by Varsha Ravi
She had said she had been sent to kill him, which discomfited him further. The notion that there was an entity out there happily willing to wreck entire minds, entire lives, in order to get a rise out of him was unsettling. Already, he was an inconvenience and a danger to Suri and Rana and all close to them. Already, he had stayed for too long.
How soft you’ve become, he thought, a memory and a presage. The words were someone else’s, but he heard them in his own voice.
So, he had healed her—not entirely, as he suspected that was impossible. But to the extent of his own ability.
And after the revulsion, the whispering dread—who will you hurt next, simply by existing?—had passed, he had thought immediately, impossibly, of Suri. Of how she might hate him for such an act, so clearly inhuman, of how she might ask her questions, pressed together with sharp, dark-eyed curiosity, and seek guilelessly to understand it. He had thought of her, and unbidden, he had wanted to tell her of what he had done. Because it was important—because they told each other things when they were important.
Except that was not entirely true. Because they told each other things even when they were not so important, even when there was no good reason for the other person to know. She told him about her classes and her friends and her hopes for the future, the latter offered with self-conscious gruffness and ducked, bright eyes. And he told her useless trifles about his past, memories twisted so far into fiction they bore little resemblance to anything that he had lived.
Before, the thoughtless need to tell her would not have struck him as odd. It was true enough that he had been wary of staying in a single place for more than a night, of speaking to another and having them respond. These were things he did not indulge in, and even without his memory, he had felt the strangeness of it. But now, he knew. And the cutting, bitter knowledge—that he had not bared himself the way that he had with her in millennia—terrified him. He hadn’t thought he had the capacity for softness, for trust, and it had made him foolish and prideful.
How he wanted to tell her. Not with the rushed, expectant desperation of a sinner, not as a confession. It was a desire borne by habit, a careless kind of trust. He wanted to tell her just to hear what she would say, just because he felt like he had to. As if they were capable of reciprocation, instead of chasms laid edge to edge.
The water had risen over his shoulders, and he twisted the tap shut, disrupting it with his movement. The world felt liquid and liminal around him, as though he could lean his head back and melt straight into the water, following it down the drain to a different life.
It had been a long time since he had been human, and yet he was still the same coward. Weaned on idealism and yearning, a martyr through and through.
Kiran shifted in the water, and his shoulder ached from the burn. He lifted his hand and gently traced the lines of the new sankhili. It had come with the darkness, with the nightmare that he had not been able to recall the next day, slumped and crooked on the coffee table. He hadn’t noticed the new mark until he had undressed for the shower, bleary with fatigue.
As far as he could tell, it was meant to bind his power. Not as the old one had—that had blocked it entirely, rendered it useless. Now that it had disappeared fully, this new one—jagged and small, hooked under his collarbone—tempted him to use it, only to rain down pain if he did. Healing Annabel had inflamed it, rendering him speechless with agony for a few moments. The cold water slid over it, soothing the burn for only a few seconds, a temporary balm.
Tell her, a tiny, traitorous voice whispered. Tell her of the chains, and of what you did to Annabel.
Kiran tipped forward, submerging himself in the water. It was beginning to warm from his skin, but it was still cold enough that it shocked him out of the syrup-sweet reverie he’d fallen into, that airy, ethereal dreamland where telling her was a foregone conclusion, a need.
And yet, again and again, he saw the world burning around him. It was a nightmare borne from the past—sprung from battlefields and dead cities and ash-stained burial grounds—but all souls returned, and their stories returned with them. Time was a tapestry woven from old threads. The world had burned once, and so it would burn again.
I can’t, he thought again, repeating the words until they lost meaning under the glassy emptiness of the water. If she knew, she would want to help—she would try to help, no matter the cost. And maybe, just maybe, she might ask him to stay.
He feared that most of all, of course. Because he knew if she asked him to stay, he would. Wordlessly, senselessly, he would stay. The world would burn, as it was always meant to do, only this time he had lit the match and flung it, uncaring—and he would stay.
25
Enesmat
Kiran felt the knife just as painfully as if it had struck his own heart. It was a sharp, burning twinge in his chest, a flame that did not, could not, die. It consumed him until all that remained was ashes and the suggestion of smoke.
The cruelty of humanity. Their capacity for self-destruction.
He stepped closer to Viro. The knife was still buried between her ribs—she was still alive. Her eyes were sharp and wide with pain, but her chest was heaving slowly, her mouth twisted in a facsimile of a smile. Viro was staring down at her as if the matter of her death was something distasteful, but necessary. An objective on a list, a means to an end.
He stepped closer. Viro released her body, and she crumpled to the stone, caught between the two columns of the temple. Her hands lingered over the knife in her chest, grasping it loosely, but she didn’t pull. Her mouth twitched upward bitterly—she knew what would happen if she tried.
Kiran stepped forward, and knelt beside her body, taking her in his arms. In death, her skin was too warm, searing with heat. Her eyelids fluttered as she turned to look at him, gaze molten and impossibly fond. “You were not listening the first time,” she chided, as if he were a child. Blood dotted her bottom lip. “I told you to run, Kiran. As fast as you can, as far as you can make it. Run.”
