of her powerful, immortal, magical Glory self. She gave all of her dust to Vy. For the first time in her millenniums of existence, she became truly incorporeal.

She had no containment. No life.

So she was no longer in the realm of the living, or haunting the border between life and death.

She flitted over the horizon, chasing after the soul she wanted to spend eternity with.