the pages until he found his place. He sighed, gray smoke spilling from his lips and into the dark above.
“I remember,” he said.
And he began to write.
CHAPTER 50
SILVER
A house sat on the shore of Threelakes.
It stood alone beneath an endless sky, the valley all about it wrapped in perfect silence. It was made of good oak, high gables and broad verandahs and tall windows looking out over the water at its back.
A girl sat on the shoreline, watching the sunset.
It was strange now, with only one sun in the sky. Stranger still to track its movement across the heavens in a handful of hours, watching it fall to its rest with her black and naked eyes. Aa and Niah shared dominion of the sky once more. Dark and light forever changed. Dawn the gateway to waking, and dusk the door to sleeping. All the world about her was trying to come to grips with the balance. Wondering what to make of the pale orb that waxed and waned in the new night sky.
But Ashlinn knew they’d soon remember.
He was rising, now the sun had fallen. Anais ascending his dark throne, the stars glittering like diamonds and steel all about him. He was beautiful, she had to admit. Casting a glittering light across the lake, turning all to quicksilver. But it struck Ashlinn as sad somehow, to watch him burning up there by himself.
He was alone, just like she was.
She didn’t know how to die. Didn’t even know if she could. She’d followed Tric’s directions, treading the path he’d already torn with his bare hands, his farewell kiss still burning on her brow. Her fingertips forever blacked from clawing her way through, her skin forever paled from that lightless path, her breath forever stolen by the endless dark. She had no regrets—she’d promised to kill the sky to be the one standing by Mia in the end. And looking to the Moon above, the swiftly turning night, she supposed in some strange way, she had. But Ashlinn had never stopped to wonder what she’d be when it was over. Or how she might endure forever without her.
“Mia.”
The name was a prayer on her lips. A kiss to alabaster skin. A question without an answer. Because what had become of her? Where was she now? Curled up warm beside the Hearth with those she cherished while Ashlinn lingered here, ageless, deathless, loveless? Wandering with divinities on some empyrean shore? Or had she simply been annihilated, consumed with all those other fragments so that the Night might regain her crown, and the Moon reclaim his throne?
An immortality alone didn’t seem a fair tithe to pay for that.
And yet she’d pay it all again. Because it seemed if she tried hard enough, Ash could still taste her. Salt and honey. Iron and blood. Running the tip of her tongue along her lips. Breathing it in and sighing it out. Looking out over the smooth expanse of silver beneath the Moon’s unblinking gaze and thanking whatever god or goddess or twist of fate had brought that girl into her life.
If only briefly.
Mia.
And then, across the silver, she saw a figure.
Walking on water so still it was like polished stone, like glass, like ice beneath her bare feet. She was pale and she was beautiful, draped in a gown made of shadows. Her scars were healed, her brand gone, the marks of her trials vanished like smoke. Long black hair streamed about her bare shoulders, her kohled eyes deep as the hole she’d filled inside Ashlinn’s chest.
“Mia?” she asked, not daring to hope.
Ash’s eyes were wide as she took a halting step out into the water. Ripples shimmered across the silver, and Ash feared Mia might be dispelled like an illusion, a fever dream, some desperate mirage born of impossible hope. But her girl walked on, across the glass, close enough now to see the black of her eyes, the curl of her lips. And then Mia was in her arms, her flesh as pale and real as Ashlinn’s own. Their bones colliding, their bodies entwined. She’d thought Mia’s eyes were just empty darkness, but this close, this dangerously, wonderfully close, she could see they were filled with tiny sparks of light, like stars strewn across the curtains of night above.
Just like hers.
Beautiful.
They kissed. Sweet as clove cigarillos. Deep as midnight. A kiss that spoke of blood spilled and battles won, of reborn moons and blinded suns, of the dark within and the light without and