And teeth gritted, eyes flashing, she rose up from her knees. Bringing the blade with her, whistling as it came. She felt it cleave through Cleo’s chest, flesh and bone and heart beyond. The woman gasped and all the world stood still. She clutched the blade buried in her breast, palms cut to the bone on its edge. Looking into her foe’s eyes, emerald green into midnight black.
“Fear was never my fate,” Mia hissed.
And with one last blackened breath, Cleo fell.
Mia felt a crushing blow to her spine. Her flesh crawling. Her pulse hammering inside her veins. Her flesh felt aflame, agony, ecstasy, everything and nothing between as she swayed on her feet. A thousand screams, a thousand whispers, the black enveloping her, hundreds of daemons swarming, storming, seething about her. Her hair whipped above her as if a wind blew from below, her head thrown back, arms held out, black eyes closed. Shadows scrawled across the ground before her, through the air around her, maddened skeins of liquid black.
The hunger inside her drowned. The emptiness swallowed. Awakening and severing. Benediction and baptism and communion. All the pieces of herself, missing and lost, found at last. Every question answered. Every puzzle solved. All the world about her crumbling, flickering, shuddering, as if this were the ending of everything.
The beginning.
Face upturned to the sky, she saw it again—just as she’d done in Godsgrave Arena, the moment Furian fell beneath her blade. A field of blinding black, wide as forever. A dark infinity scattered with tiny stars, like her Black Mother’s gowns.
And there above her, Mia saw a globe of pale light burning. Not red or blue or gold, but a pale and ghostly white. She knew it for what it was now. Knew its riddle, knew its purpose, knew it burned within her as surely as she knew its name. Like the circle in her dreams, inscribed into the brow of the boy in her reflection.
The boy beside her.
The boy inside her.
Anais.
“The many were one,” he whispered.
The many fragments of his soul.
“And will be again.”
United in me.
“One beneath the three.”
One moon beneath three suns.
“To raise the four.”
The Four Daughters.
“Free the first.”
Niah, the first divinity.
“Blind the second and the third.”
Extinguish the second and third suns.
And what then would remain?
One sun.
One moon.
One night.
Balance. As it was, and should, and will be.
She fell to her knees. Gasping. Sobbing. The totality almost too much to bear. The power burning in her chest almost overwhelming. The shadows held still, hundreds of not-eyes now watching her from the gloom. The other pieces of his soul, long kept chained here in the dark to slake a tyrant’s darkest hungers.
A false messiah.
A fallen Chosen.
What now would she be?
Mia lifted her head, features framed by rivers of black.
The shadows held their breath.
“The many were one,” she whispered. “And will be again.”
Bloody hands outstretched. Beckoning them. The black about her shivered. Fear rippling among the fearless. And out of the trembling, hungry dark stepped a shape. A shape Mia knew almost as well as her own. A shape who’d found her the turn her world was taken away, who walked beside her through all the miles and all the murder and all the moments until …
Until the moment I sent him away.
“… you certainly took your time getting here…,” Mister Kindly said.
She smiled, tears slipping down scarred and branded cheeks.
“Forgive me,” she whispered.
The not-cat tilted his head.
“… i told you before, mia. i am a part of you. and you are the all of me…”
She ran her fingers through his fur. As real now as the bone beneath her feet. The part of her in him, the part of him in her, the parts of them together, many and one.
“… there is nothing to forgive…”
And he stepped back home. Back into the shadow he’d walked inside since the turn he found her as a child, small and frightened and alone no longer.
The others followed. Daemons of every shape: bats and cats, mice and wolves, snakes and hawks and owls. Hundreds of pieces of a shattered whole, hundreds of shadows merging with hers. A dark as deep as any she’d known now pooling at her feet, a fire as bright as any she’d felt burning inside her chest. And just for a moment, just for a breath, a dark and flickering shape was standing tall behind her. Black flame flowing over his skin, black wings at his back. A white circle was scribed