Lightbringer

by Claire Legrand

  “I don’t understand.” Rielle glanced back over her shoulder, as if she would find Corien there. But she saw only the sea, endless and glittering. “Have I died?”

  “Not yet,” the girl answered brightly. “The shell of your body is there, but the heart of you, your true self, is here with me. It’s not death, even though it looks like it. It’s next.”

  “I would like to see myself,” Rielle said, sick with fear.

  The girl wrinkled her nose. “If you insist.”

  Before Rielle’s eyes appeared a vision of herself, still and glassy-eyed, back on the mountain. Her skin and lips were deathly pale. Corien sat on the steps of her altar, holding her in his arms, begging her to awaken. He roared for his officers to fetch the healers from their laboratories.

  Rielle shivered, watching this unmoving version of herself. She certainly looked dead.

  “Don’t worry.” The girl’s voice was high and clear. “Didn’t you hear me? You’re not dead yet. Now, come. I’ve been waiting so long for you to arrive. Walk with me. I should like to show you what is here.”

  Rielle hesitated, then took the girl’s hand. They walked through the shallow black-gold sea. The hem of the child’s white gown floated on the water’s surface.

  “Do not be afraid,” said the girl cheerfully, leading her on. “It is only me here, and I have no wish to hurt you. I think you will like it here very much. I think you will prefer it.”

  Rielle shivered. She longed to rip her hand free and also to wrap the child in her arms. “Where are we?”

  “We are everywhere. Do not let go of my hand, please. That will make it easier for you. Your mind is still quite crude in its humanity.”

  Then the girl tugged Rielle forward, and the sky began to move. The stars streaked past them in brilliant streams of color, but the water remained calm, as if somehow every step they took covered a span of many miles above and only a few inches below.

  Rielle cried out and stumbled, her mind unable to grasp the incongruity, but the girl’s grip was strong. Her laughter chimed above the roar of the sky.

  “Where are you taking me?” Rielle gasped.

  “I want you to see me,” the girl replied. “Am I not beautiful?”

  “I cannot look.” Tears streamed down Rielle’s face. Her chest tightened. The force of the stars streaking past, how they rushed like angry rivers. The sound would crush her.

  “I understand. Your eyes are simple, but they will not always be. Already it has begun.”

  Hours passed. At last, Rielle cracked open her eyes just enough to see her feet moving shakily through the black water. The sea’s surface did not reflect the light of the stars. The waves held their own light, as if illuminated by fires that burned deep underwater.

  She found her voice, hoarse from disuse. “You are the empirium, aren’t you?”

  “You should open your eyes all the way and look around.” The girl’s whisper made her jump.

  They had stopped moving and were now sitting in the shallow sea. Something tickled the back of Rielle’s neck, urging her face toward the sky. She fought it, though she ached to look up. If she saw whatever hung in the sky above her, she would never want to look away. Instead, she watched the warm water lap against her swollen belly.

  Playful, the girl drew her hands across the waves, then smiled up at Rielle. “This is where you belong. Look up and tell me you agree. I would like you to agree.”

  Rielle hesitated. The seabed pebbles were silky between her fingers, each one pulsing with the rapid patter of her heartbeat.

  “Look up, won’t you?” the girl said once more. “You will not be sorry.”

  Rielle could no longer resist. She lifted her gaze to the sky.

  Among the stars, globes of light and rock spun slowly—some large and near, others small and distant. Stripes of color ribboned some; others were plain or murky with clouds. Rielle ached to reach up and touch them. She sat on her hands.

  “What are they?” she whispered.

  “They are worlds. Would you like one?”

  Rielle ignored the question. “I don’t understand. My world does not look like this.”

  “It would if you lived in the stars and looked down upon it. It is a pretty thing, Avitas. Green and blue and white. A gemstone streaked with clouds.”

  Rielle’s heart pounded all reason out of her. She struggled to form thoughts. “Tell me: Are you the empirium?”

