The shadows reached out toward her, stretching into the nothing she’d become. She looked down to her own shadow and saw it was black, like tar, like glue, running between her fingers like melting candle wax. She could smell faint smoke and motes of dust, the perfume of empty tombs. Something crunching beneath her feet, dry and brittle as twigs. Sharp as the screaming in her mind.
“O, Goddess,” Mia breathed.
A bleakness so perfect she couldn’t imagine anything before or after or ever again. No light. No sound. No warmth. No hope. Tears welling in her eyes.
“O, Goddess … I can feel her.”
She pushed it aside. The fear. The sorrow. The loss and the pain. So close now, she could taste it. Reach out with trembling hands and touch it. Rip it from its cage of broken ribs and make it her own. Her birthright. Her legacy. Her blood and her vengeance. Her promise to the only one she had left.
Brother.
“I … I cannot swim very well.”
“I can.” She squeezed his hand again. “And I’ll not let you drown.”
The cliffs about her were fragmented now, run through with dark cracks and rife with shadows. On the broken earth beneath her, in the crumbling walls around her, she saw the faintest marks of civilization—the vague pattern of bricks here, a fragment of broken statue there. The ground she’d set her boots to sloped ever downward, and in it, she saw the faint impression of flagstones—as if this had once been a road, smashed with unspeakable fury into the shattered earth.
She was close now. That same pull she’d felt in the presence of Furian, of Cassius, of her father, now amplified a dozen-, a hundred-, a thousandfold. A black gravity. A bottomless undertow, rippling beneath the paper-thin skin of reality about her. The veil between this world and another felt thin and stretched. Something grander and more terrible was waiting on the other side. Something close to …
Home.
When she’d first heard tell of the Crown of the Moon, Mia had imagined something awe-inspiring. Something palatial. A fortress of gold, perhaps, glittering on an impossible mountaintop. A spire of silver, topped with a wreath of starlight. Instead, this was a desolation. A dissolution. She knew now she was walking into an enormous crater, wrought by an impact that had scoured the land of all but broken memories. Of the empire that once flourished in this place, there was almost no trace. Its legends, its lore, its magiks, its songs, and its people, all undone in an instant. A cataclysm that ruptured the very earth, leaving it forever broken.
Mia followed the slope inward. Downward. Wind curling in her hair. Whispers echoing in her ears. Vertigo swelling in her skull. She could definitely hear a woman’s voice now, discernible in the shapeless, haunted babble. And through the furrowed troughs and shattered defiles, dust on her skin and steel in her eyes, she finally stepped into the heart of the Ashkahi crater and saw it laid before her in all its broken glory.
The Crown of the Moon.
She almost smiled to see it. The final answer to the riddle of her life. The last revelation in a story written in ink and blood by the light of dusk and dawning. And in the end, after all the murder and all the miles, it was so simple. She could see the city of Godsgrave in her mind, as if from above—the Sword and Shield Arms, the Nethers, the towering, ossified Ribs. Shattered isles, run through with traceries of canals, looking for all the world like a giant laid upon its back. One piece missing.
And here it was.
Not a fortress of gold or a spire of silver.
“Of course,” Mia whispered.
A skull.
A colossal, impossible skull.
BOOK 5
SHE WORE THE NIGHT
CHAPTER 40
FATE
“The Crown of the Moon,” Mia breathed.
It was hundreds of feet tall, miles across, buried to the temples in splintered earth. Its face was upturned to the sky, a circle scribed into its vast and barren brow. It was gravebone of course, just like the Ribs, the rest of Godsgrave’s foundations, the blade on Mia’s back. The last remnants of Anais’s body, flung from the heavens by a vengeful father who should have loved him as an only son. His body had struck the earth so hard, the Itreyan peninsula was smashed beneath the sea, and there upon the ruins, Aa had commanded his faithful to build his new temple. But here, in the heart