32

TOGETHER

In war, there is no grand moment of beginning.

The bards like to sing about it—that still second before the world turns on, the gears of mortals grinding as two armies face each other, and then the horn. Always a horn, announcing the charge, and two glorious lines of steeds and men charging at one another.

But that’s song. Fantasy. Not reality. Maybe it happens in mortal war. In wars between humans, not between humans and witches. Without magic. Maybe, somewhere across the sea from the Mist Continent, war has that grand horn and that majestic charge. But what comes after is nothing poetic.

Be wary always of bards who sing about beautiful war.

Because it’s nothing but pain, and death, and horrible, horrible disfigurement. Because, when the valkerax finally arrive, it’s in secret, through the canyons and from crevices below, and we never see it coming.

Peace one moment, and furious chaos the next.

Varia doesn’t stand on her valkerax valiantly or line them up and charge them in like a mortal might. She doesn’t gloat or pose dramatic before her victory. She fights with her wyrm weapons like a beast fighting for survival, for revenge—ragingly, the bulk of the horde descending on us in what feels like an instant. Fire suddenly everywhere, licking invisible flowers and eating what wood is left in the ruins of Pala Orias, snaking up the corpses of beneathers far too young to die. Beneathers who have only ever known war.

The archers shoot frantically, the white valkerax swarming over the canyon walls and staggering at the tranqs in their scales, passing out dead cold and tripping the others rushing in behind them. Pileups of wyrms writhe around one another, snapping and scrabbling to get their bearings and charge, claws ripping one another apart as much as they rip the beneathers.

Evlorasin immediately ascends, roaring out a vicious battle cry as its mane shines rainbow. Up, and up, and then I lose sight of it.

“Be well,” Ev says to me, but the words fade all too quickly. I watch its pure white feathers drift softly down to the earth with something like regret. Lucien stands, and I stand with him and watch as the fingers of his working hand turn black up to the wrist.

“I put a barrier around the front line,” he clarifies. “A bubble. It won’t stop the valkerax, but it will slow them down marginally. Make them easier targets.”

“Is Varia nearby?” I ask.

“Yes.” He narrows his eyes out of the cave’s mouth. “But not close enough. She’s staying just out of range. It’s like she…knows.”

“Shit,” I hiss. “I can lure her out. Make her angrier, make her come right for us—”

“By sleeping again?” Lucien frowns. I should say yes, but I can’t. If I sleep, and lure her, and Varia gets close enough, I might not wake up in time to stop Lucien from splitting the First Root again. I have to be here to interrupt him. To put it back together before he splits it apart.

I can’t go to her in the dream. But the only other way I have to communicate with her, to lure her, is the hunger. My valkerax blood promise, and the Bone Tree song inside her, calling to me. The hunger here is muted by Lucien’s powerful magic. Just a little more from me, and I can push it down entirely. But if I Weep, that valkerax part of me comes out, too. The six eyes. It could make me more vulnerable to the Bone Tree’s command, not less. I could communicate with her, goad her closer, but she could also just grab my reins, force me to hurt and kill like she almost did in the Black Archives.

“Zera, no,” Lucien starts. “What if—”

“I won’t,” I say. “Trust me. Please.”

He hedges, black eyes sliced thin. “I can’t lose you.”

“You won’t.” I say it, and unsay it. “It’ll be only for a second. Please.”

I feel the grip of his magic loosen before his expression does. “Only a second.”

I suppress my smile and dive straight into the silence. Of the silence. One foot in front of the other, one step deeper at a time. Falling, like falling into a weightless ocean. I’ve seen the ocean now.

What a beautiful unlife it’s been.

I surface into absolute stillness, into the world being split six ways, six eyes looking at six Luciens. Magma-hot blood tears streak down my face, eye-corner to eye-corner, the blood dripping to the floor and mixing with the pearl blood of the Tree of Souls. The hunger in my head is gone, gnawing at me no longer, but I understand it better now. It’s not really gone. Weeping doesn’t get rid of the hunger. It just lets it rest—from the pain. From the anger. From the guilt.

Weeping isn’t to suppress the hunger. It’s to embrace it.

To embrace all of myself, no matter how dark or terrifying.

I’m here.

I’m here, I think loudly and clearly. Come and get me.

I look at the First Root sticking out of the dirt, crystallize its sundered shape in my mind. The connection between Bone Tree Varia and the valkerax part of me twinges, a harp string plucked too fast and too hard. She’s seen it. She knows I’m looking at the First Root. So close to splitting it again. Too close.

