CHAPTER 41

The Fracturing of the World

As the Resistance crumples—

As the dead walk across the surface of Blackfire Bay—

As Archer and Sefia make their stand on the watchtower—

Somewhere across the ocean, at the western edge of the world, where the place of the fleshless and the place of the living nearly touch, something happens that I did not expect.

The Resurrection Amulet was only ever supposed to summon one soul from the world of the dead.

When Archer put it on, he summoned hundreds.

Hundreds of ghosts rammed into the invisible barrier between the living and the dead, surging back into this wonderful and terrible world, this world rife with contradictions and inconsistencies and magic, and where they came through, the barrier cracks.

It’s a fine break—a bone that doesn’t need setting; a paper cut so clean, at first it doesn’t even bleed.

But it’s a break, and slowly, the souls of everyone who has ever died—every single one—begin to reenter Kelanna.

They leak through the fracture like ink in water.

Like smoke in a white sky.

They spill across the pages of this world—more and more of them, faster and faster. The crack splits, spiderwebbing, as if in glass or a sheet of ice.

Unlike Archer’s phantoms, which have been given life and form by his beating heart, his living body, these ghosts form and re-form like wisps of fog—there and not, here and gone.

It’s a slender figure that finally shatters the barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead. She’s strong and desperate and determined, scrambling through the break until at last the divide splinters into millions of fragments, and the dead pour from the black place beyond the edge of the world.

She pauses while they flood past her. She looks over her shoulder, and her shadowy hair is pulled into a knot at the base of her neck.

Is it Mareah?

And there, behind her, is it Lon? The darkness flowing about him like oversize robes?

They take each other’s hands, as much as they can with their ghostly fingers.

And they leave the place of the fleshless behind.

They come to the deep blue, where the whales sing their sad songs and starving sharks swim for miles in search of prey. They stream by squid, sea turtles, clouds of shrimp, schools of shimmering fish, and enter the vivid turquoise world just below the surface. The white flashing underside of the sky and the sun striking the water.

Like spears they burst into the air. They remember how bright the world is, how the waves sparkle, how the sky is so unforgivingly blue.

And as they dissipate, burning away like mist in the sun, they remember.

This world.

This wonderful and terrible world of water and ships and magic.

And their daughter.

They have returned.