“Gods, I miss you so much…”
Face crumpling like paper beneath the barrage, curled over on herself, forehead pressed to grain, hair strewn in black drifts all around. She could see him, just as she’d seen him on the night they met, a night like this, a sight etched in lightning and snow-white feathers before her wondering eyes. The things they’d done. The places they’d seen. The bond they’d shared. The hole he’d left behind that all the love in the world couldn’t fill.
No victory without sacrifice.
No parade without a funeral.
No heroes dying in their beds.
She rose slowly, the sobs wracking her body, climbing to her feet and staring at the storm above. She watched lightning split the sky, great banks of black clashing like ironclads across the heavens, the thunderous boom of explosions echoing in her memory, shreddermen and Earthcrushers and vast shadows of death, and the voice of a goddess reverberating in her mind.
“Oh my dear, precious girl. You do not know, do you?”
She wiped her eyes.
“What it will cost you…”
And her heart fell still in her chest.
For there, up in the black, etched in brief brilliances by the lightning’s hands, she saw it. A momentary flash, the flare left behind on your eyelid after you stare too long at the sun. The impression of vast, white wings, feathers as long as her arm, broad as her thigh. Black stripes, rippling muscle, a proud, sleek head tipped with a razor-sharp beak. Eyes like midnight, black and bottomless.
“Izanagi’s breath,” she whispered, squinting into the black.
Lightning flashed again, illuminating the beast before her wondering eyes.
The impossible.
The unthinkable.
She reached into herself, into the place she’d refused to go since that day, that ending, a decade old and caked in dust. The quiet fire of it, impossibly dimmed since the sparks inside her had been born, walking with lives and minds and dreams of their own. But still she found it, waiting, like an old hearth of char-black stone, cold with the press of years. But still stone. Still strong. Unbreakable. Waiting for the tinder to catch again, to flare bright, to bring warmth where all had been darkness a moment before.
She reached up into the clouds and felt him. A flash of aggression. Curiosity. Wild and vibrant and seething hot, so alive and bright she couldn’t help but laugh for the joy of it, fingers pressed to her lips as it spilled out of her, a bubbling flood from the depths of someplace dark and deep.
So beautiful …
He circled lower, down through the deluge, skimming between the rain. His wings crackling with lightning, set afire with each arc across the skies. Down and down and down, Yukiko leaping off the stage and running out into the mud, splashing through the muck to where he finally set himself down, spattered in black, shaking himself like a soggy hound. She stopped a handful of feet away, stretching out one hand, thinking herself crazed, moon-broken, the grief and loss finally getting the best of her and tipping her down into the black.
And then he roared. Thunderous. Deafening. Pressing on her chest, thrumming in her belly. A roar of warning, of a beast when territory is pressed, hackles raised, tearing at the ground with his talons, tail stretched like a whip. Radiating pride, aggression, a beautiful, imperious will.
She stopped short, fell still.
Perfectly.
Utterly.
Still.
KNOW YOU.
His voice rolled like a thunderclap in her mind, in the place once filled with warm and wonderful thoughts—a love that had borne her higher than the clouds. She ached with the song of it, the fire of it, wrapping her arms around her chest and knowing it wasn’t a dream, not a vision, recognizing him at last. At last.
You’re his son, aren’t you?
She pushed warmth into his mind, the sensation of her cheek pressed against his. The memory of a little bundle of feathers and fur sneezing and snarling at her as she reached out to hug him on Susano-ō’s throne, cub-sharp claws scratching on the stone.
You’re his Hope.
She filled him with a smile.
Little Rhaii.
A snarl, shifting the earth beneath him, rumbling and tectonic.
NOT LITTLE. NO MORE.
He spread his wings, lighting flaring bright.
SUKAA IS GONE. SO IS HIS LAW.
She stepped closer, through the falling rain, smoothing the hair from her face. He was as beautiful as any sight she’d seen in her life. As tall and broad as his father had been, amber eyes ablaze with a rage, a questioning, filling her with the sense she’d come home; stepping into the heat of a well-stoked hearth after a decade of wandering in the dark. The storm raged about them, a song as old as the world itself, the rains washing everything away. Flooding earth and filling sky and waking new seeds in fresh ground. All that had gone before. All that would come after.