  The girl looked disappointed. “Everything is the empirium.”

  “But there must be a single place or being more powerful than the others. A place where everything began. A being that began it.”

  “Must there?” The girl tilted her head. “Perhaps you are the being that began it, for you are of the empirium, and the empirium is all things. Perhaps nothing began it and it has always been.” Her bright golden eyes did not blink. “Perhaps I am the empirium, one of many that have existed, and the time has come for me to be reborn as another.”

  Rielle’s breathing had grown thin. “You speak nonsense. Are you the empirium or not? Are you the thing that made us?”

  “Would you try to kill me if I were? Usurp my place?” The girl’s voice had gone cold. “Your angelic lover might wish you would. His questions are pale. His sight is narrow. Without you to help him, he is insignificant.”

  The girl stood, found Rielle’s hand once more. “There is more to see. You are the first in an age who has been strong enough to see me. I would like to share all of myself with you.”

  Rielle gazed up as they walked, the waves sloshing around her legs. The sky was a tumult of streaking color, planes upon planes of it, as if the river of stars had fractured into facets that each now streamed in a different direction.

  “If you are of the empirium,” Rielle began, “and so am I, then I’m not seeing only you. I’m seeing myself. In all of this—these stars, these worlds. I am reflected in them.”

  The girl’s voice bubbled with glee. “Now you are beginning to understand. Come! Hurry!”

  Rielle followed, a new deft grace in her steps. How beautiful the sky was, how glorious in its strangeness. She plunged her hand into it, drew down one of the spinning worlds. A little violet jewel, angry yellow clouds swirling across half its surface.

  “Do with it as you wish,” the girl whispered. They sat at the edge of the sea, their feet dangling. Below them, a waterfall plunged silently into blackness. “Do you love it?”

  Rielle examined the world, slowly rolling it back and forth between her palms. “I feel nothing for it.”

  “What if beings live upon it?”

  “Do they? How many?”

  “Millions.”

  Alarmed, Rielle released the world back into the sky. She pushed herself to her feet, watched the stars absorb it. “I wish to leave now.”

  The girl frowned. “But there is so much more to see.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “You won’t be forever.”

  Rielle’s eyes filled with tears. She could not tear her gaze from the sky. She never wanted to stop looking at it; she wanted to pluck every world from the stars and run her fingers across them until she had memorized their textures. And yet her body ached for stillness, for the warm comfort of Corien’s bed. The conflict soured her tongue, as if she had bitten into metal.

  The girl stood. Her grip on Rielle’s hand was iron, her smile glittering. Rielle recognized that smile; she had worn it herself.

  And she realized, with a dizzying wave of clarity, that she was speaking to the empirium, yes, but she was also speaking to the part of herself that wished to see more, to make and unmake and never stop.

  “Come with me,” the girl pleaded. “You will see. We are rising, you and I. There is so much more for us to do.”

  They plunged back into the sea, crossing it beneath the churning stars. The gi
rl’s pace was swifter now. The stars and their worlds blurred into unreadable sheets of color.

  Movement caught Rielle’s eye. She glanced left, saw reflections of herself and the bright-eyed girl holding her hand, the black sea at their feet, the chaos overhead. Countless reflections, infinite to the horizon. On her right, the same thing, and before her, and behind her. An infinite prism of herself. She whirled, searching, and when she called out for Corien, her terrified voice echoed against itself. Corien? The single plaintive word expanded, ripples of sound colliding until her ears rang.

  “I have so many more things to show you,” said the girl, frowning. She tugged Rielle faster. “Come. This way. I’m lonely and I’m tired. It’s so nice to have a friend. Please?”

  The girl’s smallness was an illusion. The force of her dragging Rielle through the water was that of ten thousand rolling storms. Rielle tried to stop, dug her heels into the soft seabed, but the sight of her reflections, all of them doing the same thing, disoriented her. She lost her balance and fell, but the girl caught her.

