Up here, she felt like a god. Mountains loomed beneath her, their shadows dutiful subjects to her reign. She was a master of her life and death on this cliff, the one balancing on the tightrope, deciding her own end, her own continued story. Here, with the wind and the cirrus clouds and the swollen moons, she felt like the multiverse was extending a hand and running it along her cheek, and she had every right to accept or deny it.
Fwexei og-vērijanji, her people called it. Child of the multiverse. It was a feeling one had when exposed to nature, when it cowed one as much as it fulfilled them. She’d had the feeling all her life. Now, it brewed in her strongly.
I am fighting for you, she thought at the Infinity. I am protecting your skin and bones and carving out the disease eating away at you. You are the child of my precious masters, and I will let nothing happen to you.
She dug her pointed nails into her palm until, against the pain, she had to grit her teeth. She drew blood. It welled sticky underneath her fingertips and trickled down her palms to fall away into the darkness, an offering and a penance.
Her Society’s warpath to victory would mean tearing down the multiverse before building it anew, but it was a necessary evil, she knew. Sometimes, healing required the use of a blade. Sometimes, seeds were sown with fire.
“Qne pakoine, vērijanji,” she apologized anyway.
Behind her, she heard footsteps a hundred yards off, but instead of veering in another direction, they kept coming, clipping across wood and then tile, then the stone of the garden pathway, then finally thudding through the grass. She could smell the spice of pepper-firwood and knew immediately it was her niece Leiung’sen.
Nianna’so slipped free of the yijgrass’ hold and stood to face her niece. Leiung’sen’s curly red hair was braided over each shoulder and then braided together over her chest, like any child’s before her first blood. Her green eyes were bright with the moonlight. She looked exactly like her mother had at that age, which sent a sharp ache through Nianna’so’s chest. Her niece had her hands folded behind her back, demure. She was in her white silk nightgown and wood-soled slippers, but she was wearing an arrowhead pendant around her neck that Nianna’so had never seen on her before. Something about it was so strikingly familiar that it made Nianna’so pause for a second.
Behind her niece, Ganji on-Il was lit up by the moonlight. It rose up like a temple of banded rock, the palace a series of rounded towers and geometric-bell-shaped spires. It was the highest point in the country, and here she and her young niece were, standing together quietly at its feet. It didn’t make Nianna’so feel any smaller. If anything, it made her more infinite. She only hoped her niece felt the same way. The palace belonged to them. It was just another of their subjects, despite its expansiveness. Nothing was too vast to stand beneath them. After all, soon, every fold of the Infinity—every crack, every crevice, every inch of ether and life—it would be theirs to watch over like shepherds.
“Yu qne akrigna,” Nianna’so welcomed her niece, and stepped forward to kiss the girl’s forehead. Against her warm skin, Nianna’so smiled, nose buried in curls. The curls were wet and smelled like a fresh bath but also like an excessive amount of pepper-firwood oil. In fact, it was far too much, more than Leiung’sen ever wore. It was spicy and off-putting. Nianna’so wrinkled her nose.
“Yu nai ratnak hwezgne?” Nianna’so asked Leiung’sen, checking her niece’s eyes for signs of insomnia. She cupped Leiung’sen’s small cheeks, concerned. They were warm against her palms, which made her frown. Was it possible Leiung’sen was catching a fever? There were some sicknesses demons weren’t immune to after all. “LeiLei, yu ban ōmui?”
Leiung’sen tilted her head in Nianna’so’s touch and brought her right hand up to wrap around Nianna’so’s wrist. Her fingers squeezed down a touch too hard. Then like a dawn breaking over a mountain ridge, a tiny smile sparked flint-quick on Leiung’sen’s lips. But the smile kept growing, and kept growing, until it stretched from something sweet and innocent into something so fanged and broken that it made a cold sweat break out on the back of Nianna’so’s neck. “Our child,” Leiung’sen said. “You have disappointed us.”
When a deafening siren erupted from Ganji on-Il and penetrated the night, Nianna’so jumped. Her niece kept her hand crushed in her grip. The siren swelled like a screaming death throe, and Nianna’so flattened her ears against her head to drown out the wail. Her niece shook, laughing soundlessly. Her eyes were beaming, even as she took a step back, letting go of Nianna’so’s wrist. Around them, a ward snapped into place and smoothed away into near-invisibility. It cut them off from the rest of the world, unseen, silent. Nianna’so was horrified. Her niece didn’t know magic.
Despite the ward, the pandemonium crescendoed around them, coming together like a fugue: frantic screams underneath the siren—shouts in Narin heading for the Hei Tower—her nieces’ quarters—panicked calls for water, for an elementus—the unmistakable roar of a growing fire near the chapel—someone weeping, begging—
“D-Daman?” Nianna’so stammered, lost. Her body wouldn’t move. She looked between her niece and the invisible ward and the palace and back. “Daman?” she asked again, pleading, but even as she did, she realized something—something she hadn’t noticed before or maybe she’d ignored—a small smell, hidden underneath the heavy cloud of the pepper-firwood oil—a sharp scent—the smell of—
The world ground to a halt.
