T’Alon plunged into a fire so hot it didn’t feel like burning. It only felt numb. He felt his fire warring with that of the World Apart, trying to absorb it, take it in, and rebuff it all at once, and failing to do much of any of them.
He fell, and as he came out the other side, down in the mirrored chasm in the bottom of the frozen sea, he opened his eyes and saw the Night Lord sinking into the surf, its bright eyes darkening.
T’Alon looked south on that last part of the fall.
Everything slowed down. Somehow, the light of the moon overhead was magnified by the layers of ice the queen had made of the eastern sea. He saw the last frozen shelf the beast had broken through. It stretched out for leagues upon leagues, forming a subterranean sky that could have been mistaken for frosted clouds. The true sea frothed beneath it, the waves crashing upon icebergs and coming up against a great jagged stone wall—the base on which the lands to the west and all their people rested—to the lands beyond Center, and into the sands and the black caves where he had been born.
The sea would take back the land. Already, the highest waves struck the frozen sky above, and with each falling slab of ice, it would grow taller and stronger, its swells more full, its bearing more wild and regal.
T’Alon closed his eyes. He remembered the day he had tried for so long to forget. He remembered clutching the side of the black cliff not far from here, and looking down as Resh fell.
He remembered the way she had looked at him. Not with anger, nor regret. Not even with grief. She had looked at him with relief. Relief born of love—that she had died so that he might live.
Before he struck, he thought perhaps he had made the most of it.
To the south, in black trenches covered in a soft blanket of snow, the Landkist of the Valley fled.
They ran for hours. They ran for what felt like days, until the maze of stone and frost began to melt some. When they emerged from a crevice onto a shelf that overlooked a beach with the first crashing waves they had seen since leaving the Valley core, Kole fell to his knees.
Linn went to him while the others waited, looking back toward the north, though they had come too far south to see the frozen sea, and too far down to spy the mountains.
They had run through the night, unto the coming of the day. And though the sky was darker than it had been, Linn thought it was brighter than it ought to be.
“Rane has given us a sunrise,” she said, squatting beside him.
Kole sobbed, the tears that leaked from his face turning to mist as his heat returned, and Baas, Misha, Jenk and even the Sage who rested close by, looking close to death, averted their eyes.
Linn couldn’t say why he cried. She doubted even he could, if he’d been asked.
Perhaps it was due to the hand he had lost. It could have been the fact that one more Ember had fallen, and one he had never known as well as he’d like. More likely, it was the feeling that they had come so far, been through so much, and yet the enemy had come, and one nothing could have prepared them for.
“I am with you,” Linn said. “We are with you. Our people—all people—are with us.”
It seemed to calm him. They knelt for a time, watching the waves crash upon the shore, which was coated with frost and the salt they couldn’t seem to escape in the east. Jenk and Misha walked along the beach, kicking at loose shells and picking a few up to examine. Far beyond them, there looked to be the beginnings of a forest, with the bare hints of gray mountains in the distance.
Despite her wounds, Shifa tired of their dalliance first. The hound approached, sniffing Kole and giving Linn a lick on the ear that had her giggling.
“What do you say, Sage?” Kole called over.
The Eastern Dark turned a haggard look his way. He leaned against a gray stone, hugging his cloak tight to his chest. His face was paler than it had been before, his cheeks more sallow.
“Shall we get on with saving the World?”
Linn smiled. She kept it on for a while, even after the sun sank too soon and the dark came out to roost, bringing all its doubts with it.
Shadow did not dare to surface for a long time.
She had slipped into the darkness between the broken slabs of the queen’s fallen tower just before the Night Lord’s emerald beam had burned it all away, and then she had sank lower, dove deeper than she ever had before.
In the dark, she couldn’t feel the tears burning her cheeks. In the dark, she couldn’t feel the lump in her throat that wouldn’t quit. More so, in the dark, none could see her.
A part of her hated that T’Alon had told her. A greater part of her hated that she missed him so. She had buried it before. Locked it away along with everything else. When the Eastern Dark had taken the Ember as a vessel, Shadow hadn’t reacted. She told herself it was because she didn’t care. In truth, she didn’t want to.
When T’Alon had come back, been freed from the Sage’s influence, she had been shocked at the joy that had filled her breast. Now she could torment him again. Bother him. Torture him with her wiles and ways.
She could follow him.
T’Alon was dead. She knew it before she had slipped into the dark that she now knew as the space between this World and the one that had finally come knocking, like sins repaid. As she flew or swam in the lightless, close expanse, she felt him go, and, in spite of her usual disregard, she found herself hoping he had made a show of it. That he had made the Last God hurt.
As Shadow flew from north to south, she wondered how long she could stay in this place without losing herself to it. The Eastern Dark had told her to be careful when traveling the secret ways of the World. Too easy to become lost.
The Eastern Dark.
Shadow’s tears dried. Her heart hardened. Her mind bent toward a new purpose: anger. Hate, and for one who deserved it more than any other.