  “Look!” The girl swept her arm across the sky. The stars halted in their roaring currents, then coalesced and shrank. Bright pearls of light dotted the emptied sky, each surrounded by a faint glow.

  Weak-kneed with fear, Rielle nevertheless marveled at them. Her blood roared in her ears, just as when the rivers of stars had blazed through the sky. Her power reached out from her chest—dozens of seeking fingers, all groping for more. More light to be dazzled by, more worlds to touch, more speed. She longed to cross an ocean even larger than the one at her feet. To jump from pearl to pearl, those opalescent eyes staring down at her from the sky, and follow whatever path they took.

  “What are they?” she breathed.

  The girl’s cheek pressed against her arm. “Someday you will find out,” she murmured, dreamy.

  Rielle, please! Come back to me!

  Her heart jumped at the distant sound of Corien’s voice. The pain of her body returned to her, as if carried on the backs of his words: the pangs of her hungry stomach, her parched mouth. She stepped back, turned her gaze away from the sky.

  The girl opened her mouth and howled with furious despair, and the world plunged into darkness.

  Rielle ran from her through the water, though it broke her heart to leave this part of herself, so pure and unwavering in its desires. She had so many questions, so many worlds to touch. With each step, she wondered if she would find another cliff and fall off the edge of all things.

  “You cannot leave me!” the girl wailed. “I will not allow it!”

  Something hot and sharp tugged on Rielle’s arms, her chest, her trembling knees. She glanced back and saw nothing. A black abyss, and her feet sinking into the seabed, and a terrible silence that threatened to smother her.

  She sent out a thought to Corien. The farther she ran from the girl, the more clearly she could think. Hold on to me. Don’t let me go.

  I have you. His voice was firm and steady. He sent her image after image, each less muddy in her mind. The fortress rising dark and square, the mountains in their coats of snow. Corien, cradling her body in his arms. She saw her own inert body flicker, a candle’s flame wavering in the wind. Waves of gold passed over her body’s skin, and she knew they were scorching hot, for she could feel that searing heat in her own blood, how it pulsed like water boiling, and yet Corien did not shy away. He held her and held her, whispering her name against her hair, and with his mind he called her forward across the sea. The girl’s piercing wails spiraled higher, so deafening that Rielle thought her skull would shatter before she escaped.

  Then, a wall of cold slammed against her, shoving air back into her lungs.

  She burst back into herself, felt the delicate wet fall of snow on her cheeks and the warmth of Corien beside her, and began to laugh. Tears soaked her face; her chest ached with wild sobs.

  “Where did you go?” Corien asked quietly, once her laughter gentled.

  She pressed her face against his coat. “I went to what is next,” she whispered. “I went inside myself and saw what I am and what I will become. I looked at the stars and pulled them down and held them.”

  Corien was quiet. She could feel his mind examining her every word.

  “Would you like to go back?” he asked at last.

  Rielle scanned the Reach, curious what had happened in her absence. Her power skimmed across the empirium, then brought images back to her: The avalanche she had caused when the empirium took her, how it had crashed down the mountain and flattened dozens of adatrox. Boulders of ice had smashed into one of the enclosures that held the doomed ice-dragons. Several of them were now free, fleeing for the mountains. At their sides limped their Kammerat companions, those odd, obsessive little Borsvallic recluses who preferred the company of dragons to that of humans.

  And, Rielle noticed with a flicker of interest, they were not alone.

  There was Obritsa and her guard, Artem. And Ilmaire Lysleva too, and another young man beside him. Another of the Kammerat.

  At once, Rielle sensed Corien’s rising anger. Now that she was safe, he would kill them.

  “Don’t hurt them,” she commanded. “Who is that man? I do not recognize him.”

  “His name is Leevi,” Corien told her, his voice thin with anger. “One of the Kammerat, a former prisoner here. He escaped months ago, and now he returns with the king of Borsvall, and more Kammerat too, all come to save their kin.” Corien’s voice curled. “How heroic.”

