Epilogue
Everywhere, there was light.
It was merciless and implacable, so overwhelming and encompassing that it drowned out all other sights, soaking its beholder in brilliance alone.
The light could be heard, like the high, sustained note of singing crystal or snow falling on snow or the murmuring of deep woods.
It got into you, and on the inside, it was not pain, precisely, nor pleasure.
It was something else, which carried both pain and pleasure with it, but was more than the two of them.
The sensation was too vast and too potent to be understood.
The force of it sent consciousness fragmenting into a thousand glinting pieces, which all reflected the light.
There, in the light, Orden Inver rested, the scattered remains of a man, broadcast over some unknowable and fertile ground, bathed in illumination.
Breaths of air seemed to wash over him—brine, petrichor, lavender, hot stone.
Scent was the only thing he could fully understand in that hinterland.
Even as a thousand pieces, he could still comprehend that, as well as a tiny part of the wind and light that moved over him.
After a thousand years, or a thousand moments, he felt someone or something stirring within that formless, peaceable realm.
They moved quietly about, and at first Orden was at a loss as to what they did.
Then, almost imperceptibly, he began to feel himself taking shape again.
Piece by slow piece, the unseen presence was gathering up his fragments and reassembling them into a whole.
If he’d been able to struggle, Orden would have done so.
He did not want to be whole again—he wanted only to continue as he was, sown like good seed and left to take root in the undemanding glory of this place.
There was something else too. Some half-recalled hurt that kept him scrabbling for brokenness, knowing that to be whole would be to feel that wound, and it would be a brutal one.
But even to desire something or form a thought meant Orden was more than he had been at first. He continued to struggle futilely against the unseen force that worked at mending him.
He tried to fall apart again, tried to remember the feeling of being shattered and lying with no cares in the wind and light, on ground that seemed to breathe serenity.
Resistance and memory were the product of personhood, though.
He continued to reunite, and knew he’d lost the battle when the chill of unyielding stone drifted across his consciousness, followed by searing pain.
He’d not had a body to experience such things a moment ago. He had been only spirit.
For a long time, Orden lay still. He did not fight the pain washing over him in nauseous waves, because he had learned patience in the formless hinterland.
He let himself be, a soul within a body, back inside a net of foolish, easily damaged flesh.
At last, he managed to reconcile himself to it.
He traced the bounds of his own form with his mind, reacquainting himself with this part of his being. Time to face the outer world.
Orden opened his eyes.
For one sick, panicked moment, he thought he’d been thrown back in time, as well as back into the flesh.
The stone of a cavern ceiling hung low overhead, and Orden’s father, Darias, and eldest brother, Carian, lay on either side of him, just as they had on a hunting expedition that haunted the king’s most tortured dreams.
There’d been no stags to find, nor boar, nor foxes. In the absence of fitting prey after two days’ searching, Darias and Carian had bid Orden to run, and promised death if he did not elude capture.
That was then, this is now, he thought over and over until his shallow breath deepened, his erratic pulse evened out, his blurring vision cleared. They were put down, and I was raised up.
Not Darias. Not Carian. Not in the flesh. He saw their likenesses, carved in stone. He was in the crypt of kings, cut into the raw face of the mountain above his castle proper.
“Took you long enough,” said a rough, compelling voice. “Welcome to your second life.”
A gleam of white in the shadows, which materialized into a spreading crescent moon, dancing toward him. As yet, Orden could not move his arms or legs. But he could feel sensation returning bit by bit as blood churned through his veins and thoughts raced through his head.
“I brought you back,” Gwylen Silithien said, settling herself beside the stone coffin in which Orden had been interred.
There was no lid and no likeness yet, and he found, as he raised his head slightly and glanced down at himself, that he was wrapped in graveclothes.
“I have a task for you, Orden Inver. You left something undone.”
He swallowed, past a thickness and taste of ashes and oil in his throat.
It was Inver practice to pour an incendiary compound into the mouths of their dead, so that they might become living flames in whatever worlds lay beyond.
But there was a bittersweet taste of herbs and some unknown cordial as well, which was not used in the Inver rites.
“What did you drag me back for?” he finally managed to get out.
“Vengeance,” Gwylen said. For a moment, something that might have been regret flickered across her face.
Then her expression hardened, becoming as closed off and forbidding as the effigies that surrounded them.
“I restored your life, and you owe me a debt in kind, by the standards of any faith on the Hand. I want you to hunt down and put an end to the assassin who consigned you to the grave. Then, when you’ve finished, you can deal with your brother.
No, not Silas. Yes, I know about Carian.
You’ve craved his death for as long as you can remember, yet somehow he always survives.
I promise you, that if you take vengeance for your own death first, afterward you’ll finally be able to put Carian down. ”
With agonizing care, Orden sat up. His head swam and felt fit to burst, but the pressure receded after a few moments. In its wake came remembrance.
Oh.
There it was.
The awful wound he’d shied away from returning to.
Ariana Lyrien, his little queen, his shining star, with murder and stricken guilt in her eyes as she served him summer wine.
He had not wanted to believe it. He’d drunk because he could not bring himself to believe it, nor to live in a world where she hated him so.
Now here he was, by the will of the cursed gods, forced back into life with the knowledge that had killed him.
Ariana despised him. Perhaps she had always done so.
And Orden Inver, who had never known the sting of true betrayal before, felt its full force. His heart throbbed and keened and broke with it. He could not bear the pain—he had not wanted to live like this. Had known he could not live like this.
Crimson flooded Orden’s vision, and for once, he did not fight it back.
He needed fire and wrath and the legacy of his forefathers to hold him up, for he himself had failed on all fronts.
Even in this smallest but most vital of matters, he had proved incapable; Ariana had never loved him, for all he’d longed to claim her heart.
But that thought came too close to the wound within, and to facing the devastation lying beneath Orden’s still-regal exterior. Forcing it down, he let the red tide claim him. With a reckless jolt of energy, Orden surged to his feet.
“Vengeance,” he agreed.
He was an Inver.
He would follow the ways of his people.
He would burn, he would break, he would conquer.
Alive, but with a mortal wound inside him, he did not know what else to do.