Chapter 42
I’d never in my life flown faster than I did that day, soaring through the Mist and across the canyon like the finest arrow shot from the finest bow.
Hostiles burst out of the Mist to bar my path.
A harpy even larger than the doomed Nerys swiped at me with her foot-long talons.
I dodged the blow and whipped my own talons across her belly.
The thin black cyclone of a wind titan lashed out at me, trying to knock me off course, but my wings were stronger than he expected.
I rammed my way through the swirling wind and shattered his cloud-cloaked skull with my own.
Nothing and no one would stand in my way.
I was a Rose, and I was Kerezen’s daughter.
The Warden had spent years forging me into a weapon, and with my mother’s blood in my veins and the triumph of the anchors’ destruction still buzzing in my fingertips, all the most Olden parts of me were flaring to life.
The Mist urged me on, whispering against the slick feathers of my wings. It knew me; it welcomed me.
Suddenly the glow of fire bloomed up ahead, burning a hole through the Mist.
Ankaret.
I picked up speed. The sooner I reached her, the sooner I could help her and fly back to Gareth.
Not even all this gorgeous power streaming through my body could quell the terrible acid feeling brewing in the back of my throat, like I was going to be sick.
With every beat of my wings that carried me farther away from Gareth, the feeling intensified, threatening to choke me.
Something bad is happening. That was all I could think. Something bad, something bad.
Then, without warning, I burst out of the Mist and into darkness; the air was clear, but there was hardly any sunlight, even though, beyond these canyons, it was a bright winter morning. I stopped short, hovering at the Mist’s edge while I took in the scene before me.
On a flat plain of red dirt and scrubby pines, surrounded by a ring of roiling Mist, Kilraith had Ankaret pinned to the ground. He was massive, easily twice the size of the entire priory. His dark wings stretched across the sky, crackling with storms and blocking out the sun.
Ankaret was sizable herself but still dwarfed by him.
Her brilliant light shuddered like a flame in harsh wind, shadowy talons trapped her wings, and at the heart of this battle of light and darkness was another, smaller one.
Two pale figures, human in form and comically tiny compared to their larger selves, dueled in a clash of swords so bright it hurt to look at.
The blades crackled like lightning—one wreathed in flame, one tinged with darkness—and one clearly outmatched the other.
As I watched in horror, Ankaret’s knees buckled. She fell hard into the dwindling inferno of her fire. And she didn’t rise again.
The world moved slowly then, as if it knew what was about to happen and wanted to delay the inevitable, maybe out of some warped sense of pity for the creatures wriggling in its grasp.
Kilraith brought his sword down toward Ankaret’s neck; the great dark bird above him raised his wings as if ready to dive toward its prey.
Ankaret was pleading with him, her voice faint: Not like this. Look at me. Don’t you remember?
I couldn’t move; all my power and strength, and I couldn’t move.
How was he still so powerful, even with four anchors gone?
And why had Ankaret called me and no one else?
There must have been a reason, but it was all happening so quickly, and I didn’t see what I could do, how I could help.
If even she couldn’t overpower him, then what hope did I have?
Alastrina was right, I thought wildly. Ankaret shouldn’t have engaged him, not so soon after the transference. She was too weak; she needed time to recover. We should have given her time.
Gods unmade. The old curse seemed suddenly baleful as I watched Kilraith’s sword arc through the air. The gods had indeed unmade themselves, and it had led to this. This day, this fight, this moment.
But then, with only the space of a short breath to spare, Ankaret rolled to the side, and Kilraith’s blade plunged into the earth.
She surged to her feet and threw herself at him, wrapping him into a fierce embrace.
The firebird of her power twisted out of Kilraith’s talons and reared up with a keening cry.
“Remember!” Ankaret shouted. Her voice boomed, nearly knocking me out of the sky and making my ears ring painfully, like an enormous bell had been struck right beside my cheek.
And then—
Then, in a single soundless instant, the entire canyon, the entire Mist, filled with images. Hundreds of them, thousands, appeared on the canyon walls and above the pines and throughout every inch of the Mist like the reflections of countless mirrors.
