Aunty’s body shifted, changing into Ryk’s, her great, scaled face and crown of fish bones tipped towards the sea’s surface.
Maujaq, half of his white robes now black with Seela’s plague, was still beside her. “Will we rise, Empress?”
Ryk rested her hand, manacled in furs of her own, on the Inua’s head. He would soon turn into one of Seela’s spawn. Ryk perceived deeper trenches stretching wide across her vast ocean, and she longed for her sister Heen to close them up again. But her sister’s soulstone was lost, and Ryk was glad that Heen herself could not hear the earth cry out. Deon’s light in the world had, too, gone dark, and so had Phyr’s. She shut her eyes. Fia would stand by and watch them blink out like stars. The Deer child may not have had a chance, after all.
Ryk was alone. Her fury was great, the core of it a stinging grain of grief.
But there was no use for grief in war.
Maujaq stiffened, then relaxed, and shut his eyes at last.
“We will rise,” Ryk turned to Natti, who emerged to take Maujaq’s place, his white furs clasping her body like a prayer. “You will lead the charge now. As you were meant to.”
Natti dipped her head. “We’re going to fight?”
“Yes,” said Ryk, who was Aunty and who wasn’t. “A fight to the last. A fight with our friend.”
Seela stood at the cliff, waiting, a statue of bone and flame and darkness. He could feel her approaching, could feel the stones she bore. Yet he could no longer feel the burden of her spirit, which had held her back so long and had also brought her to him.
She crested the horizon, moving in a torrent of ash and wind, travelling quickly, learning even quicker than Killian had when the darkness took hold of him, before there was something other than Seela.
She made landfall but didn’t stop. The tendrils of her body and its mass dragged itself like a lightning strike up the cliff, and Seela scuttled backward to allow her space to re-form. To rise.
The children fell in behind him, burning, longing, for their sister.
Saskia burst from the black mass into the grass, tumbling onto her wretched knees. Dark tears streamed down her crackling face. Seela clicked his tongue. “I could beat you for running away,” he snarled, “yet one shouldn’t harm the dog that has returned. And it’s a better punishment, I think, to see that I was right, and to kill that hope that has kept you alive all this time.”
Saskia looked up at him through her tears, and Seela dragged her to her feet, throwing her to the other children. Roan’s form materialized before him, standing tall. There, on her shoulder, he saw it for himself through the mask of bone: the Tradewind Moonstone.
Seela dipped his head in deference. “You’ve returned to us, Daughter.”
Roan’s face, obscured by the helm that was the fox’s skull, was blank; the mouth showed no joy, but she would learn that quickly, too. The Opal at her breast was alive once again, a shining beacon of painful dark light.
Her nine tails were spears. “Father,” she said. And the word made him soar.
“We must go back out to sea, child. Though you have felt it, too.” She nodded. “The Sapphire is at hand. And with us both, it will be easily taken.”
“Easily,” she echoed, drawing up beside him, facing the howling water. “And the Quartz?”
Seela’s smile was as sharp as the rest of him. “It will come to us.”
She took his hand. This must be what pride was. Then the black consumed them in one howling mass, and they split from the cliff, careening headlong for the sea.
“Your despair,” Fia sneered, “makes you weak.”
Phae pressed her hands into the rings, which were now quiet here on the summit of Fia’s great realm. She pressed and whispered and must have said inside herself too many times, No, no, no.
“Your Fox friend made her choice. She let the darkness in, and it was stronger than her. Your trust was for nothing. Now what will you and your allies do? How will they stand?”
Phae sat up stiffly. How could Roan have done it? There was so much Phae hadn’t been able to see — the fire, the black. Just Eli’s and Roan’s voices, the red rings, then nothing. Roan had taken the Moonstone. If there was anything left of Roan. What Phae had seen there couldn’t be the girl she grew up with. The girl she trusted.
There was no wind up here, just a sorrowful wind passing through the jungle below. What would happen to her if she flung herself off? Would the laws of physics also be wrong? How can you die when you’re already in an underworld?