She did not like the Last God. She did not know him. He was a being beyond her comprehension: a living World, or else the soul of one. He was a titan of darkness, a beast without chains. A destroyer, as Myriel had called him. He was not a being worthy of hate, only a force of nature to survive, or to be crushed by. Hating him—hating it—was as worthwhile as hating the tides or the stars overhead.
But Ray Valour was a man, or had been once. He had made himself into something else, just as he had made her into something else. Shadow had a life. She didn’t remember it. She never would. But she had lived a life.
Some part of her had always known it. Suspected it. Whispered it into the cold reaches of the nights. Screamed it into the void, the void that enveloped her now.
The Eastern Dark had found his power where he shouldn’t have. He had gone looking, and the looking, as he said, had got him found.
How many others had paid the price? How many others—Sages, Landkist or all manner of folk beneath them—had died due to his meddling? More so, due to his attempts to put it right?
There had been a time when Ray Valour had thought of nothing but himself. He had coveted the Embers not because they could turn back the coming tide, but because they could endure it. When Uhtren of the Valley attempted to turn the power of the World Apart against his dark brother, it had consumed him and plunged the Valley into something close to the darkness that now threatened all lands.
The Eastern Dark had let it happen. He had watched from afar as the Embers had burned brightly against the Dark Kind, thrown them back, burned out and died. He had watched it all, waiting for his champions to emerge. Waiting for more to join the ranks of the Landkist led by T’Alon Rane, his champion. His crusader.
Now, nearing the end of a life he had lived too long, Ray Valour had had a change of heart. He no longer coveted the secrets of the World Apart. He no longer ached for the power that would make him kin to the Last God. He now walked among the heroes of the very people he had doomed, whose brightest stars he had enslaved or killed in rain-soaked passes wh
en they had come too near to threatening him.
But Shadow was not one to forget. And she had never been one to forgive.
She didn’t know if she would help the Landkist of the Valley. She only knew that she would kill the last Sage. She only hoped she got the chance before the World took even that small pleasure from her.
Shadow felt pain as the land began to change above her. Or was it below?
The sun was rising, and the shadows became scarcer. She closed her eyes and felt the World, saw it, like shapes in a thick cloud of mist.
The land was still covered in white, but it wasn’t flat and frozen as it had been to the north. There was stone with earth beneath it. There was water. It dripped from ancient stalactites and formed pools in deep caves. There were slow-moving rivers that fed the more fertile lands to the southwest, and the more rotten ones to the southeast, where the Landkist of the Valley were heading.
Shadow meant to make for them, to travel through the darkness in the trenches and beneath the overhanging shelves, but something got her attention. It wasn’t a sight nor a sound, but a smell.
The smell of blood.
She hovered on the edge of the shadowed gap like a fish beneath the surface of a shallow pool. She stuck her fingers through, teasing the air. It was cold. The sun had not climbed high enough in the sky to reach so low into the trench. The walls were black and full of crags. Salt had blown in from the northeast, reaching every crack and crevice on this part of the continent. It clung to everything like a stony paste, indistinguishable from the snow but for the mild sting it brought when the wind blew it into her eyes. She grabbed onto the stone with both hands, pushing herself up onto her palms, the loose pebbles and sharp bits of slate grinding into her midnight skin.
Shadow crouched in the gap, alert for signs of ambush. The longer she spent in the place between, the longer it took her to adjust to the true lands.
No movement. Not even a hawk wheeling overhead. But still that copper scent she knew so well. Only, now that she focused on it, this one had a different taste. She stuck her tongue out like a snake might. Rane had always hated it when she did that. Thought it was for show. It was, partly. She liked making him uncomfortable, and Brega beside him. But Shadow had been changed by whatever the Eastern Dark had done to her. She was not a girl, nor a Landkist, but something in between.
She tested the air and found herself slinking through the shadows of the gap like a hunting cat, shoulders hunched and neck stuck forward. When she rounded a sharp bend, she expected to see another pathway branching off from this one. Instead, she found herself in a corner whose walls were made up of carved obsidian, too sheer and slick for salt or snow to cake.
Shadow nearly turned from the spot, but then the wind changed, whistling as it crept down from the highlands and brought with it that sour smell, more pungent than it had been before. She moved forward, bracing herself against an outcropping, and saw the trail. It looked like a slug the size of her torso had dragged itself through a pool of blood, and it disappeared into a small cave just ahead.
Something had crawled into the crevice. Something that was wounded, and something that had done well to cover its tracks.
Shadow smiled.
She struck her right hand out and heard the pop and sizzle that preceded the blade she formed more out of her mind than any power she could explain. She simply willed it into being, and it appeared. It was a short, sharp thing that trailed faint wisps of ash.
Shadow crouched and crept into the darkness of the cave. The darkness that was her friend.
She heard the steady, echoing drips of rust-flavored water falling into depressions in the floor. Her eyes adjusted quickly, more quickly to the dark than the light.
When she saw him slumped against the back wall, red eyes glazed over as he stared at her, she raised her eyebrows and stood, allowing her blade to hang loose at her side.
“You’ve seen better days, Alistair the Cordial.”
