And then.
And then …
She began walking. Slowly, blinking, unbelieving. Aleksandar called to her, the soldiers cried “Stormdancer!” as her walk became a jog, then a flat run, one hand at her stomach. She heard nothing. Nothing except the pulse of it. Sprinting now, staggering and stumbling over broken ground, snow and ash all around, blinding, choking. But still she ran, fresh tears in her eyes, not daring to hope, not daring to believe what she could feel with her own mind, reaching out across the Kenning to the faint and fluttering spark somewhere beyond. Running faster than she could have dreamed, feet barely touching the earth, skidding to a stop beside a pile of dirt and ash and twisted metal, still steaming from the heat of the Earthcrusher’s demise.
She could see it in his mind’s eye as she reached him, down on her knees, tearing a sheet of buckled iron aside, clearing away the black slurry and dirt covering him.
The oni legion gathered all around him, the iron giant’s hide crawling with every child of the Endsinger yet moving, belly filled, throat gurgling with them, breaking through the elevator doors. His hands, slamming the throttles forward, bending and jamming them in place. Slipping from the pilot’s harness and diving toward the shattered viewports, down through the broken pane and out into the freezing air. His rockets flaring blue-white, shuddering with exertion as he flew away at full burn. The Earthcrusher’s tortured scream flaring red-hot, then incandescent, the spark catching behind him amidst the deafening detonation of the behemoth’s chi reserves. The blast wave hitting him midair, thrusting him farther away, buoyed on a pillow of fire and shock as the Earthcrusher tore itself apart and incinerated the seething horde around it.
Crashing to earth. Too hurt to move. Almost too hurt to breathe.
Almost.
“Kin,” she sobbed.
He blinked up at her, face caked with ash and soot. He tried to speak, but no words would come, cracked lips painted white. And there, in that sea of gray, his head cradled in her arms, he fixed his gaze on hers, watching with those knife-bright eyes. She could feel it within him, even if he couldn’t speak it.
Even in the midst of all this death, there is life.
He lifted his hand, clad in beaten brass, and gentle as falling snow, he wiped away her tears. And he smiled.
There is love.
54
EULOGY
Sumiko prayed.
Head bowed before the shrine of Susano-ō. Begging he would not cover Lady Sun’s face today, that rolling gray would not cast a shadow across the muddy purple of the sky. Today there must be light. Today there must be warmth. Lady Amaterasu must burn bright in the heavens, smiling on the festivities to come.
She heard floorboards creaking, the shrine door sliding open. Faint birdsong in the garden, her children playing amidst the struggling trees. It had been a good winter—the rains had fallen heavy, washing yet more poison from the skies above, falling from the heavens no longer in floods of reeking black, but of fading, injured gray. The air was light today, a hint of freshness and new green amidst the lingering chi stains. She’d noted some people had even stopped wearing kerchiefs and breathers in spring, but Sumiko still insisted her girls not play outside unprotected. The memory of her mother’s passing, the black she’d coughed at her ending would never truly fade. All wounds heal with the passing of long years, but it would be some time yet before the air was clear enough to risk her loves outside.
She’d lost too much already.
Everyone had.
Footsteps across the floorboards, bringing a smile to her lips. Her husband knelt behind her, put his arms around her, kissed her neck. She leaned back into him, felt the muscle and cable at play beneath his skin, ran her thumb over the empty input jack at his wrist.
“Shinji,” she sighed.
“Are you ready, love? It would not do to be late.”
“I’m ready,” she smiled.
“Then come.”
*
A hundred flags and a thousand ribbons and ten thousand smiling faces.
People were gathered in the fields outside Kigen city; an endless sea, rolling and shifting like the gray waters of the bay. Clan banners whipping in the wind—the sigils of the Tiger, Fox and Phoenix alongside the twisting design of the Serpent clan—a viper eating its own tail, forming an endless, unbroken circle. Though small in number, the remnants of the Lotus Guild had built their homes in the ruins of Dragon lands, setting up new factories with the help of Morcheba’s Ordo-Mechanika. After a decade of toil and failure, at last the works were producing marvels for the populace; creations born of ingenuity and alliance with the gaijin technicians, powered not by the deadly bloom that had brought their nation close to ruin, but by the same fuel the Morchebans had almost conquered the country with.