  “Let them go,” said Rielle, already losing interest in the frantic little group.

  Corien’s every thought clenched into fists. “They will think they have beaten me.”

  “And if they do?” Rielle touched his cheek, turned him to face her. “It won’t matter in the end. We will kill them. They will live and watch us rise. They will die at their own hands, unable to bear the agony of their failure. Whichever of these things happens, their joy will be short-lived.”

  She felt Corien settle, watched the lines of tension melt from his shoulders. He pressed his thumb to her chapped bottom lip.

  She smiled at him. “You see? They are nothing to us. Let them flee for their mountains like rabbits running scared. I would like to see them realize the futility of escape. I would like to watch that dawn on their faces. Wouldn’t you?”

  Corien pressed his brow to hers and closed his eyes. His mind rose to meet hers gently, and when he next looked at her, he was calm.

  Then a thought occurred to Rielle. “Did I kill him?” she asked, thinking of the angel she had smashed between her hands.

  A pause. Corien’s fingers stroked her arm. “You did.”

  “I hardly remember it,” she said, and yet the girl inside her, eyes glittering in her endless sea, could remember every speck of the angel, how it had felt to split him open with her power. Mere dust in her hands, easily swept away.

  “I’m sorry,” she added, because she felt it was the thing to say.

  “He meant very little to me. A child from a common family, neither strong nor clever.” Corien paused. “And anyway, you don’t mean it.”

  He was right. The death of that angel had sent her to that place beneath the rushing stars, and she already longed to return to it.

  But before she could do that, she would need to be stronger still, in both mind and body, so she could understand what she saw and be worthy of it.

  More than that, she needed to look once more into the eyes of those who had feared her. She thought of them all, their names plucked easily from her distant memories: Audric, Ludivine, the Archon, Miren Ballastier, Queen Genoveve. Tal, dead at her hands.

  She drew each of their faces to mind and felt a cold white rush of anger. They would be cursing her even now. They would still think of her as human, look at her as if she were one of them. They would perhaps still imagine themselves capable of gentling h
er.

  Corien’s lips brushed her brow. She could sense how she baffled him, how carefully he moved around in her mind, as if stepping barefoot around broken glass.

  “What is it you want, Rielle?”

  “I want everyone to see the wonder of our great work and fall to their knees,” she said. “I want to walk the black sea and climb the lights to see what lies beyond them.”

  She looked up, her vision painting Corien in shades of gold. He sucked in a breath, and gleefully she wondered what she looked like to him now that she had held a world in her palms. When they returned to the fortress, she would go to her mirror before she ate a single scrap of food.

  “I want to look once more into the eyes of those who fear me and show them what I have become,” she said, her voice trembling as she thought of it. “I will show them they were right to fear me and that I will never again hide from the true reach of my power.”

  Then Rielle looked past Corien to the dull gray sky and comforted herself by imagining it remade—vast and roaring and incandescent with stars.

  30

  Ludivine

  “When the world was young, bright with fire and black with storms, the empirium touched the white sands of Patria’s northern shore, and drew up from the dust a creature of such beauty that for a moment all the beasts of the world held their breaths. Into this creature, the empirium breathed the gift of long life, and sent her soaring into the clouds on newborn wings of light and shadow that trailed to her ankles, and named her angel.”

  —The Girl in the Moon and Other Tales, a collection of angelic folklore and mythology

  In her boat, her cloak damp with seawater, Ludivine watched the Mazabatian warships out on the waves. Her stolen human eyes watered from the wind.

  There were fifteen ships, their curved wooden hulls and empty decks polished to a gleam. A banner of cyan and emerald fluttered proudly from each mast, and the ships plunged across the sea at full sail—but they were unmanned, propelled forward by waterworkers and windsingers packed into the boats surrounding Ludivine’s.