I couldn’t help but hope that the corpses would fall as soon as Nura did, like puppets limp from the loss of their master.

Sadly, this was not the case. Seconds after Nura died, Tisaanah had to drag me away from the quickly encroaching hordes of monstrous soldiers. The haze of exhaustion and anger and sadness cleared enough for a single question to surface:

Now what?

Those were the first words out of my lips when Tisaanah and I managed to steal a few seconds of quiet again, behind a half-broken house. My eyes were drawn down to the amber, which I clutched like my life depended on it.

Your life does depend on it, the magic seemed to sing. Everything depends on me. Come with me and we can create a new world. You and me.

I hadn’t been able to see the details of it before, when it was tightly held in Nura’s grasp. The thing inside it resembled a misshapen fetus, white as if carved in ivory, curled up at the center of the amber stone. It was barely a suggestion of a person at this point, no features, no fingers, no toes, but disturbingly humanoid. It was disgusting… and yet, entrancing.

The power of it thrummed beneath my skin. The heart had felt staggeringly powerful, too, but erratic and ever moving, like a river rushing around us.

This? This was more… enticing. Like a beckoning hand.

Create the world you wish, it seemed to whisper. Create life. Do you know what does that? A god.

“What do we do with that thing now?” Tisaanah said. She was breathing hard, her forearm around her body, clearly cradling an injury.

I glanced over my shoulder to see sheer hell unfolding around us. The magic at my hands tingled.

We could use it. The answer was on the tip of my tongue. We could use it to win this war and every one after it. We could use it to build the world of our dreams.

I snapped my chin up, blinking hard.

Ascended above. No wonder this thing had driven Nura to a new level of madness.

“We absolutely should not use it,” I said.

Tisaanah nodded emphatically. Then she lifted her gaze to the night sky. I followed her stare and noticed that the streaks of unnatural light arcing across it had only grown brighter, stronger.

“Do you feel that?” she murmured.

She pressed her hand to her chest, as if trying to steady something untethered.

I did feel it. A disruption, like waves churning in the magic far beneath us. Noxious.

Her brow was furrowed in thought. “What if Vardir was right?”

I hated Vardir. But knowledge was never his problem. He was almost certainly right.

“Then what?” I said. “We have this.” I nodded down to the amber. “And that.” I nodded to Tisaanah’s pockets, where she still held the shards of the heart—what little we could recover, even though it now seemed so volatile that the very thought of using it chilled me. “But there’s a third, and if Vardir is right, then we need it in order to stop all of this.”

Death magic.

Right. And also, there was that. It’ll probably kill you! Vardir had said, so fucking cheerfully.

I ran my hand through my hair, letting out a grunt of frustration. “This is all so—”

Tisaanah’s eyes went wide. She grabbed my wrist hard enough to make me stumble.

“How did you not notice this?” she gasped.

I looked down. She held my hand out between us, where Ilyzath’s mark was burned into my palm—where Ilyzath’s mark was now moving. The

chaotic lines trembled like the Ilyzath’s carvings in the shadows. Faint puffs of purple shadow quivered around each stroke.

Ascended fucking above. My hand had hurt, but so did the rest of my body, and I’d spent the last several hours with my hands wrapped around my spear’s staff.

“I was a little distracted, but that’s— that’s—”

Tisaanah lifted her own hand. The gold mark now spread several inches up her forearm. Shimmers of glowing light ran from her palm to her fingertips, glowing towards the amber—but when I looked more carefully, I realized those lights moved in a second wave, too, fainter strings of gold moving towards her little finger. She turned, slowly, and the light grew bolder as her hand pointed to the sea.

Pointed in the direction of Ilyzath. “Fuck, I’m an idiot,” I breathed.

All at once, pieces clicked together. Ilyzath’s words echoed in my head, now suddenly so much clearer.

Hands reaching into forces that should not be wielded, it had said, and thinning boundaries that should not be torn.

I, too, have lost pieces of myself, it had told me. I stuck on those three words: Pieces of myself.

The Lejaras. That was what it had been talking about. And this, what was happening now, was exactly what it had warned of. Mortal hubris.

Ilyzath was built upon ancient magic that no one understood. It was semi-sentient, just as the Lejaras seemed to be. And if any location could hold death itself… well, that was it.

The final Lejara was in Ilyzath.

Tisaanah and I looked at each other, wide-eyed, the realization hitting us both.

“I can go alone,” I said.

“That is a stupid idea,” she said, without hesitation, and reached out to take my hand.

I knew better than to argue with her. A few scribbles on a sheet of paper, and we were gone.