M
y mother’s face became a desecrated corpse, Serel’s screamed into Vos’s disfigured features, Esmaris’s
rose and melted into a demon in the shadows. The scars on my back multiplied and opened and seeped and healed and split, over and over and over again.
I watched my family being whipped to death in the mines. I watched Serel crumble beneath falling marble, just as that boy had at the slaving hub. I watched Max’s perfect face dissolve into ugly decay under my touch.
The silver threads of my mind wrapped tighter and tighter around me, binding me in my ugly past and my ugly future like a fly caught in a spider’s web.
You could never do this. You brought death to everyone that you’ve ever loved. You let them sacrifice for you and you repay them this way?
I didn’t know if it was Reshaye’s voice or my own.
I saw only flashes of what was happening out there — flashes of blue and orange and flames and rot. With each glimmer of sight, I desperately tried to free myself, only to be pulled back even deeper than before.
The web of my mind was going dim, consumed by that blue fire.
It was all going to hell. It was going to end this way. With Reshaye, using my body to kill, to destroy. And all I could think, between the terror and the nightmares, was that I hoped Max would kill me before it happened.
Then, I saw another flash. An image — a memory, though not one that belonged to me — skittered through my head. A little girl with long black hair holding out a butterfly in a jar.
Did you know that when caterpillars make a cocoon, their bodies totally dissolve? Kira. Max’s sister.
They become nothing, before they become something else.
And all at once, the idea hit me. I was fighting and fighting to get out of my own head, but Reshaye lived within me. It pulled from a deeper level of magic. And some part of that was inside of me, even if it was buried far beneath my consciousness. Even if I had to claw through the pits of darkness to get to it.
The threads pulled tighter, calling me, strangling me.
It will kill you! a part of me screamed.
But I didn’t give myself time to listen to my fear. When the next wave of terror came for me, I hurled myself into the darkness.
 |
I OPENED my eyes to a vat of dust-scattered ink and pain so intense that my vision throbbed.
The world solidified. Split. A sky. And a ground. And a horizon line.
Plains, I realized. I stood in the center of silent plains, miles and miles of nothing but faintly waving grass. Moonlight cast silver shadows across their wheat-frayed tips and wildflower petals. Their movements were odd, choppy, like the breeze was skipping and lurching. The
flowers bloomed and wilted and died in strange succession, backwards, forwards, again and again.
I looked down at my hands to see that they, too, were changing. Like the boundaries between my form and the world were strange, ill-defined. I was naked, but my skin bled out into the sky like the translucent flesh of a jellyfish.
All around me, bleeding threads of light reached from the ground into the sky.
Only one, far in the distance, was searing violet, plunging all the way through the ground through a vicious weeping tear. One pure streak of magic.
Max.
I knew it immediately. The only other person who would be drawing from magic so deep. And beyond that, I felt him
— an echo of a presence that, by now, I knew as well as my own.
And then, looming over me, I felt another presence that I knew too well.
I lifted my chin, up to the sky. Realized that there was a stream of light pouring from me, too. But mine clotted above me into a cloud of bloody crimson.
And it had eyes.
The eyes opened. And I recognized the thing that stared back at me, though I couldn’t quite say how: Reshaye.
{You!}
The word was a roll of thunder. The ground shook. And suddenly, before I could speak or move, Reshaye dove for me, surrounding me. Its form shifted, morphed, into something almost resembling some grotesque variation of a human — long, spindling limbs that moved in fits and starts. A cloudy face. A pair of white, savage eyes.
And long, bladed fingers that were suddenly at my throat.
{You betrayed me!} it wailed. {After everything I did for you, you betrayed me!}
The pain hit me all at once — pain so intense I could barely breathe, barely think. Images bombarded me. White, white, white. Flashes of long blonde hair.
{I gave you EVERYTHING!}
One strike with those inhuman, powerful fists, and I was on the ground. Its claws dug into my shoulders. I felt the burning warmth of blood running down my back. And when Reshaye pulled back, it now wore Esmaris’s face.
A flare of fury rose in me. No. I was done.
“No,” I snarled. “No more.”
No more of any of it. No more dividing myself up as an offering to more powerful monsters.
No more sacrificing those I loved in the name of their own safety.
And no more would I fail to unleash the full potential of the power — my power — at my disposal.
Reshaye’s fingers tightened around my throat. I looked into those empty eyes, those eyes that were somehow nothing and everything all at once.
It is a form of raw magic, Nura had told me, once. That’s all it was. Magic to be Wielded.
And Wield it, I would.
I plunged my hands into the misty form of Reshaye’s smoky form.
It let out a bone-piercing screech, but I barely heard it, because the pain was so intense that I momentarily lost my grip on my senses.
I thought I knew pain. I had been wrong. Nothing, nothing, would ever compare to this.
Through the agony, I pulled Reshaye to me. I Wielded its murky form the way I once Wielded water in a pond, so many months ago. It fought me every step of the way, sinking its teeth into my soul.
