The Gilded Ones #3: The Eternal Ones

The dazzling finale to the groundbreaking, New York Times bestselling Gilded Ones series. One girl holds the power to defeat the gods but can she become one?

Mere weeks after confronting the Gilded Ones the false beings she once believed to be her family Deka is on the hunt. In order to kill the gods, whose ravenous competition for power is bleeding Otera dry, she must uncover the source of her divinity. But with her mortal body on the verge of ruin, Deka is running out of time to save herself and an empire that's tearing itself apart at its seams.

When Deka's search leads her and her friends to the edge of the world as they know it, they discover an astonishing new realm, one which holds the key to Deka's past. Yet it also illuminates a devastating decision she must soon make

Choose to be reborn as a god, losing everyone she loves in the process. Or bring about the end of the world.

Leseprobe:

1


The end of the world begins not with a scream but with a mist, spreading sinister tendrils on a dark, moonlit night.

Deep as I am inside Ixa s mind, I don t even notice. There s just too much to experience. I may be able to see only the faintest shades of color through my blue-scaled, feline-like companion s eyes, but even then, everything I glimpse is breathtaking. Groves of soaring silver trees sprout from pink stone hills. Scrubby purple grasses cling to their roots, tiny iridescent lizards darting across them. Glass flitters. They, like the silver trees and the purple grass, are native only to Gar Nasim, the haunting, remote island that is my current location.

Finally, after three months of running and hiding, pursuers constantly at our backs, I m here on the island that Anok, the only goddess who s still our ally, told us to seek. The island where, she told me, I would find my way to Mother and, through her, the way to unlock my full power so I can defeat the gods.

Except there s no sign of Mother. Not even the faintest trace.

I sniff at a nearby tree, nose flaring with irritation when it immediately puffs a noxious odor in my direction. Trees and plants, they all have defenses invisible to the naked eye--after spending most of the last few weeks inside Ixa s mind, I understand that now. And these silver trees, in particular, are quick to express their displeasure.

The tree sends another puff of odor our way, and Ixa wrinkles our nose, the motion sending a tickling sensation down the rest of our body. Stinky, he says.

He s in here too, the shadow just behind my consciousness. I don t know how it works precisely, the way we share one body, one mind. Only that it does. And that while I m here, I don t have to be in my own body. In the wounded, golden ruin that s all that s left of me after my confrontation with the Gilded Ones, the false goddesses I once thought were my mothers, all those we eks ago.

Britta calls it possession, what I do to Ixa. She says it s as if I m one of the demons written about in the Infinite Wisdoms, the false holy scrolls whose corrupt teachings I once followed to the letter. But she doesn t understand. Ixa likes me here, welcomes me into his body. And I, for one, am grateful.

Whenever I m in Ixa s body, I m free. Free of pain. Free of the torment that plagues my every waking moment.

For the few moments or hours that I m here, I can just be.

I lope to the next tree, nostrils already expanding to catch the scents in the air. Have to keep moving, have to keep going. This is the steepest hill in Gar Nasim, the site of the Old City. Around us rise the ruins of the long-abandoned city of rose-hued stone, whose fallen buildings and the golden skeletons peeking underneath them tell a damning history. Of jatu, brothers to the immortal, gold-blooded alaki, slaughtering their sisters by the thousands in the very same cit y they once ruled. Of generations of deathshrieks, the monstrous-seeming creatures that are the resurrected forms of alaki, shrieking their songs of mourning to the wind.

No human would ever set foot here. No human would even dare.

But Mother has to be hiding somewhere close. Perhaps not in these ruins, precisely, but somewhere on this island nonetheless. Shadows, the onetime spies of the former emperor, Gezo, hide in abandoned places when they want to evade detection. That s what White Hands, my onetime mentor and now firmest ally, taught me.

I just have to keep--

Deka?

Heat sears my skin and I gasp back into my own body.

Now, Britta is crouched at eye level with me, her burly form blocking the door of the tiny house where my physical body s been hidden all day, her offending hand still on my shoulder.<