drawn against the sun. She was beautiful. Terrible. Her eyes were as black as her dress, deeper than oceans. Her skin was pale and bright as stars.
Like always, she had Alinne Corvere’s face. But Mia knew, in that dreaming, knowing kind of way, that this wasn’t her real face.
And like always, across the infinite gray, her father and sisters waited for them.
He was clad all in white, so bright and sharp it hurt Mia’s eyes to look at. But Mia looked all the same. He stared back as she and her mother approached, three eyes fixed on her, red and yellow and bl—
“No,” Mia said.
“No, enough of this.”
She heard Bladesinger’s voice inside her head.
“You should try it. Next time you sleep. Take a hold of the shape and make it what you want. It’s your dream, after all.”
And so she stopped. Pushed the images of her father in his shroud of gleaming white away. She was inside the Quiet Mountain, after all—the place where the veil between the real world and the Abyss was thinnest. If she wished to speak, to learn, to know, this then would be her best chance. And so the child balled her little hands into fists. Twisting the dream and making it hers. The scene seemed to resist her, the stone/glass/ice beneath her rippled like a millpond. But this was her place. Her mind. She’d never given an inch in the real world, not in all her life.
Why the ’byss would things be different here?
The image of her father and sisters trembled, then vanished entirely. The girl was left alone in the vast emptiness with the Mother of Night, here on the border of the Abyss and the waking world. The Goddess looked down at her daughter, the black of her eyes filled with a million tiny stars. And the girl wasn’t a girl anymore. She was the champion of the Venatus Magni. The Queen of Scoundrels. The Lady of Blades.
The war you cannot win.
“All right,” Mia said. “We need to have a serious chat.”
Niah blinked. Long as an ice age.
“Speak, child,” she finally said.
“Listen, I appreciate how difficult this has been for you to manage,” Mia said. “I appreciate you want out of your prison and your son back at your side. But you have to appreciate I don’t really feel like dying for it.”
The Mother tilted her head, her voice tinged with sadness.
“You fear.”
The girl shook her head. “Worse. I love.”
“You would deny what you are?”
“No,” she replied. “This is who I am. I’m not a hero. I’m a vengeful, selfish bitch. And I’ve never pretended otherwise. If you wanted a savior, perhaps you should’ve picked a girl who believes this world is worth saving.”
The Dark Mother leaned closer, looking into her eyes.
“Let us speak, then, of vengeance, little one,” she said, lifting the lopsided scales between them. “Out of jealousy, out of fear, my husband slew my son while he slept. Ever I obeyed him. Only once did I defy him, and only then, out of love for him. And for that sin, he cast me into the Abyss. He killed the magik in the earth. He murdered the light in the night.”
“My father’s tried to murder me a dozen times,” the girl shrugged. “Maybe your boy should’ve got out of bed earlier.”
The Mother blinked those infinite black eyes. Impossible fury boiling inside them. For a moment, the image of Alinne Corvere trembled and shook, as if it couldn’t quite hold its form, and for a second, Mia saw what lay beyond it. The monstrosity she’d seen in books as a child—the horror the Ministry of Aa preached about from their pulpits. Not the Mother of Night or even Our Lady of Blessed Murder. The soundless void between the stars. The endless black at the end of life.
The Maw.
She was tentacles and eyes and claws and open, drooling mouths. Wide as infinity. Black as eternity. But the tremors stilled and the dark subsided, and the girl looked up into her mother’s face once again. Thin black lips. Hard black eyes. The face of Alinne Corvere—the woman who’d scolded her as a child, sent her to bed without supper, told her to never flinch, never fear, never forget.
“You will leave the world in the grip of tyrant?” the Goddess asked.
“No,” the girl replied. “I’m going to kill a tyrant. And I can’t do that if I’m dead.”
The Mother frowned. “I do not speak of your petty imperator. I talk of the Ever—”