The impact is instantaneous. I hear Malachite shouting outside, Fione wailing, the hiss of steam as Yorl’s matronic moves, the battle raging outside as my unheart splinters into a thousand shards. Lucien’s face looks ashen and fearful—scared of losing everyone. Of losing me.

But we can’t move. We can’t go out and help them. We have to be here, at the First Root, to fix it all. To end—and begin—it all.

I have to trust that they’re still alive. I can’t let the emotion of fear submerge me. Drown me. The ocean is so big, so full of life, but I won’t drown in it. I can swim. I’ve learned to swim now. Reginall taught me. Ev taught me. The fourteen men I killed taught me. Lucien taught me.

Everyone in my life taught me to swim in the ocean of myself.

I can swim now, and there’s an island I have to reach—that black-rock island of Rel’donas, that small, peaceful room where I found rest at last.

Fire starts to lick at the cave’s mouth, and the ground rocks us to our knees as two valkerax entwined in furious combat writhe over each other just outside, slamming into the cave and away from it, blood spattering over earth and our clothes and staining the First Root. Dirt and dust fall from the precarious ceiling, white feathers and fur flying.

Ev.

Ev, tearing into the stomach of its brethren, as its stomach is torn into, too.

And then Varia.

She appears out of nowhere—teleporting? I don’t know, but she feels like she’s gone, far away, and then she’s in front of us, sallow and hungry and mere rags, a skeleton of the princess I knew and the sister Lucien loves. It’s clear to read on his face—he doesn’t move. He can’t. She looks like a corpse. Dead. Worse—sucked clean of all life. The bone choker around her neck is nearly decapitating her now, the red flesh of her windpipe showing, the white tendons of her throat column exposed. She looks a waif, but the power around her is harder and heavier than lead.

And her milky, shriveled eyes are on me.

In a way, Lucien’s shock, that one moment of hesitation—his love for his sister sealed the world’s fate. He could’ve gone for the First Root the moment she appeared. But his love roots him to the spot for just this one second. And I take it.

He has never starved. But he has loved.

And that’s why, at the end of the world, there are wolves and not mortals.

That’s why I reach the Root first. That’s why Varia lunges for me, my hands gripping the slippery pearlescent blood as I try desperately to push the two halves of the First Root together again. To hold it there, to heal it there. She’s only destruction. She doesn’t know—she can’t know of healing. Of what I’m doing.

But the bones of her choker spear out of her and into me all the same.

Four, five—I can’t count how many points of pain, of entry. Maybe a thousand. It feels like a thousand, the agony ripping through muscle and organ and every undead part of me. My skin tries to curl away from itself, vomit and hot-cold blood like nausea, a tide that moves with my inhales and exhales. Each breath, pain.

Every year of the thousand this Tree has had to endure—pain.

“NO!” Lucien bellows, and the flash of black light dizzies me. He does something—I don’t know what—but Varia staggers back woodenly, like a doll, and lunges for me again.

This time, her half-dead visage freezes. Completely unmoving, her withered eye sockets focused only on me. Her bones still spear my body, but I manage to turn my head over my shoulder to look at Lucien. His entire body is eaten by the void, up to his neck, to his jaw, creeping over his lips as he trembles, shakes, holding his sister in place with all his magic.

“Lucien!” I scream, blood spattering out of my throat. “Let go!”

He doesn’t.

“It’ll kill you!” My voice shatters. “LUCIEN!”

His eyes flicker from his sister to me, just that one movement so impossibly hard for him. “You…let go…”

“I have to put it together!” I shake my head. “You have to trust me!”

Varia’s eyes are dead. But his are alive and burning. Burning alive with his love for me, his worry, our memories together. The two halves of the First Root start to keen in my hands, close, their wounds touching and reaching out for one another all at once. Something booms beneath us, around us, above us. It sends out shock waves, little tremor warnings, and I know.

I know like the valkerax know. Or maybe it’s the fact I’m holding the First Root itself in my hands. Maybe it’s talking to me with its soul, its magic. However it’s doing it, I can see it like a clear dream. Like I’m dreaming lucid, awake. Images, feelings. I can see the battle unfolding below, valkerax dead, beneathers dead, blood smearing the ghostly gold flowers. I can see the now and the future. The Tree of Souls won’t heal without first hurting. It’ll collapse the cavern. All the canyons. The destruction will be huge.

Everyone will die.

“Lucien, take them,” I beg him. “Everyone. Take them and go.”

Spittle and blood foam in the corners of his mouth, the animate void crawling steadily up his throat, Varia’s limbs beginning to twitch.

“I won’t leave you…behind…again,” he hisses.

“Take everyone,” I say. “I can do the rest. You have to—you have to get away. To Pala Amna. As far as you can get.”