He heard her. Shadow could tell because of the way his eyes shifted, the faint light that reached in from the day outside slipping across the gummed red lenses. She heard a croak issue from his burned and broken throat.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Aye,” he managed, his voice sounding like death, and his breath smelling like it had already gone past it.
Shadow grimaced and settled into a squat, laying the flat of her smoking blade across her knees.
“You crawled all this way?” She looked back toward the low-hanging cave mouth, letting him know just how little respect she had for him, how unafraid she was of turning her back. “Must be leagues back to the palace.”
“No … palace,” he sighed. “No … more.”
“No,” she said, nodding sagely. “I suppose you’re right. The palace is no more. You count that a great victory, yes? Your master, this god of the World Apart, has ruined a dead queen’s house.” She rolled her eyes.
Despite his condition, or perhaps because of it, Alistair managed a smile. Shadow could see the pool below him was not water. It was a wonder he still had energy to speak, but then, the Landkist—or whatever the Shadow Kings called themselves—had always been sturdier than most. Tougher to kill.
“You really think you’ve won, don’t you?” Shadow asked. She was incredulous.
“We have,” Alistair managed through a throat growing rawer as he forced it to carry each word that might be his last. It leaked and split. The smell was almost too much for Shadow to bear. “He is here. He has come. He will raze. He will ruin. He will make anew.”
“How did that work for you and yours?” Shadow pretended to be disinterested. She picked up a loose stone and tossed it at Alistair’s chest. It bounced off the gouged bone armor and rolled away. He didn’t react. “How much new is there in the World Apart? You betrayed Myriel and the others—well, whichever ones were on her side to begin with—all so you could doom another place to end up like the one you fled.”
Alistair’s smile, if it were possible, only widened. His eyes did as well, exposing whites around the far edges she hadn’t seen before.
“The Last God will devour the rest,” he said. It sounded like the beginnings to a poem, or a song. “And then only he will remain. He will fade too. He will consume himself, a snake—”
“Eating its own tail. Yes,” Shadow groaned.
“And only the strong will remain,” he said. “Beasts. Even men, in some places. In some worlds. No Landkist. No champions. No gods. Men. Wolves. Rivers. Peaks. This is what I have brought to you. This is what your Sages have brought. Rebirth.”
Shadow looked incredulous. “You don’t serve the Last God any more than you served Valour,” she said. “Well-spoken as you may be, Alistair, I must say, you sound quite mad.”
His eyes had lost more of their color. They didn’t shift like they had before, only stared, growing sticky. A droplet of water fell from the ceiling and struck his broad gray nose. He didn’t flinch.
“I was going to kill you,” Shadow said. “But it seems there’s no need for that, now. Seems you might want me to.”
“Save … your pity.”
Shadow thought of ramming her blade through what remained of his neck, just as he wanted her to. She paused, took a steadying breath, and the urge passed.
She stood and let go of the hilt of her blade. The weapon crumbled into smoke, leaving nothing but a darker smudge against the floor.
“I’ll leave you to it, then.”
She turned to leave, but heard Alistair try to croak something else out.
“What?”
“Why defend it?”
Shadow half turned. Alistair had managed to push himself forward. He had tried to crawl toward her, perhaps to speak to her. Perhaps to try to kill her with his bare hands and sharp teeth. He slumped, his energy all but spent.
“You are not of thi
s World, Shadow,” he sighed. “Why defend it? Why defend them? They resent you. They hate you. You must … know it.”
Shadow paused. She almost didn’t answer, but then it would have felt like admitting defeat.
“What would I do with my time if the World were to end?” she asked, leaving him a smile. She hoped it felt like a dagger in the heart as she ducked back out into the fresh air.
The wind had picked up. It howled through the trench, and she could hear it doing the same through the vast web that made the land up. It was a song. A song that belonged to it, that it had been singing for a thousand years.
She followed it south and then passed beyond it. In the nights, she kept searching the horizon, hoping to see the amber glow of an Ember’s fire, or the lightning of an archer’s storm. She felt lonely, and looking back only made it worse.
Willow leaned against the trunk of a tree that stood a stone’s throw from the horror that was the Sightless, with its gnarled branches and its blackened bark. She had chosen a high branch, one out of the view of those doomed, twisted things that she hoped never to join.
She watched the others of her kind gather on the mounds of moss and the fur-covered roots below. They stood behind Maro and two Raiths from the northwest.
The Sightless was acting strangely. More strangely than they were wont to act, given that they were the strangest thing that existed in the land of Center. The black-eyed crones leaned from their hollows, but they did not try to meet the eyes of those below.
The Sightless delighted in laying low even the stoutest of the Emerald Road’s warriors with little more than a steady gaze and whatever visions it showed him. She had even seen their presence crack the minds of wise men and women from other lands, learned folk who had considered themselves Seers and tellers of truths unknown to the rest.
She was not so old. Not as old as others in the tribe. Not even as old as Maro, who was young. But in her years, Willow had only seen one stand before the ancient tree, meet the collective gaze of the hive of former Willows, and stand. That was a Riverman from the south. One who could move the earth with his mind. One who had come with the Embers who had helped to repel the Sage of Balon Rael, who had broken the Emerald Blade.
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