of the Ashkahi civilization, Anais’s severed head had struck the ground with unthinkable force, bringing the empire that worshipped him as a god to an end.
It seemed a lonely thing. A tragic thing. Infanticide, etched in ancient bone.
Mia climbed up the broken foothills, the blasted rocks. A single crow circled above, calling to no one at all. The dust curled and danced about her feet. Mia’s shadow pointed directly toward the skull, like a compass needle toward north. Fear gnawing on her stomach. Pressing on her chest. She could feel herself being pulled, stretched, a hunger like she’d never known.
It was as if all her life, she’d been unfinished, and she’d never realized until this moment. All the fragments of her brief existence seemed insignificant—Jonnen, Tric, Mercurio, Scaeva, even Ashlinn—they were only phantoms somewhere in the dark within. Because through all the years and all the blood, at last, at last, she was home.
No.
Mia gritted her teeth, balled her hands to fists.
This is not my home.
She was here for a reason. Not to sleep, but to awake. Not to be claimed, but to claim. The power of a fallen god. The legacy of a shattered line. The power of the light in the night. To tear it, beating and bleeding, from a shattered chest and wrest back her brother from the bastard who’d claimed him. To fight and die for the only thing that gave her life meaning anymore. The only thing she had left.
When all is blood, blood is all.
Mia climbed up through the open mouth, across teeth as big as cathedrals. The shadows about her were twisting and curling, a dark descending, deep as dreaming. She stole through a split in the skull’s cavernous palate, up wending ways of dull gravebone, slipping out at last into a vast and lonely hall inside the skull’s hollowed crown. The cavity was round like an amphitheater, wide as a dozen arenas. It was almost entirely empty, thin spears of illumination piercing the hundreds of cracks in the bone above, the last sun’s dying light turning pitch-black to a dull gloom. The whisperwinds were so loud, Mia could feel them on her skin, hear the words beyond at last, here at their source—a tale of love and loss, of betrayal and butchery, of a sky torn asunder and all the land beside, a mother’s tears and a son’s blood and a father’s shaking, crimson hands.
Mia crept forward, avoiding the tiny patches of sunlight spilling through the cracks, hidden inside the dark she’d ever called friend. Looking about that black and empty gallery, she saw nothing. And yet she knew with terrible certainty she wasn’t alone. She peered into the nooks and furrows, searching for some sign of life, some source for the awful dread and hunger piercing her heart. And finally, looking up to a shelf of splintered gravebone behind her, Mia saw her standing alone.
A beauty. A horror. A woman.
At last.
Cleo.
She was tall. Willow slender. And young, O, Goddess … so very young. Mia had no idea what she’d expected—an ancient crone, an ageless husk—but Cleo barely looked older than she, truth told. Her hair was thick, black, glossy as a slick of oil, reaching past her ankles and dragging on the floor behind her. She wore a backless black gown, gossamer thin and unadorned, made entirely of shadows. The black hugged her frame, stretching all the way from her chin to her bare feet. Her arms were bare like her back, her skin the kind of pale that hadn’t seen the suns in …
… well, centuries, Mia supposed.
She was beautiful. Her lips and eyelids black as ink. Utterly motionless, save for the hems of her gown, which curled and swayed as if alive. And her shadow, Goddess, it was so dark, Mia’s eyes hurt to look at it. Watering as if she’d stared into the suns too long. It pooled at the woman’s feet, bled out across the bone like liquid. Dripping away over the ledge she stood on and vanishing entirely before it landed.
Slow as centuries, Cleo lifted her hands, digging her fingertips into her skin. Mia saw her forearms were scratched and scabbed, her nails now laying in another score of welts. The woman’s green eyes were upturned to the ceiling’s vast and cracking dome, head tilted as if she were listening—save there was nothing to hear but the hush and sigh of the endless winds.
Cleo held out her hand, fingers splayed, and Mia felt something shifting in