“Not without you,” he said, voice strangely steady.
She grimaced, but her eyes were bright. “So stubborn. You are a fool. And perhaps I am a fool for loving you. I wonder…” she cut off, voice hoarse and faded. The color was draining from her skin, but she managed to finish, gaze fixed on his, “I wonder where that leaves us now.”
And then she was gone.
He had spent seventeen years walking beside death. And yet, strangely, this was the first time someone had ever died in his arms. This was the first time he had watched the light leave someone’s eyes, watched it hollow them completely. A second before, he had been holding Suri in his arms—now, he was embracing a corpse.
He laid her gently beside the edge of the altar and drew himself up. He felt as though he were a corpse himself, nothing more than a set of bones and a flame formed into the shape of a beating human heart.
When he spoke, his voice was nearly inaudible even in the silence of the early morning. The sky continued to lighten, that oily, empty blackness fading into a dark, expansive red. Not the color of fire, but of blood. “Have you ever wondered what would happen if I gave myself to the earth before the auspicious time?”
He would have died in eight hours, if this had not happened. But eight hours was enough—to die now was something wholly different than dying then.
Viro still stood on the top step of the temple. His gaze sharpened from that mercurial anger to something guarded, wary. Afraid.
Good, he thought. Be afraid.
His fear meant nothing, now. It would change nothing. The king of Athri was just as powerless as Suri had been seconds before, trapped by the promise of a knife.
Kiran had always thought of power as something to hold carefully, to wield with reason and kindness. Something to be shared—something to drive peace. But now, he thought it resembled the knife in his hands, the ceremonial dagger that had always laid beside the stone idol, meant to be used once—only once.
Power would o
nly ever consume, would only ever kill. It seared through humanity, uncaring, and left a trail of corpses in its wake. And yet it was so fragile. It was so easy to misuse, so ephemeral. Without a strong grip, it would slip away.
But if you held it carefully, angled the blade properly, it could cut through anything.
“I have,” he said, his voice still touched with that odd, remote quiet. He examined the ceremonial dagger in his scarred hands—the holy daggers were all jeweled and lovely, but this one was different, he knew. The kita-studded hilt had been carved from the heartwood of the kino trees below, the iron first cut and sharpened when they had begun to build this temple. This was a knife as old as his fire, and it had been made for him.
“I have dreamt of it, of death, countless times. I have considered all the possible outcomes, all the possible results. And sometimes, I wonder what will happen if I sacrifice myself early.”
“Kiran,” the boy said, holding his gaze. It was unreadable; perhaps it was not, and he was simply too distant from his own body to read it. Everything about the world around him seemed foreign—even the cold stone under his feet felt peculiar. All he could depend on was the feeling of fire in his hands, in his lungs.
“I cannot know, of course, what will happen before I do it,” he continued. “Sometimes I wonder if it will backfire—if it will double the curse for another eighteen years. And other times, I think perhaps it will cure the blessing just as well as if I sacrificed myself properly. But do you know what I suspect will happen?”
He did not say anything. Kiran had not truly expected him to, and yet the silence chafed at him. He held up the ceremonial dagger, shifting it so the metal shone in the firelight. Without looking up, he said, “I think it will have no effect at all. My blood will spill, and the world will continue, untouched by the hands of the gods.”
The king seemed to find his voice, gravelly with anger and tinged with an odd, sharp fear. “You would ruin this nation. You would destroy these people, for the sake of your divine wrath, your lost love.” His eyes narrowed in a faint, revolted challenge. “Are you even capable of that?”
“Am I?” he echoed, tracing the lifelines of his empty, spread palm with the tip of the knife. Kiran turned and held the boy’s gaze steadily. There was so much emotion in those eyes, a tempest of raw feeling. And he could not feel any of it—just the echoes of that old fire, that first flame. “There is no divine wrath, Viro, just as there is no divine virtue. I am not a tool for you to wield as you would a scythe, reaping souls as payment. And if this country falls, it will be you who tore it down.”
Are you not afraid that, in the end, they will disappoint you?
“Do not disappoint me,” he said, and then cut his palm open, and placed it on the carved icon at the center of the altar.
The sacrifice was differentiated from past rituals by one simple aspect—intent. The act of bloodletting was common enough; it was his intent, his flame-bound heart, that determined the purpose of the blood, and the effect of it.
He turned the blade inward, slid it between his ribs—there was a reciprocation in the act, a physical death as well as a spiritual one. But even if he had not split his heart, he would have died simply from the wish, the decision to give up his blood.
It was a wish that rose and found the thrones of the gods and waited to be judged, and that was why he was not entirely surprised when that warm, hollowing fire in his chest grew into something spiteful and blistering.
I told you, Avya whispered, flames wrapped around his heart. I should not have let them hurt you.
The god’s anger was alive, a dark, destructive flame that held a certain measure of malevolence—of true wrath. Kiran welcomed it, even as it burned through his mortal body, through his brittle bones. A small, logical part of his mind tried to push it away, tried to cleanse his mind of the relentless fire of that sharp, jagged anger. Yet the greater portion of him turned its back on it. There is no point, it said, lost in old, broken grief. Let it in. Let it burn you away.