There was nothing but that smell and a feeling in her gut, but Nianna’so’s suspicions were cemented. She knew without a doubt who she was standing in front of. Somewhere behind Leiung’sen’s green eyes and thin mouth—somewhere inside her flat chest and lanky body—a Watcher was now hiding.
No ground in battle is gained without great sacrifice, Nianna’so thought, scrambling, trying to find some meaning to this. There is no victory without loss. Was her niece a needed pawn in their great plan? But what plan was there in this chaos?
“Nun xiexen. Our child,” her master said. In the sticky air between them, the punning term of endearment fell flat. It was strange to hear authority in her niece’s voice. Leiung’sen was a timid girl, but now, there was nothing but power in her words. Nianna’so’s master smiled with Leiung’sen’s thin mouth and folded the her right hand behind her back with the other.
Nianna’so’s heart hammered against her ribs.
“It has been many years since we first came to Xeixin,” her master said. “Mian’ji Xi’eongsan was nothing like you were. She welcomed us warmly to the palace gates, but you, our child, you greeted us with a drawn blade. It was then we knew this world would prosper were you granted its throne.”
Her master smiled with Leiung’sen’s mouth and, with a flourish, drew a thin dagger from behind Leiung’sen’s back. The blade flashed silver in the moons’ light.
“A bag full of coin and a handful of words to the right person,” her master said. “That was all it took to remove Mian’ji Xi’eongsan from power, nun xiexin. We gave no coercion, either. No falsehoods. Your kind simply quicken to darkness.”
Nianna’so’s heart caved in her chest. Were they suggesting that they’d— Her stomach lurched. “No,” she denied. “No—”
“Words, our child,” her master said. “Words are dangerous things, more than any sword. Words have the power to move swords, yet even so, a sword can only kill a man but once. Words can kill him a thousand times. How many deaths you shall die now from ours.”
In the blink of an eye, her master brought the dagger down—right into Leiung’sen’s stomach. The blade sunk in deep, blood blooming across the silk and unfurling like a rose. Nianna’so screamed out. With a jerk, her master pulled the blade upward toward Leiung’sen’s sternum, gutting her. Silk split. Blood poured. It was a deep wound. A life-ending wound.
“Humans. Demons,” her master said calmly, dropping the dagger to the ground where the yijgrass swallowed it whole. Leiung’sen’s body collapsed to its knees, swaying. Intestines pooled in her lap
. “You are all impure. Sullied beings born in poison, how could you be anything but? You are creatures with shadows in your souls, and we will singe them out of you.”
When her master pillared out from Leiung’sen’s slack, lifeless mouth in a beam, Nianna’so had three seconds before she felt like she’d eaten a column of fire—before her eyes bulged with an unbearable pressure—before her bones lit up in white-hot pain—before her muscles peeled away beneath her skin and she screamed and screamed and screamed into a void—
Before there was not a darkness, but a light that burned away everything into nothing.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Pinckney Benedict, who mentored me throughout my undergraduate years and honors thesis. You saw the potential in this novel back when it was just a set of manuscripts following lonely little Oliver. I’ll never forget you having the entire class chant the “If it comes by land” epigraph. Believe excellence.
Thank you to Mandi, who watched me break down on the kitchen floor screeching at the plot chaos I’d drawn on the fridge’s whiteboard and didn’t judge me for it. Out loud, at least. Thank you for reading through this shitfest and catching my mistakes, too.
Thank you to Ashley, who inspired me to build the world of the Infinity ten years ago and who is the inspiration behind and the original creator of Artysaedra Veiyel. I appreciate you letting me steal your character and remake her into the drunken warrior she is.
Thank you to Hannah, my occasional editor and oftentimes reader. You keep me writing when I’m convinced I’m a failure. Your contributions to this novel are appreciated. Thank you, sei arielle.
Thank you to myself, for somewhat keeping your shit together and forcing yourself to publish this manuscript. You wanted to publish it and its two subsequent manuscripts as one book in a colossal brick of a novel, but jokes on you: we went with this structurally unsound garbage. Look back on the lack of build up and resolution and cry. But we made it. Ten years, and we finally made it.
Lastly, enst, M’abuna. Atesr cofr te binesiter. Cofren M’Kah, M’Sol, M’semhi, ankh M’exos. Aile’de yunen cofr. Aneqin us jos cofr.
L.J. Engelmeier, granddaughter of a mortician, grew up in a household where death was dinner table conversation. Currently, she lives in southern Illinois with her cat Hannibal, and when not selling fine jewelry and working retail, she tries to write things that don’t suck. You can follow Engelmeier on Twitter (@LJEngelmeier) where, as with her life, she doesn’t do much of anything. Kostet odai ankh leifhs, fimau’a.
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