85
AN ENDING
“Akiva?”
Karou didn’t understand what she was seeing. The fulfillment of her wish had been simplicity itself. No sooner had the gavriel vanished than she knew where he was: nearby but hidden, deep in a quarter of the Kirin caves that their party had yet to explore. So she’d guided them here, through many turnings, coming finally around this corner to find… Akiva on his knees.
There were five others, black-haired strangers, and she heard what he said to them but it didn’t make sense, and she didn’t run to him. She didn’t run. Her feet never touched stone, but she was there inside a second, drawing him up beside her and looking at him, into him. Pouring herself into him, and knowing. At once.
Here was an ending.
He seemed to her a guttered fire, and all things lost and hollow. “I’m sorry,” he said, and she couldn’t fathom what had happened, in a matter of hours, to do this to him. Where was the waiting gaze, vivid and alive, and the laughter, the tease, the dance, the hunger? What had they done to him? She spun toward the strangers, and that’s when she saw their eyes.
Oh.
“What is this?” she asked, and was immediately afraid to hear the answer. She waited for it, though, and it was slow in coming, or else she was misperceiving time again, and then Akiva took her into his arms and pressed his lips to the top of her head, long and lingering. As kisses go, it might have been fine, had it fallen on her lips. As answers go, it was very bad. It was good-bye, through and through. She felt it in the rigidity of his arms, the tremor of his jaw, the defeat in his shoulders. She pulled away, out from under the press of his good-bye lips. “What are you doing?” she asked him. Belatedly she processed what she’d heard him say first of all. “Where are you going?”
“With them,” he said. “I have to.”
She took a step back, glancing once more to this “them.” Akiva’s people, Stelians. She knew that he had never met any before, and couldn’t guess what it meant, that they were here now. The older woman stood nearest, and she was very beautiful, but it was the younger woman Karou couldn’t look away from. Maybe it was the artist in her. Sometimes, rarely, you see someone who doesn’t look like anyone else, not even a little, and who could never, ever be mistaken or forgotten. That’s what she was like, this seraph. It wasn’t even beauty—not that she wasn’t beautiful, in her sharp, dark way. She was unique, extreme. Extreme angles, extreme intensity, and her regal stance spoke volumes. Here was someone, Karou thought, envious, who had known exactly who she was from the day she was born.
And she was going to take Akiva away with her.
Because whatever this was, not for a second did Karou wonder or fear that Akiva was leaving her by choice. She felt the presence of her own friends and comrades closing the space behind her. All of them were here: Issa, Liraz, Ziri, Zuzana, Mik, even Eliza. Plus two score Misbegotten and more than two score chimaera, all prepared to fight for Akiva when they found him.
Only to find him not fighting for himself.
“I have to,” he had said.
It was Liraz who responded. “No,” she said, in the way she had of laying down a truth and standing over it like a lioness guarding a kill. “You don’t.” And she drew her sword and faced the Stelians.
“Lir, no.” Akiva raised his hands, urgent. “Please. Put that away. You can’t beat them.”
She looked at him like she didn’t know him.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “In the battle. It was them.” He looked to the Stelians, focusing on the older woman. “Wasn’t it? You fought our enemy for us.”
She shook her head. “No. We didn’t,” she said, and Akiva blinked in confusion. But then she added, with a gesture to the fierce young woman at her side, “Scarab did.”
And no one spoke. They remembered the way their enemies had fallen limp in battle and plummeted from the sky. One woman. One woman had done that.
Liraz let her sword slip back into its sheath.
“Please tell me what’s going on,” Karou whispered, and when Akiva turned again to the older woman, she thought for the briefest moment that he was ignoring her plea. In fact, he was making a plea of his own.
“Would you?” he asked. “Please?” And Karou had no idea what he meant by it, but was aware that something passed between the two women then: a wordless argument. Afterward she would understand that they’d debated telling them—sending them—the answer to her question, and that Nightingale had won. Because afterward Karou would understand all of it.