And so he did, and as the flames grew into a dissonant, shattering throb of fury and of loss, they consumed him entirely. His hands slipped from the altar and he fell to his knees beside it, trembling with fire. And that caustic, nearly pleasant burn was the last thing he registered before he slipped from consciousness, and the city caught flame.
He opened his eyes, and found himself in the meadow of kantal. This time, he was standing, hands clasped in one another, skin smelling of smoke and amber.
The endless day had passed, and now it was night. The blackness of the sky above stained him as though it was ink, the tepals of the flame lilies gleaming though there was no glint of warmth to reflect against. They shone in the darkness, individual flames borne from bone and flint.
Kiran reached out a hand to touch one, brushing his fingers against the shell of the flower, and it curled against his skin as if it sensed a kinship in his divinity-riven heart. The ribbon of the tepal wreathed his wrist, vicious and lovely. The tip grazed the edge of his lifeline, and then melted into blood.
His skin was wet, rich with scarlet—he broke away, staggering back from the broken blossom and into darkness. But it was not enough. The flower dissolved entirely, the deep green tendrils and leaves falling away into salted hot liquid that soaked into the dark soil of the meadows and gave way to the birth of something dark and terrible.
When he wrenched away frantically, he touched another set of flowers, golden stamens pressed flush against the point of his elbow. Heat spattered the back of his arm as the kantal flowers disappeared into blood. The night swallowed him, depthless and absolute, and unsteadily, he stumbled from flower to flower sightlessly, ruinous. Poisoned dirt stained his feet, and yet he could not stop, twisted by some power beyond his control, a rhythm that wound through the field of flowers and swept them into iron-sweet death.
The darkness was everything; it was bitter, blistering light and he had seared himself into blackness, empty sockets drenched with blood and crushed tepals. He was a blind man in a world of colchicine and turned soil. He was a gelid dream inverted and shattered.
Madness devoured the meadow until the last blossom had fallen to his touch, until the ink of the night had sunk into the soil. His skin was vermilion-soaked, ready to ignite. He could taste all the blood he had wrought, sour iron coating the back of his mouth, and he curled his toes into the dirt to keep himself from falling to his knees.
The sea of crimson receded as the earth swallowed it whole, tremors running through the haunted, airless darkness until the soil thrust forth a nascent nightmare of its own, already streaked with blood and venom.
The nightmare smiled, lightless, and danced across the drowned dirt toward him, kicking up ashes and broken tepals with every movement. He twirled and ran and set flame- spun hands on his shoulders, grasping them so tightly that the ragged nails split skin. And then he leaned in, so close the blood on his lips wet the shell of his ear.
“Die,” he whispered, voice sweetened with cruelty, and so he did.
The first few times the story was told, there were differing accounts of how precisely the fire had begun. There were no survivors—the fire burned the city in its entirety, sparing not a single house, not a single heart. It swept through the streets relentlessly, its only focus to burn.
Some speculated that the fires of Avyakanth reignited spontaneously, and untouched and unmediated by the hands of man, burned all in their path. Others were convinced that it was the work of that Najan spy—the one who had killed their captain, who had broken their king. They had set strategic fires throughout the city, choking out escape routes and dooming the people to a single, inescapable fate.
But the version of the story that spread like wildfire spoke of the cause as not something borne of the city proper, but of the kingdom’s reclusive, divinity-touched prophet. The young messiah, driven mad with lost love.
And in this story, it was his wrath that had burned the city—he had always been imbalanced, no
t fully settled in his own body. In his bitter fury, he had blamed the whole of humanity for his pain, had cursed them all to burn the same way he had. And so the fire had spread, not driven by the physical hunger for air, but by a more ruthless desire, an appetite for death.
The story, as it went, said this anger lived on even after his death—that it became a deity in and of itself, something cold and remote from the warmth of humanity; a god named for a razed nation, for ashes and ashes. But the story, as close as it was to the truth, was not wholly accurate.
And yet it held a kernel of old fear, of god-struck awe, and so it survived regardless. In that temple, high above the dying city, a tale was spun from dust and ash into something that held flame—something that held power. And it cut through the truth, through the remnants of those that were below, even as they cried out; even as they burned.
In the palace, entire rooms were abandoned to the fires. Screams layered over one another in a cacophony of pain as people struggled to escape the flames, trapped underneath the weight of others.
In the aviary, a girl stood beside the windows and watched the city burn. And when the flames reached her, she smiled.
In the temples of Marai, priests clutched each other in terror as flaming braziers turned to liquid and seized them; the ceilings crumbled from melting supports, paintings on carved stone blurred by smoke and flame. Two girls clung to one another, watching as the north tower listed precariously to the side. And as it fell, threatening to crush them and then following through, one did not tear their gaze away from that shadowed echo in the distance, from another burning temple.
And in the soft paddy fields on the outskirts of the shattered city, one watched the flames and mourned the death of a thousand hearts.