The word rises from the earth itself. Carried on a wind that shouldn’t exist. Spoken by a voice that is not one voice but thousands. Tens of thousands. Every soldier I’ve burned without rites. Every civilian I’ve scattered without names. Every forgotten dead whose ashes I spread across the pits without letting them say goodbye.
We are coming.
In my arms, Aradya stirs. Her eyes flutter open—dark again, no trace of the terrible luminescence from before—and for a moment she doesn’t seem to know where she is. Then her gaze focuses on my face.
Recognition floods back.
Her lips part. Form a single word, barely voiced: “What?—”
Then the first pyre erupts.
In the distance, toward the Ash Pits, a column of green fire shoots into the sky. Then another. Then another. The pyres I’ve tended for two decades—the flames that were supposed to keep the dead silent—are burning in colors that have nothing to do with the living world.
The smoke forms shapes.
Faces. Mouths opening and closing in silent screams. Hands reaching toward the city. Eyes that fix on me from across the distance, seeing through the haze with impossible clarity.
And beneath our feet, in the depths where the true mass graves lie, a vast and hungry presence completes its climb toward the surface.
TEN
ARADYA
The burned-out building smells of endings.
I slump against the wall, my legs finally surrendering now that there’s nothing left to run from. The plaster at my back is stained permanently black, decades of pyre-smoke baked into its surface until the original color has become a memory. Ash coats everything here—the floor, the charred beams overhead, the shattered remains of what might have once been furniture. A fine gray layer settles over my hair, my clothes, my skin. Every breath tastes of cremation.
We’re at the edge of the Ash Pits. Through gaps in the ruined walls, I can see the iron pyres standing in silent rows, their metal frameworks blackened by decades of fire. The smell drifts in on the night air—bone char, chemical ward-herbs, the indescribable stink of death made fuel.
And I am so, so tired.
My magic is depleted—gutted to a thin flicker I can barely feel. I reach for the familiar whisper of power that has lived inside me since childhood and find it there, but faint, a candle where a bonfire used to burn. The effort I spent in the Undercroft carved pieces out of me. Simple words feel like labornow, each syllable dragged up from the bottom of a nearly empty well.
The dead should be pressing at the edges of my consciousness. They always are. Wherever I go, I feel them—the weight of unfinished grief, the pressure of spirits wanting to be heard. It’s been that way since I was eight years old and first heard my grandmother’s voice speaking through my own throat.
Now there’s nothing.
The silence of a woman who has poured out everything she had and discovered that it still wasn’t enough.
I press my hand against my sternum, searching for a flicker of power. My palm comes away tacky with dried blood. I must look like a creature out of a nightmare—pale skin, dark hair wild with ash, blood marking my face like twisted war paint.
I study him in the dim light.
He carried me out of the Undercroft.
I remember that. The strength of his arms around me. The steady beat of his stride even as the dead pressed in from every side. The heat of his body against my cheek when consciousness blurred and I couldn’t tell if I was awake or dreaming.
He could have left me. Should have left me. A witch drained of power is dead weight, and the dead were calling his name, demanding his blood. Leaving me behind would have given him a distraction, bought him time to escape.
Instead, he carried me.
Why?
“You should burn me.”
The words rasp out of my throat before I’ve decided to speak them. My voice sounds like sandpaper on stone.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t turn. His hand tightens on his blade, knuckles going pale against the green of his skin, but his gaze stays fixed on the pyres.