“Your sister is going to fight,” Phae turned, and Fia’s face was the impassive antelope, nostrils flaring. “Ryk.”
Fia nodded, now with the woman’s twisted, gleeful face. “Oh yes. Another great battle on the calamitous sea. Yet another mistake that my sisters keep making — trust the humans with their very soulstones. Let them handle their own wretched destinies and leave us out of it. The Sapphire is as good as gone. And then what?”
Phae felt herself sharpening. “You tell me.”
Fia’s antlers flashed, and so did Phae’s, a high and heavy crown weighing her down, the tines growing too fast, too long, encasing her in a cage of bone and hair. She was pinned to the summit.
“In all of this,” Fia’s male face said with a sigh, “did you not stop to ask why the Families are divided? Because they must be. They are stewards for different causes. There is a balance. The stones represent that balance. That requirement of separation. You all think unity is what will save you. But it won’t. Unity will cave the world in and devour whatever is left.”
Only Phae’s finger was outside of the cage in which Fia had crushed her. Fia had to be wrong. There had to be something good from unity. We are stronger as one. If only she could master herself, her own crushing doubt . . .
“When the stones come together, their unity creates a vibrance. A power unparalleled. But it needs to be directed — pointing it through a prism will make a frequency that can shatter the targes from beyond the Bloodlands. Open the way for the darklings to rise.”
Phae’s neck quivered. She hadn’t yet felt pain, not really, but the image Fia painted was bleak, as if it were carved on the inside of her skull, inevitable. And that truly hurt.
Prism. She held onto the word, the feel of it in her mouth. “But there’s another prism. A prism of light. The . . . Quartz.”
Her finger found purchase in the ground. She felt a sensation, a crackling blue spark that came from Fia themself, a bald curiosity at the challenge.
Her head became lighter, inch by inch, as the flickering tines wound back down, until they were only hair, and Phae was breathless in the dirt.
“The Quartz can open a different door,” Phae said, tilting her eyes up to face Fia, their faces ticking around in turn, as if they didn’t want her to see their expressions, to guess anything else. “And if it can awaken Ancient, then that is the only hope we have.”
Their neck clicked to a stop between faces. Fia’s antlers glowed once, then the leaves in the tines shifted and were still.
“Ancient will not rise.” There was no doubt, just misery, in this admission.
“We need to try,” Phae pressed. “My despair makes me human. What does yours make you?”
Fia brought their hands around their body, pressing tight. As if it wanted to disappear.
“We will not give you the Quartz,” they said, and Phae was alone on the mountain.
The rings flashed beneath her. Her antlers rose. Please, she begged. Let me see. Let the whole realm see what happens next.
A world of waves and water. A bleak iron sky. A cataract of heaven cleaving open as the storm whipped up, and the force tore the air currents out of the stratosphere.
A tsunami. A hurricane. A monsoon. In the heart of the southern Atlantic, where no promise of landfall could be seen, Seela and Roan emerged from the dark heart that their intentions had stirred.
Rising from the waves was the army of Ryk, Empress of the Sea, and in her battle crown she bore the Abyssal Sapphire.
Once more into the breach. But only one side would come out again.
The thing that had been Roan Harken felt something creep across its face, beneath its death mask. A smile.
She and her father were fluid fire. But that fire had been augmented by its sister elements. Her father, Seela, had not only the command of fire but the earth. The Emerald saw to that. And while the sea may be vast and formidable, the earth was beneath the sea, buried in the dark. And it would shift for them.
Seela worked on the tectonic plates. Trenches opened like gashes. The sea raged. Deep in the water, where the Seals banded together, preparing to fight back, the water warriors were not prepared for the earth beneath the waves to break. They fell back behind Ryk and her new Inua. These Seals had gathered from every ocean, throwing themselves into this last salvo. Tribes from the North, from the South Pacific, from the hidden places on coasts with weapons of rock and souls that hadn’t known the cities or industrial world that had brought them all here in the first place. The cities that would flood and burn, soon enough. And the thing that had been Roan Harken grew stronger just thinking about it.