My own life flashed before my eyes in bloody fragments. A little faceless girl playing with flowers and paper
butterflies in her village. A scared almost-woman sitting in the back of a rolling cart. Esmaris’s home, my solitary dancing practice, my nights in his bed. A teenage girl weeping as her friend tended to her wounds and her heartbreak.
And then, of course, some years later, the crack of a whip, the sails of a ship, the stark gleam of two towers on a rocky shore.
Reshaye wailed. Thrashed.
{You betrayed me, you, you, you…!} it wept, voice dissolving, unraveling.
I grabbed onto Reshaye the way I had grabbed onto Esmaris’s mind, the day I first killed. And that was when I felt it: the agony of it. Not only my own pain, but Reshaye’s, too — the agony of being so many different pieces stitched together, shattered remnants of half-lost memories, grief over faceless deaths and nameless betrayals.
White walls.
Golden hair.
Bright eyes and champagne feathers.
A forgotten name, screamed over and over and over again, until it was swallowed by stone.
Weeping.
{Stop,} Reshaye whispered, and it was the voice of a child. {Stop, please, stop…}
I pushed deeper.
And I reached the center, and the world went suddenly quiet, save for a rhythmic beat: the beating of a heart. There, at the core of Reshaye’s magic, was a formless, pulsing mass.
I closed my fingers around it. It wasn’t just one core, one heart, I realized — it was pieces of many. They were warm, throbbing in time with my own heartbeat.
“…We carry many stories…” I glanced up, through all of this rushing magic, and saw the faintest outline of a figure
standing with me. Blurry, faint, the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. “…So many stories, you and I…”
The thunder roared. The sky flashed. Reshaye’s wordless screech filled my ears. The pain grew so intense that I could barely think. I was being torn away, but that shadowy slip of a figure reached out and grabbed me.
“…It was never meant to be this way…” it whispered. “… Take it, please, take all of it, take it away…”
It shoved that heart into my hands — that mass of magic and power and broken memories. And in that same moment, I looked up through a vicious thunderclap to see two silhouettes engulfed in blue and red, burning in silent flames, locked in a kiss.
“…Someone calls for you…”
Max. The name lurched through my soul. I felt that kiss burn on my lips. It was joined by my mother’s on my forehead and Serel’s on my cheek.
Scars left by everyone I had left behind. Everyone I had sacrificed. Everyone I had lost.
No. Not again.
I would not accept another kiss goodbye.
I looked down at that core of power. Magic to be Wielded.
The figure lurched towards me, shredding and desperate. “…Now!…”
And at that exact moment, just as I felt its claws rip into the back of my skull, just as I felt myself lose my grip on reality, I took that heart and swallowed it. Inhaled its power. Felt it flood my veins.
Gods, power like this — how could it be anything but right? How could it be anything but good?
Light flooded from my fingertips, my eyes, my mouth as I opened it to let out a roar or a laugh or something in between.
I reached for the sky. And the world dissolved in white, and white, and white.
 |
YOU ARE NOT FUCKING DONE, Tisaanah, so get back here.
I heard him.
I felt him, felt his kiss, felt his breath reach for mine.
I threw everything I had, all of this new power wrapped around my fingertips, into one vicious slice. The nightmare images dissolved with wild screeches.
My mind snapped back into place. I was thrust back into a world of light and color and overwhelming sound. My body was in shambles, blood rolling down my skin, burns crawling over my flesh.
But I just clutched Max and pulled my lips away from him long enough to look into those dark eyes, into that face crafted from curling flames.
“You look beautiful,” I whispered.
Shock careened across his features. Shock, then a shattered relief.
Translucent eyelids slid from the inner corners of his eyes. And then the fire was gone, and the rot was gone, and we were two humans of broken flesh and blood collapsing against each other and onto the floor.
Everything hurt.
Max’s forehead was pressed to mine, hands clutching my face as if he couldn’t believe I was here.
“You scared the shit out of me,” he breathed, at last. “Sorry.”
In a daze, I removed his left hand from my cheek and flipped it palm up. Dragged a circle through the blood.
I could still feel my connection to that deep, deep well of magic, though the thread binding me to it was fraying, growing thinner by the second. I had one final purpose for it.
One line, then another. “Tisaanah.”
Max was starting to sway. “What?”
I finished the last line of my Stratagram. “I love you.”
We crashed onto the cobblestones outside the Mikov estate. I collapsed to the ground, and so did Max. Around us, dozens upon dozens of slaves appeared—every slave in the Mikovs’ city, drawn to us like flower petals in the most beautiful garden in Ara, far across the sea.
But I didn’t look at them. My gaze was fixed only on Max, our cheeks pressed against the cold stone, my hand still cradling his. The thread connecting me to that deep reservoir of magic finally snapped, leaving me in my fragile, mortal body, drained of all magic.
The world dimmed.
“I love you,” I whispered. And I curled my hand around his, squeezing as tightly as I could as unconsciousness took us both.
