her: As an angel, during the First Age, this child had been a creature of alabaster skin, hair that fell in auburn waves past his shoulders, amber eyes flecked with bright green. When the Deep took him, rent his body from him, he had been mere decades old, quite young for an angel.
“Malikel,” Rielle whispered. “Don’t be afraid. Be reborn.”
Her empirium-bright vision took her under. It showed her that the boy, Malikel, was at his core nothing more than stardust. Millions of spinning orbs, each more brilliant than the sun, each connected to all the others—and to the ground Rielle knelt upon, and to the darkening shape of the corpse at her feet. It was an abomination, that corpse. She hated the sight of it. Why would it lie gaping before her like this, so dead and dim, so lifeless, when it could easily be made whole again?
She worked quickly. Her power was endless, brewing like a storm. She followed its reach up to Malikel, tugged on the threads of his mind. Some nearby threads, slippery and elusive, she could not touch, not yet—the threads connecting this place to that place, the threads connecting the moments ahead of her to the moments behind.
Darkly, she thought of Obritsa. It wasn’t fair that the girl should enjoy privileges Rielle could not.
“Someday I will travel anywhere and everywhere,” she murmured as she knit together the threads she could touch—the physicality of the corpse, the eagerness of Malikel’s mind—and dreamt of the threads she couldn’t. “Someday, I will travel to the ends of everything and then back to the beginnings. Someday, marques will fall to their knees in envy of me, for I will surpass them.”
“Concentrate, Rielle,” Corien said urgently, his voice near and far at once. “You’re dimming fast.”
And he was right. Something was changing so rapidly that it made her falter. Malikel’s mind, all his ancient thoughts, were half knitted to this corpse, this body with its brightening light. A braided path brought them slowly together, a connection of the empirium itself—angel to corpse, vibrant mind to dead flesh. The beginning of a new life, crafted by her own will.
But then Rielle’s fingers caught on an empirial knot—a snag in the fabric of energy she had woven—and she stumbled in her work. The energy that had come over her as she killed the Venteran Obex bled swiftly from her. It was as if she’d been holding up a palace with her own two hands, lifting it high in the air, and then her muscles gave out without warning and the entire structure came tumbling down. The knots unraveled; the threads of mind-to-flesh and flesh-to-mind slipped from her grip.
She didn’t hear Malikel’s scream, for he had no mouth, no voice, but she felt his panic, his terror and pain. It wasn’t just that the stitches she had created were unraveling.
Malikel himself was unraveling.
She felt the essence of his mind unspool. Something at the core of his consciousness was rent open and flew apart, a detonation. The pieces of him went flying, his thoughts reduced to sheer terror, and then he was gone.
Rielle sat back hard on her heels.
The corpse steamed at her feet, now a puddle of blood, bone, and punctured organs. A constellation of sizzling gashes dotted what had once been its torso, and through the gashes blazed a golden light, rapidly fading.
Rielle looked up at Corien through a veil of weariness, and as her exhaustion returned, she began to understand what had happened. The thoughts of the other angels brushed up against her, all of them terrified, all of them astonished and cowed.
“I’m not ready yet,” Rielle said at last. “I thought I could do it; I felt how close I was. I’ve been close.” She cried tears she did not ask for, registered a sadness that felt too far from her to touch. Her mind was wrapped in sheets of thick cotton. She wanted to lie down in the dirt and sleep for months. Her nose and mouth filled with the scent and taste of blood. Her thoughts crested and dove, darting from desire to desire, and she didn’t know how to quiet them.
Corien said nothing. He lifted her into his arms, held her close against his chest.
“You need rest,” he said quietly. “True rest. We have four castings now. There is time before we need to find the others.” He brushed a kiss across her cheek, then whispered, “I’ll show you my home. A place of industry and monstrous