But she had the wind, too. The Moonstone. Her wide wings gaped. There were no feathers, no galaxies of Phyr set in them; they were bone wings, but they ripped air from lungs, currents from skies, stirred up spirits that could not beat back against her. The earth heaved below. The sky fell above. And in between the sea, full of brave and doomed warriors shattering and dying. The cinder kids, alive and dead all the same, poured into the water, ready to fight until they were ash and nothingness. The Seals cried out, full of battle rage. They, too, were ready to die for their cause.
Above the roiling water, Seela and Roan physically intertwined, two strands of the same DNA. The sky cracked wide with black lightning. The sea pulled back like the moon had dropped out of the sky, waves now a curtain. And in the middle of it was Ryk, her huge jaws wide, her massive harpoon twice her size and covered in the black blood of the cinder kid army that had ripped their forces apart. She was lacquered with gore, fevered with the fight. She was flanked by her last fighter, her Inua in polar bear furs. The Sapphire in her crown gleamed with a threat.
Seela and Roan split apart, two darts of smoke and ash and burning, always burning, rocketing towards the Seal Paramount. Roan held back, watched as Seela and Ryk clashed in the raging seas, the water that had split apart now crashing down on them. Roan fell before the last Inua, and there was a twinge of horror, and recognition, on the girl’s face.
“Roan?”
Roan pulled the bone mask back as her body and form changed, spine-wings and spear-tail buoying her up. She tilted her head at the squat girl in the armour of fur — armour that reeked of death from its last inhabitant. Roan smiled.
“Natti.” The word was foreign in her stretching mouth. It had meant something to other-Roan, weak Roan. Friend and ally. Now it meant nothing.
“What have you . . .” Roan watched the girl’s eyes, cutting to the Moonstone she wore proudly. She relished that grimace — a comedic smear of fury. “You killed Eli.”
A twinge. Eli. Another wretched foreign word on her tongue. Roan spat it out. She didn’t want to consider it. Not just what it meant, but what sat underneath it. A question she couldn’t answer. Something she was forgetting.
“None of that matters,” Roan said, letting it come out in the voice this Natti Seal knew, all the better to hurt her with. “Nothing matters but the end.”
Roan’s bone blade, black and furious, was hungry in her hand. Natti raised her fists, and they collided.
“This is where it’s happening.” Commander Zhou winced for his broken arm as he hit a keystroke that enlarged a map. They retreated by air to a compound in Newfoundland, and Barton still felt a twinge from being back in Canada, after everything. I’m home, and since leaving it’s all gone to hell.
Zhou moved the cursor to the Atlantic. “We can’t get a visual. No equipment could break through the atmospheric disturbance. They’re on their own.”
The Council of the Owls and the last of the Conclave of Fire had joined them through a shuddering video feed. They could have been ghosts. The Owls’ Paramount and their stone were lost. The Fire Conclave’s Paramount had turned against Ancient. They were running out of things to say.
“So we do nothing,” Barton said.
Zhou exhaled. “There is something we can do.” Another map came up, populated by red dots. Too many red dots, so many more than the last time they’d checked.
Winnipeg was one of them.
“The breadth of these creature-risings has expanded. Again. It’s at the point now where there’s one almost every three hours, at random. There are Denizens on the ground, of course, trying to fight back. They’re the ones who need us now.”
“— Mundane interference,” Alena said, voice cutting in and out of the feed. “Now that the Moonstone’s influence has been lost, our ability to hide Denizens has been compromised. Governments have mobilized their own militaries. Denizens are rounded up now as the culprits for these attacks.”
Barton stood for the first time in several hours. He hadn’t had the heart to do so, not after seeing Eli back there on Skye, and Roan above him, the last person he’d ever thought to have given up, given in. There didn’t seem to be anything left to stand for. But from across the void he’d felt Phae. She was still hanging on. He could, too.
“Then that makes all Denizens fugitives,” he said, “but we’re the only ones who can beat Seela’s children back. So we’ll do what we have to do.”
