IN THE instant the tower collapsed, Hsheng knew her future; the brutal impact of stone on bone and flesh, the breath crushed out of her, blood and brains filling her mouth and nose, impossible pain, but gone quickly, and then the deepest silence imaginable. She knew all of this before the stone even enveloped her, while she was still staring at her father’s bemused face. She felt it so vividly she knew it was real.
And then—something else happened instead. It was like sliding down into warm water that enveloped her on all sides. She felt at peace, protected. Her mouth and lungs opened and let the water into her, and she understood that it wasn’t water at all: it was light made somehow liquid. Life, existence. She wasn’t falling. She wasn’t being crushed. Then what was happening?
Whatever it was, it felt glorious. Maybe it was death, but not as she had ever imagined it.
It wasn’t her thought. But it was where her thoughts dwelled, in the center of her.
She sat in a darkened hall. She remembered it from the banquet of rotting food, but none of the other guests were there. The moonflower vines had grown to cover almost everything and were in glorious bloom not just with moonflowers but with blossoms of every size, description, and color. A haze of pollen hung in the air and dusted the table yellow. Above the courtyard, the heavens blazed with stars so bright they left marks on her vision.
“Are you ready?” someone asked.
She’d thought she was alone, but now she saw a person sitting at the head of the table in her father’s seat. And it looked like her father a little. His face, at least, seemed familiar. But she now saw that the flowering vines all originated from him. They sprouted from his head like hair; his fingers tapered and elongated to become vines;, thick runners pushed out of his chest and torso.
“No,” she said. She didn’t know who he was or what he meant, and she didn’t care.
“You are,” he said. “You have been. But the time wasn’t right. Now it is. Three of the xual are gone, and I have feasted on two. We have feasted. And we are ready.”
“You and I are not we,” she said.
“Look again.”
She didn’t want to. She stretched the moment, staring into the face that resembled her father’s but wasn’t. Reluctantly, she finally turned her gaze down.
The vines were also growing from her. She tried to stand, to shake them loose, but it was no good. They were rooted to her very bones. Her blood, her nerves were in them. They were extensions of her body. She felt him, and the thousands of strands that connected them.
She tried to stand up again, but her legs weren’t there, or at least she couldn’t feel them. Her arms weren’t, either—or her body or her head. Just the vines, spreading everywhere.
The man stood, and the walls of the courtyard sagged and then slowly collapsed, entombing her in flowers and creepers. She tried to push through them, to tear them, but they were her, and there was no escape. But she was growing. And as she grew, her arms and legs came back. Her sense of body returned. Different than she remembered. Better. Bigger, more massive with each passing moment.
Who was she, anyway? She’d thought she was Hsheng, the daughter of the Emperor. But she was more than that, wasn’t she? Much more. She remembered things now. Places, people, worlds, rage—and above all, hunger.
No, she thought. That’s not me.
But it is. Your father made you for this. I helped him do it. All of your life, you have been waiting for this, to become this. To be me. To be Nalzhu. To walk once more, and do what we do.
Now she could see. She was looking down at the fortress, as if from a height. She realized that she was still at the summit of the Earth Center Tower. The top had collapsed, but the rest of the tower still retained a semblance of its structure. That was changing, however. Stone-bone guardians swarmed from it, joining together, gathering the broken parts to themselves, re-forming the building into something else. Vines sprang from the stone, guiding it toward a new shape.
But I will not be Hsheng, she protested.
Nor were you ever meant to be.
The sky was pouring rain now, and the clouds were fat and hot with lightning. They hummed with life and spirit, and beyond them a world of plains, mountains, oceans, life to learn and destroy. The fortress below her seemed tiny. Not worth her time.
But it is. We must finish here first. We must be free.
Very well.
She felt them, the xual striving against her. The coiled power that Qaxh called his Thing. Nasch. Taxual. They were all that remained of the troublesome bonds that had kept her quiet, smoothed over her malice, prevented her becoming. They were still strong, even though now there were only three. But there was something helping her, too, something working in the remains of the Earth Center Tower, a shape-giving force flowing from the Dream of the World, directing the bones and vines, informing them with might. She—Nalzhu—had an ally. Who or what was it? Not her father. He was gone.
Besides the surviving xual, there was another that must be dealt with. Yash. Nalzhu felt her there, the enemy. She passed her gaze through stone until she saw the barbarian. Then she pulled her feet from the rock that had moored her for so many ages. She was distantly aware of the remaining walls collapsing, of the rooms of the tower crushing together to form her corpus, of a hundred souls torn from their bodies in the instant of her first step. To the delusion that had been Hsheng, that would have mattered. To Nalzhu it mattered not at all.
It was good, in fact. It was like pulling splinters from her flesh; the pain brought release, and there was no reason to care for what became of the splinter. So she took another step toward the Standing Pinion Tower. Where Yash was.