Into her mind—all their minds—came an experience of sense and feeling so complete it was like living it, and it was nothing Karou wished to live. She knew why Akiva had asked his grandmother—his grandmother—to answer them in this way, because no told truth could match this. It enveloped her and entered her: a history of tragedy and unspeakable horror, relentless and complex and yet somehow delivered with the utmost ease. It was simply given to her mind, compressed and precise, like a universe contained within a pearl. Or like memories pressed into a wishbone, Karou thought. But this history was so much deeper and more terrible than her own. It was dreamlike.
Nightmarish.
And she understood what had happened to Akiva since she saw him last, because now she was a guttered fire, too, and all things lost and hollow.
How do you take in something so massive and so hideous? Karou found out. You stand there gasping, and wonder how you ever found it in yourself to imagine a happy ending.
For a long moment, no one spoke. Their horror was palpable, their breathing louder than it should have been. There had been, briefly, in Nightingale’s sending, a sensation of great weight and savage, quaking hunger, and now that they knew it, none of them would ever unknow it: the press of the nithilam against the skin of their world.
Karou stood but a pace away from Akiva, but it felt like a gulf, already. His own part in the story had been made clear in the sending, and there could be no question: He had to go. The reshaping of an empire had once seemed so huge to them, and now it was only a side note to the question of Eretz’s very survival. Karou reeled. Akiva looked into her eyes, and she saw what he wanted to ask but wouldn’t, because her own destiny was not some afterthought to pin to his. She couldn’t go with him. Without her, there could be no rebirth for the chimaera people.
It was he who was meant to stay with her—“a prior commitment,” as he had told Ormerod—but now he couldn’t, and their story was, after all, not to be the story of all Eretz: seraphim and chimaera together, and a “different way of living.” It was only one flutter out of millions within a world besieged, and once more, they were torn apart.
It was Liraz who broke the silence at last. “What about the godstars?” she asked, like a plea. “In the story, they battle the beasts and win.”
“There are no godstars,” said Scarab, and with her words came a brief, bleak sending: just a sundered sky and the understanding that there was nothing out there in all the vastness to watch over them, and no help coming. For the many gods they had named and worshiped in three worlds and more, when had help ever come? Scarab said, in a voice to match her words for bleakness, “And there never were.”
It was the worst, the lowest moment of all, and Karou would always remember it as the blackest of shadows—the kind of black that shadows can only achieve when they lie alongside the brightest light.
Because another sending came to them then. It cut through the other, brilliant and blinding. It was light, reeling and abundant. A sensation of light. An army of light. There were figures limned in it, golden and many, and Karou knew who and what they were. They all knew, though the silhouettes didn’t match the myth. This was dream logic, and heart-deep knowing. These were the bright warriors.
The godstars.
Karou saw Scarab’s head snap up, and Nightingale’s, too, and she read their shock and knew that this sending was not theirs, nor the other Stelians’, either, who looked as staggered as they did.
So where did it come from?
“Yet.”
One word, from behind Karou, from within her own party, and the voice was familiar but too wholly unexpected for her to place it in that first instant. She had to turn and see with her eyes, and blink, and see again, before she could believe it.
“People with destinies shouldn’t make plans,” Eliza would say later, laughing, but right now what she said was, “There never were godstars yet.”
Because it was her. Eliza. She came forward, and she was beatific, practically glowing. She had been all but forgotten amid the mingled creatures of this world, and no surprise, because none knew what she was, not really. She had told Mik and Zuzana that she was a butterfly, but they had no context for what this meant—the ramifications of it—and anyway, she was more than that. She was an echo, and more than that, too. She was an answer. Mystery sang from her skin; she was suffused with it like a black pearl. There were no ebon seraphim in this the Second Age; those of Chavisaery had perished with Meliz, and so the Stelians gazed at her, amazed.
She was fixed on Scarab, and Scarab on her. “Who are you?” asked the queen, her severity already softening into wonder.
Eyes bright with invitation, Eliza gave a nod, calling to Scarab to know her—to touch the thread of her life—and Scarab did, with a single fingertip of her anima, a featherlight caress that ran the length of it. Eliza shivered. The sensation was new, and gave her goose bumps, and she was able to think that it was funny, that her body should respond in so ordinary a way as goose bumps to the touch of a golden seraph queen at the thread of her very life.
