The words stilled her. Struck her. Shook her to her core. Because wasn’t it true? Wasn’t that the half she’d fed? The half that must win in the end? What was Mia Corvere, if not murder and rage? What had driven her from the dark of her past? Sustained her when all else failed? So many buried in their graves by her hand. Soldiers and senators and slaves. Could she remember their faces? She’d never even known their names. And how much sleep had she lost over it, truly? How many women had she widowed? How many children orphaned?
Had she stopped to think, for a single moment, who they might be? Had they been people to her at all? With hopes and lives and dreams? Or had they simply been obstacles in the way of her ambitions? An annoyance to be removed, just as Julius Scaeva removed Darius and Alinne Corvere? Because at the last, if she were honest with herself, in the long quiet hours of the nevernight without her passengers, alone with her heart, Mia Corvere’s greatest fear wouldn’t have ever been failing to kill her father.
It would have been becoming him.
But how many Mias had she helped create?
After all of it, all the blood and death?
How can I hate him?
When I’m so much like him?
And then she saw them.
Two tiny figures, golden in the darkness.
Two burning truths, shining in the night.
They seemed so small amidst all that sound and fury. Jonnen clutched Mia’s gravebone dagger in his hands. Ashlinn held the boy in her arms, fingers spattered black by her return through the walls of the Abyss. Together, they struggled through the raging tempest, step by step through the howling gale. Not away, but toward. Around the base of Aa’s statue, across the shattered stone, inching ever closer to her father’s back.
Her brother and her girl.
Her blood and her beloved.
The difference between him and me.
Mia fixed black eyes on her father. The statue of the Everseeing behind him, the pale sword gleaming in its hand. The darkness around them shivered. Black wings unfurled at her back. She remembered what it was to sail across the dark above this world. The burning shards swelling inside her, longing to return.
She could see her loves, even now, forcing their way through the storm. Ashlinn’s golden blond, whipping in the winds, Jonnen’s eyes narrowed against the tempest. The night burned bright above her, her heart ached for all she’d be leaving behind. But this was good, she realized. This was right. A republic in ashes behind her. A city of bridges and bones laid at the bottom of the sea by her hand.
That was a better ending than most.
She spread her arms wide, as if to embrace him.
He readied himself for her blow.
“Goodnight, Father,” she said.
And cradled in Ashlinn’s arms, Jonnen struck. A pinprick really. A needle into the heel of a titan. But beyond anything else it might have been, the blade was gravebone. Crafted from a body that had plummeted to earth a millennium ago, still imbued with some tiny fragment of the power of the god it belonged to.
And in the end, who can cut you deeper than yourself?
The blade sank through the shadows.
Black blood flowed.
Scaeva screamed.
Arms open wide, Mia collided with him. Driving him back onto the Everseeing’s outstretched blade. The statue’s sword pierced his chest, burst through her back, gleaming white as lightning licked the skies. A tremor hit the island, the earth splitting beneath them. Black winds roared and thunder crashed and she raised her hands and seized his face, forcing him back farther onto the blade as her thumbs found his eyes. She pushed through, black bursting, agonized wails bubbling in the howling night. The shards burning white-hot inside her, all the world collapsing around her, a deafening voice screaming inside her.
The many were one.
THE MANY WERE ONE.
Mia felt the ground crumble away beneath her feet. The warm infinity waiting beyond. Birth and death. Day and night. Crushing him in her hands, enfolding him in her arms, kissing him goodbye. A rushing swell, deeper than oceans, than the black between the suns, than the dark at all light’s ending. All the pieces inside her catching fire, a billion tiny points of light, a shattered totality begun now anew.
They were everything.
They were nothing.
Ending.
Beginning.
A universe about them, warm and red and barely a hand’s width wide. A dark pressure all around