I saw a boy and a girl, pale as snow, each with long white hair like horsetail clouds, growing up together in a place I didn’t recognize. In this place, the violet sky was spangled with unfamiliar stars, and on the horizon glittered a vast city.
I saw the same boy and girl, now a man and a woman, entwined in each other’s arms on a blanket of flowers, naked and ecstatic, eyes locked on each other.
I saw so many things I didn’t understand. Or rather, I could identify them—a war, a school, a cottage by the sea, a city floating in the clouds—but I didn’t understand what any of them meant. What were they, and where were they? I knew none of those buildings, none of those mountains.
And then I saw the Unmaking, and the shock wave just after it that ravaged the far north, turning it into the Unmade Lands.
I saw twin white comets riding the shock wave down to Edyn, one landing softly in a quiet bay lined with caves, the other plunging into the coldest depths of the ocean—separated from his love, trapped in darkness for an entire lonely age.
And I realized, tears burning in my eyes and my breath punching in and out of me like fists, that this was them—this was Kilraith and Ankaret, and these images were windows into the life they had once lived.
My overwhelmed mind recalled everything that Farrin had told us in those long, hard days after Mhorghast’s fall, and suddenly I was able to comprehend the true, tragic scope of what these two creatures had been, what they had become.
They loved each other, Farrin had told us one afternoon, quietly, as if divulging a grave secret. She’d been holding Gemma’s hand. I’d stood by the window in Farrin’s bedroom, listening with a soldier’s attention.
In those few seconds it took for the comets to fall to Edyn, they lived an entire lifetime.
At the time, I’d skimmed over these details, focusing my attention on what would come next rather than what had come before.
But now, faced with this evidence—surrounded by it, overwhelmed by it—Farrin’s voice returned to me. During that fall from the skies, she’d told us, time had moved differently for Kilraith and Ankaret. What would seem like a mere few seconds to our eyes had been centuries to them.
And now, watching these impossible memories, I truly understood what that meant.
The Unmaking had somehow opened a doorway into a whole other world—or created an entirely new one—and the gods’ unwitting newborn creations, Kilraith and Ankaret, had lived there.
Not just lived there; they’d lived a life there.
They had learned and loved under that alien purple sky, and then, decades later, they’d been torn from it, separated, and dropped into the seas of Edyn.
I couldn’t catch my breath. These memories were too intimate; I felt like a child peering through a keyhole and seeing things she shouldn’t.
And yet I couldn’t look away. If Gareth were here, his mind would have captured every detail.
But I was the only witness. I had to remember this. I had to understand it.
Was I interpreting the images correctly?
Had these impossible beings—the only two of their kind—truly lived in another world, or were these images simply representations of things I couldn’t comprehend?
Had the world they’d lived in, the life they’d shared, been only as large as the space between them, their language and habits and customs all their own and no one else’s?
My tears spilled over. I knew that feeling.
When Gareth and I held each other, sweaty and exhausted and happy after loving each other to pieces—when his head lay on the pillow next to mine, and our legs were tangled together, and we memorized each other’s bodies with sight and touch—that was when my world was smallest. And yet it didn’t feel small when I was in it.
It felt vast, timeless. In that world, nothing could hurt me. In that world, I was home.
Our home.
“We loved each other,” Ankaret said. Her voice was softer now, but I heard it just as clearly as if she were whispering to me and not to Kilraith. She held his face in her hands and smiled. “Don’t you remember? I do. I can never forget.”
“And you think I can?” Kilraith’s voice was in shreds. The sound made me squirm. He sounded too small, too human. For almost a year, this creature had haunted every moment of our lives—and now here he was, looking lost and pitiful. Looking like a simple heartbroken man.
I wanted to scream at him. Why had he done all of this, then? Why wage a war when he could have spent his time finding Ankaret and reuniting with her?
“Then why have you done this?” Ankaret said, echoing my thoughts. “This war, this violence. Why, when this—this”—she looked around at the shimmering tapestry of memories—“this is the man I remember? He was gentle. He never would have—”
“That man is dead,” he snarled, tearing himself away from her. “He died centuries ago in a dark sea.”
“It must have been so cold, so lonely.” Ankaret stepped closer to him. A tremor rippled through the memories surrounding her, as if they were physical things tethered to her body.