His black eyes flicker with great effort over to Varia. I make a smile.

“I’ll send her along,” I say. “When the Tree lets go of her. I promise.”

“You…can’t—”

“I can,” I assure him. “I know it’s selfish. But I can—”

“You will let go of the First Root.”

His command hits me like an arrow to my chest already riddled with them. But this one hurts more than any. He promised. He was different from the others—he’d never use me like this. He said that. He showed that. But now the magic rises up, curling around my arms, forcing itself through even the peace of my Weeping—his magic is so much stronger here at the Tree of Souls. Strong enough to defy my Weeping like Varia does. He doesn’t have a Tree in him, but even being near one is enough to give him the magical power to brute force through my will. But it’s killing him. Holding Varia and making me obey this command is…it’s too much. It’ll kill him. The hunger laces razor threads around my wrists, my fingers, pulling them apart without my will.

“You said—” I gasp. “You said you’d never—”

“I will not.” He pauses, gasping for breath. “Lose you again.”

I see it in his eyes, and the hurt drains from me one feather-touch at a time. Love.

He’s doing this for love.

He’s commanding me for love.

Not like Varia did. Not in his best interest or in mine. In ours. He wants a world with me in it, as I want that world, too. Desperately. More than anything.

We teeter on the edge of a knife, the past and the future. Our past together, our future together. The battle rages outside, Evlorasin’s roar cracking the deadly tension in the cave.

A tear slips from my fifth and sixth eye, my human eyes, as my smile widens and the words tumble from my lips, tragic and hopeful all at once.

“Wait for me.”

The wildfire in his gaze roars higher, eating me like kindling. The ring—his ring—around my finger feels so solid, so wonderful, the only unpainful thing in the world as every little muscle in my body strains to force the First Root back together. The tremblings of the ground grow wild, nearly throwing us off-balance, but Lucien refuses to let even the earthquakes tear his gaze from my face. The ceiling of the little cave starts to collapse in places, chunks of dirt and stone leaving puckered holes into darkness that reveal the glowing rainbow tree above. It seems more real, somehow—its branches now strongly shimmering.

Varia suddenly breaks free of Lucien’s spell, her wooden-fingered hand darting out for my throat. She squeezes and squeezes so hard I fear my head will come off—squeezes like I’m the source of all her rage and fury. But Varia’s grip is nothing compared to the iron grip of Lucien’s command, the hunger peeling apart my willpower like it’s nothing more than dry lace. He knew all along, maybe, what I was going to do. But he had a plan, too. He didn’t want to command me, but he knew he would if he had to. He’d pour all his magic into that one command if he had to.

I can’t stop him.

But I can love him.

“If I don’t do this, Lucien,” I gasp, “I’ll be hungry forever.”

It’s not the I love you he wants. It’s not the I’ll stop, and let you do this instead. It’s not the I will consider my own safety above all others’ he wants to hear. He wants me to be with him, to be us, together at last, and in peace.

And I want that, too.

Varia’s grip closes in around my windpipe. I breathe deep, for maybe my last breath, and say, “Please trust me. Wait for me.”

It’s a promise, and a cry, and a prayer.

It’s unfair to ask him. Selfish.

But maybe I’ve earned a little of that, at the end of all things.

Whisper isn’t the type to linger, but Lucien is. So I know it’s Whisper who pulls him away from me, who breaks his eye contact, who is there one moment and then gone in shadow the next. The sound of popping, everywhere, outside the cave. Clattering as swords fall to the floor, as bowstrings unwind sharply, the clank of metal as Yorl’s matronic falls, as every beneather and friend is teleported away by Lucien’s sheer power, the sounds of battle emptying in a split second, and all I can think is thank you.

I love you.

Varia digs into my neck. I feel it happen, but she can’t stop my hands. I press with all effort, all breath, into my two palms, forcing the First Root’s wound flush against itself. My neck creaks, groans, resisting her force trying to decapitate me. Around her fingers buried deep in my neck, blood and life leave me, and I see her face. I see her expression—no, the Bone Tree’s expression—as she realizes I’m putting her together instead of taking her apart.

I’ve never seen joy. Not really. Not until this moment.

It’s a deep, old, eternal joy, the sort the New God priests crow about in the temples. Divine joy. Joy that makes moving mountains possible, that makes the sun rise and set and rise again by the buoy of sheer gilded ecstasy. She—no, it—looks at me, milky, shriveled eyes somehow filled with gratitude.

“Thank you.”

The bones sticking out of Varia’s choker and piercing into me suddenly retract, small and slender and like jewelry again. There’s a clicking sound, and the bone choker comes loose, one fang at a time, until it falls to the ground and disintegrates into white dust.