The Conclave and the Council exchanged glances. All the Denizens on land could do was defend now, try to plug as many holes as possible while the ship went down, drowning them all in blood. And they would have to defy the human laws they’d tried so hard to live with. The world had already changed. There would be no going back.
“Very well,” said the Jacob Reinhardt. “Word will be sent out. The Fox Family will fight to the end, since it’s come to that.”
Alena nodded, too. “The Owls, too. To the end.”
Zhou straightened. Nodded. The feed went dead, and the ground shook.
He turned to Barton. Nothing left to say. No sense in hoping. One foot in front of the other.
Barton’s arms stiffened, cording with the roots of Heen — the only sign that the gods, however weakened, were still with them.
The sea bloated with the bodies of its defenders. The fight was bloody and terrible. And over far too soon for the thing that had been Roan Harken.
Seela had beaten Ryk and her last contingent to land — a barren one of cliffs and rocks and the touchstone of history. Newfoundland? What use did this creature have for the names of countries given by the animals that had no right to it? Territory claim had shifted. The age for land and sanctuary and home had come to a bitter end.
She dragged Natti onto the rocks, slammed her forward. Broken and bruised but still alive. The thing that had been Roan wanted that. Killing was a simple thing — but this girl was special. There would be those who needed to bear witness.
Roan’s head snapped up to a shuddering bellow, Ryk fighting to the final breath. Natti hadn’t moved, and Roan yanked her back up, held her aloft so Natti could get a clearer view through the screen of blood in her eyes.
Seela stood over Ryk, his body crushing. Then Ryk was still, just an old, spent woman, spirit fled. Natti screamed. Roan’s wings flexed, and in a teleported flicker they were now behind Seela. His great body was bent, and his blood hissed into the ground, onto the stonebearer’s body, as he tried to pry the Sapphire loose. His grip was slippery. He couldn’t hang on. Roan watched him struggle a while longer, his face contorted.
Then he jerked and saw her — his mouth twisted in joy. Relief. Then a twinge of fear.
“Daughter,” he said. “We have done it.”
Roan dropped Natti in a heap at her feet, moving to her father’s side, dropping a heavy black-blazing hand on his shoulders, which heaved from the effort. He had been weakened. Too weak to take the Sapphire, just as he’d been too weak to take the Moonstone the first time.
“Yes,” she said. “At last.”
He tried to reach for the Sapphire but Roan held him back. She had become stronger than him. His smile faltered.
“If you’ll lend me your strength,” he said, trying to sound convincing, “we can summon them. Our family. Together.”
The ground shivered. Seela looked down at the bald rock beneath them, shaking apart for the three red rings, and the black that seeped from Roan and took hold of him, climbing.
“What —”
Roan’s fingers bit into Seela, and she felt him knowing, felt his terror. “You are tired, Father,” she said, the brutality of her voice not attempting to offer comfort. “Your work is complete. It was never meant to be you. Surely you felt it before this.” She smiled again, and this time it felt right. “The child is always meant to surpass the parent.”
Urka split the ground behind Roan, pulling itself up, smashing its axe-hands together to make sparks. Its six eyes gleamed.
Seela peeled away from the human vessel it had inhabited, until Roan looked into the spent and stricken face of Killian for the last time.
“No!” he moaned, free too late of his curse as Roan took it from him. “Roan! Don’t do this! Stop!”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You still have a purpose. You always did.”
Natti managed to raise herself up on one weakened arm. She lifted a hand, tried to call the sea to her, to strike one last time as the monster that had taken her friend and her Family from her had its back turned. But nothing came. Her hand dropped. All she could do was watch as the black reared back, a trap of razor teeth, and Roan devoured what was left of the man that had been Seela, bones, stones, and all.
The air was still. Roan turned fully to face Natti.
The Emerald was now on her right shoulder, the Moonstone on her left. The Opal at her heart, and the Sapphire in her skull.
The blades of her wings flexed. Natti’s head dropped, and the last hope she’d been carrying went as dark as her vision.