A hand caught my foot. Dorian.
He had been right below me the whole time.
He pushed me back up—his hand slow, sure—until I was able to step onto the groove.
My breath tore in and out as I clung to the wall’s face. My hands were numb, and my toes, but my heart still beat a racket in my chest.
I climbed with aching arms and legs. I climbed because of who I had been—the girl who’d scaled the wall by night a hundred, two hundred times.
Eventually I reached the top—the place I’d spent my whole life longing to be. Fingers hooked over the ledge, I dragged myself over, arms and hands and thighs shaking, but I didn’t make a noise.
My knees hit stone, one, then the other. I stood and turned just as he came up behind me, rising like a shade in the night. The monster who’d taken me out of my home, and who’d now returned me to it.
There at the top of the world, gazing back at him, I realized maybe Dorian was right.
Maybe this was just who I was.
I stood between the mountainside and the district I had grown up in. The kingdom sprawled before me, the districts laid out under moonlight, buildings and roads all narrowing toward the high-spired castle at the center.
I’d looked over the Kingdom of Storms a thousand times, but never like this. The slanted rooftops with missing shingles. The torchlight glittering on the outer wall and the middle and the inner. The castle’s white flags drifting, slapping in the wind.
I felt its smallness, like a toy town a child might create.
Atop the wall, the guard were posted along the edge for as far as my eyes took me—and none were sitting. I felt an urge to find my spot amongst them. To find Theo.
But he wasn’t there. He would never be there again.
A hand touched my arm. Dorian, with his hood already up. He urged me toward the stairs down.
I lifted my own hood. We passed behind a night guard so younghe must have been a child—and he never so much as raised his bobbing head.
All those years climbing the wall, and I’d never suspected. Never noticed, not once. All along, the fae came and went as they pleased.
We came down the stairs, switchbacking twelve stories to the cobblestones. The descent was so easy, so familiar. I stopped at the bottom—I couldn’t move my feet. I couldn’t breathe.
I was back. I was back in the southern district.
The night lay quiet except for laughter and clinking from a nearby pub. That was how early nights were: the pubs linked the district together in sound. It had always warmed me, to know happiness existed somewhere at any time of night.
Dorian stood by me, waiting, until I turned to him.
“Where to?” he asked.
I almost laughed. For once,I knew the way.
“The Dip.”
I took us through alleys, never along the main streets. This was how I’d navigated as a girl at night, avoiding all the faces that knew me; the alleys were almost more familiar than the throughways.
Before long we arrived at the street I’d grown up on. I turned a corner—and froze.
Dorian came around the corner behind me. He stopped beside me, quiet as ever, with a view of the street. He said nothing. Maybe he suspected anything he said would be useless.
Before us lay the crater. Its dimensions were the same—the depth, the sheer fucking radius. Except instead of buildings in shambles with sections of wall atop them, there was just… nothing.
It had all been cleared away. The buildings. The rubble. The bodies. My home. The door with the sun on its face.
It was real. It had happened.