A ringing silence filled her ears. Echoing with the thundering boom of the Earthcrusher’s demise, the fading remnants of the Endsinger’s song. But all around her was still. All within her was empty. Nothing at all.
She stood on the snowcapped ground, numb and freezing. Hana knelt amidst the frost, wailing, screaming, fingers into fists and tearing at her hair. But Yukiko couldn’t hear a thing. Couldn’t grasp it, didn’t want to, any or all of it. Swimming insubstantial in the air around her, flakes of ash and black snow filling the space where understanding once lingered.
There had been light as he left her. Sound that wasn’t sound. An inhalation as wide as the sky, bringing all down to nothingness.
Nothingness.
The hole seemed gone. The wound in the world closed, replaced with ruptured earth—just ordinary dirt where once the rift had lay, a gentle rain of ashes tumbling from the sky to press it with frozen lips. Its edges were crusted with metal shrapnel, demon corpses, fallen soldiers, incinerated to charcoal and black sticks amidst melted snow.
The hole seemed gone. But she could still feel it. Inside her.
In the space he’d once filled.
Men drifted through the ashen fog, coalescing from the mist to stare. Morcheban and Shiman, rejoicing, embracing, weapons thrust to the sky, to the storm raging overhead. The Thunder God pounded his drums, echoing the victorious howls. Amaterasu gleamed behind the clouds, the darkness abating, drifting back to the gloom of any normal winter’s day.
She could hear none of it.
Not a thing.
The remnants of the Everstorm pack stood about them, feathers fluttering in kindling winds, black and white caked with gray. So pitifully few. Dragged once again to the edge of extinction. Grief in their minds for their fallen packmates, their fallen Khan, this hollow victory bringing cold comfort in the face of their loss. Shai hung her head low, couldn’t meet Yukiko’s eyes. Sorrow like a flood, drowning all inside her. A loss too vast to comprehend.
Sukaa stood tall, emerald eyes burning in the ashen wind, the strongest and fiercest of the bucks who remained. The one whom the Khan had entrusted to wing his sister to safety.
~ NEVER AGAIN. ~
His thoughts echoed in the Kenning, in the bridge still lingering between them in the weeping girl’s mind.
WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN, THIS. IF BOND WITH MONKEY-CHILDREN CAN BRING OUR RACE TO RUIN, WE WILL BOND NO MORE. WE GO. NEVER RETURN. LEAVE YOU TO YOUR ASHES.
He turned to Kaiah, standing vigil over Hana’s weeping form.
~ COME. THERE IS PLACE FOR YOU IN MY PACK. BLACK AND WHITE TOGETHER. WE ARE GRAY. ~
Kaiah growled, hackles flaring, glancing down at the girl at her feet.
- I STAY WITH HER. ALWAYS. -
The Khan stared hard, finally nodded.
~ SO BE IT, SISTER. ~
He turned to his pack, his gaze imperious.
~ WE GO HOME. ~
Sukaa took to the wing, tiny whirlwinds of ash and snow rising beneath the thrashing of his wings. The other arashitora followed, leaping into the air one by one after their Khan, black and white, until only Kaiah and Shai remained.
The females looked at each other across the ruins, the shared loss of mates between them, pity welling in Kaiah’s eyes. Shai’s gaze shifted to the girl standing still and numb in the cold, arms wrapped about herself, hair whipping in the ash-choked wind.
*GOOD-BYE, YUKIKO. WE WILL NOT MEET AGAIN.*
The beating of mighty wings. The rush of frozen gales. The warmth of Shai’s thoughts, fading slowly. Yukiko closed her eyes.
She could feel them again, the lives around her, the swelling of the Lifesong beyond the wall of herself. Aleksandar the Kapitán, making his way through his men, kneeling in the snow beside his niece and cradling her in his arms. The tattered remnants of the sky-fleet above, Kurea last of all, Captain Blackbird’s ship barely aloft, her struggling engines spewing blue-black smoke. Kaori stood at the bow, Piotr beside her, fingers entwined.
Fingers entwined.
Even in the midst of all this death …
Yukiko put her hands on her belly, felt for the warmth there, her power surging anew now the dark had swallowed itself. Their strength in her, flooding, burning, an affirmation of everything they’d fought and suffered and died for.
… there is life.
All around her, thousands of sparks flaring in the space beyond the wall of herself, the song of life drowning the fading echoes of the Endsinger’s hymn. Yukiko looked out over the ashes to the new plain the hellgate once filled, the ruins of the sundered Tōnan mountains to the west, the heart of Guild power in Shima now reduced to broken rock and good, fresh earth.
The snows would fall. The chill would reign for untold nights ahead. But soon enough, the weather would shift, the sun would rise. Spring would come, and with it, the children inside her, the seeds now sleeping in the ground. This place would be a forest again. Trees would grow here. Birds would sing. Life would bloom. She could feel it in her head, in her heart, reaching out across the ruin, feeling the sparks all around her. The pain of her headache a welcome sensation after the numbness, the warmth of the blood dripping on her lips a relief after the wind’s freezing bite.