Varia staggers as if she’s been cut free from some string holding her, her knees tumbling to the ground and her body unmoving, her head on her chest. My six eyes start to blacken at the edges, but I force myself to focus on my hands, on holding. I can feel the Root’s wound starting to close, inch by inch. The tremors are worse now, great clots of dirt falling on our heads, cracks and crashes beyond the little cave as boulders fall and the canyon faces start to shatter.

“V-Varia, wake up,” I stammer, throat scraped raw and open. “Your Highness…wake up, please.”

Lucien’s magic can’t reach me—not anymore. He’s gone from the Tree of Souls, not a scrap of the power it was giving him to be found. He’s far, too far, so far my heart necklace can’t even help. I can feel the white rush of noise crawling up my half-broken spine, ready the moment I let my Weeping down to freeze me in place, keep me here screaming soundlessly for all eternity. He can’t heal me. He can’t help me. He’s gone.

Fione, Mal, Yorl. They’re all gone.

No—not gone. Safe.

I have to keep my promise to Fione now.

“Varia!” I gurgle. “Please! Get up!”

Nothing. The wound is closing in my hand, the First Root mending itself quickly and the pearl liquid coming to a stop. It coats my hands, makes them slippery, my own blood spurting out of my neck not helping, but I cling on, dig my claws in. If I can’t get her to wake up, she’s done for.

“HEY!” I scream. “ASSHOLE!”

To my utter relief, she jerks up, eyes wild and plump and black again as she looks around like she has no idea where she is or what’s going on. Her skin is still sallow, but the skeletal hunger in her cheekbones is gone, and her neck wounds are dire holes that will leave scars, but nothing fatal.

“What—” The princess blinks at me. Black eyes full of suspicion, of pride. She’s back. She’s herself. “What are you doing here? Where—”

“There’s no time,” I blurt, blood bubbling out of my nose. “This is the Tree of Souls. You can use more magic here. Use it, teleport away. To Pala Amna.”

She looks me up and down, at my mangled body “But—”

“I’ll be right behind you! Hurry!”

It’s just a second. Just a blink. But I know. How could I not know? She was my witch; we have history. She hurt me, I hurt her. But she led me here in the end, didn’t she? Her sheer determination to make the world better, no matter how misguided, led me here, to the Tree of Souls. It led me to make things right, once and for all. Varia held my hand, didn’t she? The whole way. She was the one who helped me stop the song.

“I know you wanted to do it alone.” I wheeze a laugh. “Change the world. But Fione’s waiting. So. I’ll take over from here.”

It’s just a second, but her onyx eyes soften. “You—”

“Go.”

Varia is her brother, but she’s not at the same time. She doesn’t linger, ever. No waiting for that one. Things to do, people to see, lives to change.

But she lingers now, face broken and soft as she says, “Don’t you dare die.”

All the animosity between us, all the history. It pivots on those words, and I smile. She’s there, and then in a faint popping noise, she’s gone.

And I’m alone.

“Never alone.” I can hear Evlorasin’s faint voice outside, struggling. Injured. “Never-goodbye.”

Through the massive holes in the cave’s ceiling, I see the Tree start to glow. Hundreds of feet up, and through the darkness, the Tree of Souls grows hard, full of color, real. A pure white streaked with rainbow like oil, like blood, branches regal and extending for what seems like forever. Roots below, extending forever. Connecting us all.

And it all starts to glow.

It’s a hum. A hum that reverberates in my insides, in my unheart, replacing the hunger, blowing it out and away like a sweet wind. No more guilt. No more anger. No more pain. The golden flowers become real, whole, shining like little suns in the darkness, their faces bobbing even more happily in an even more joyous wind.

Wind I can feel now.

The glow becomes so intense that it turns to light, white light shafting through the holes in the cave’s roof. One beam shines down directly on me, and it feels warm. I can see a six-eyed face in it, a celeon maw and a wise smile, a paw reaching for me. To help me.

Never alone.

The light consumes my eyes—pure white. No matter which way I glance, all white, and the heat of a thousand suns bearing down on me, full to bursting, full to burning me alive. Or burning me undead, as it were.

I laugh at my own joke, here at the end of everything, and hold the First Root together tighter. Nothing can escape the light—the sound of my laugh scorched away instantly.

together, my hunger—the Glass Tree—sobs.

TOGETHER, the Bone Tree shrieks.

I look up. “Together.”

Never alone.

A wolf to end the world, Evlorasin said. And it was right. I’m here, at the end of the world.

And the beginning of a new one.