She couldn’t help but laugh as she soared, a high, desperate, frantic laugh of relief. She rose so high that she could no longer make out Kitay’s face, until Arlong turned into little splotches of green and blue, until she had even passed through a layer of clouds.
Then she stopped.
She hung alone in an expanse of blue.
A calm washed over her then, a calm that she couldn’t ever remember feeling. There was nothing up here she could kill. Nothing she could hurt. She had her mind to herself. She had the world to herself.
She floated in the air, suspended at the point between heaven and earth.
The Red Cliffs looked so beautiful from up here.
Her mind wandered to the last minister of the Red Emperor, who had etched those ancient words into the cliffside. He’d written a scream to the heavens, an open plea to future generations, a message for the Hesperians who would one day sail into that harbor and bomb it.
What had he wanted to tell them?
Nothing lasts.
Nezha and Kitay had both been wrong. There was another way to interpret those carvings. If nothing lasted and the world did not exist, all that meant was that reality was not fixed. The illusion she lived in was fluid and mutable, and could be easily altered by someone willing to rewrite the script of reality.
Nothing lasts.
This was not a world of men. It was a world of gods, a time of great powers. It was the era of divinity walking in man, of wind and water and fire. And in warfare, she who held the power asymmetry was the inevitable victor.
She, the Last Speerly, called the greatest power of all.
And the Hesperians, no matter how hard they tried, could never take this from her.
Landing was the tricky part.
Her first instinct was to simply extinguish the fire. But then she dropped like a rock, plummeting at a breakneck speed for several heart-stopping moments until she managed to get her wings spread and a fire lit beneath them. That made her come to a lurching halt so rough she was shocked the wings didn’t rip right off her arms.
She drifted back up, heart hammering.
She’d have to glide down somehow. She thought through the movements in her head—she’d decrease the heat, little by little, until she was close enough to the ground.
It almost worked. She hadn’t counted on how fast her velocity would increase. Suddenly she was thirty feet from the ground and hurtling far too quickly toward Kitay.
“Move!” she shouted, but he didn’t budge. He just reached his hands out, grabbed her wrists, and swung her about until they collapsed in a tangled, laughing heap of leather and silk and limbs.
“I was right,” he said. “I’m always right.”
“Well, don’t be so smug about it.”
He groaned happily and rubbed his arms. “So how was it?”
“Incredible.” She flung her arms around him and hugged him tight. “You genius. You wonderful, wonderful genius.”
Kitay leaned back, arms raised. “Careful, you’ll break the wings.”
She twisted her head around to check them and marveled at the thin, careful craftsmanship that held the apparatus together. “I can’t believe you did this in a week.”
“I had some time on my hands,” said Kitay. “Wasn’t out there trying to stop a fleet or anything.”
“I love you,” she said.
Kitay gave her a tired smile. “I know.”
“We still don’t know what we’re going to do after—” she started, but he shook his head.
“I know,” he said. “I don’t know what to do about the Hesperians. For once, I haven’t the faintest idea, and I hate it. But we’ll figure our way out of it. We’ve figured our way out of this, we’re going to survive the Red Cliffs, we’re going to survive Vaisra, and we’ll keep surviving until we’re safe and the world can’t touch us. One enemy at a time. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” she said.
Once her legs had stopped shaking, he helped her strip out of her gear. Then they climbed back down the cliff, still light-headed and giddy with victory, laughing so hard that their sides hurt.
Because yes, the fleet was still coming, and yes, they might very well die the next morning, but in that instant it didn’t matter, because fuck it, she could fly.
“You’ll need some air support,” Kitay said after a while.
“Air support?”
“You’ll be a very conspicuous, very obvious target. You’ll want someone fending off the people shooting at you. They throw rocks, we throw them back. A line of archers would be nice.”