Whatever Scarab read there, they all saw fire dance in her eyes, and she grew beatific, too.
None of them understood it then, except for Eliza and Scarab. Not even Nightingale. But all present in the Kirin caves that night—seraph, chimaera, and human—would ever afterward say that they felt, in that instant, a dark age quietly give way, and a bright one bloom into being. It was an ending overlapped by a beginning, and it was thrilling and confounding, primal and terrifying, electric and delicious.
It felt like falling in love.
Scarab took a step forward. All her life she had been haunted by ananke, the relentless tug of fate. It had been oppressive, and it had been elusive. It had caused her uncertainty and dread. But never had she experienced the perfect, puzzle-piece fulfillment of it that she did now. Completion. More than that. Consummation.
Ananke went quiet. Her release from it was like the silence when a baby’s cries have become unendurable and then abruptly cease.
She stood before this woman—this seraph come from nowhere, of the lost line of Chavisaery whom all Meliz had revered as prophets—and all of Scarab’s uncertainty and dread… evanesced.
“How?” she asked. How was it possible? Where had Eliza come from? Where had her sending come from, and what did it mean?
How? Eliza’s gaze flickered to Karou and Akiva, and to Zuzana and Mik, and to Virko, who, she understood, had carried her on his back, away from the kasbah, away from government agents and who knows what else. The five of them had rescued her from infamy and madness, and from a life with no future. Because of them, she was here where she was supposed to be, and oh, she had a future now. They all did, and what a future it was. She took in the rest of the company too, and felt the same fulfillment that Scarab did. This was right. This was meant, and it was at once impossible and inevitable, like all miracles.
“I think it’s time,” was her answer. Spoken with wonder, her words weighed of fate, and even if the company didn’t understand, they were unnerved by the gravity of the moment, and held their tongues.
Well. Except for Zuzana. She and Mik clung together, drinking everything in with their eyes and ears, and making sense of it, too—the words, at least—because Zuzana had snuck wishes into her pocket earlier, wish police be damned, and they had no sooner come into the presence of the strangers than she vanished two lucknows, one for herself and one for Mik, gifting them both the language of the angels.
It proved little help in interpreting the moment, though, and so Zuzana ventured to ask, “Um, time for what?”
A ripple of mirth moved through them all—and relief, that someone had given voice to the question they all wanted answered. Indeed. Time for what?
“Time for liberation,” said Eliza. “For salvation. Time for the godstars.”
“They’re a myth,” spoke Scarab, uncertain and ready to be persuaded. Like the rest of them, she held the vision from Eliza’s sending in her mind, and didn’t know what to make of it. She only knew that she wanted to believe it.
“They are,” agreed Eliza, smiling. Everyone watched her. Everyone listened. How strange, that she should become the nucleus of this moment—this tremendous moment in the story of all their worlds.
“My people understood that time is an ocean, not a river,” she said to them all. “It doesn’t flow away and pour itself out, done and gone. It simply is—eternal and entire. Mortals might move through it in one direction, but that’s no reflection of its true nature—only of our limitations. Past and future are our own constructs.
“And as for myths, some are made up, nothing but fantasy. But some myths are true. Some have already been lived. And in the drift of time, eternal and entire, some haven’t.” She paused, gathering up the words that would make them understand.
“Some myths are prophecy.”
A race of bright warriors heard of the nithilam and traveled from their far world to do battle with them.
These were the godstars, who brought light to the universe.
Sometime in the midst of this, Karou and Akiva had bridged the space between them. They clung together now, their amazement making the cave reel around them. Their good-bye was not forgotten or evaded. Their fear was gone, but not their sorrow. Whatever happened here tonight, a parting was still before them. Loramendi waited, all those souls quiet under ash. Karou was still the chimaera’s last hope, and Akiva was what he was, unquantifiable and dangerous. But they had seen something in that golden sending, and the new future it laid open was as magnificent as it was appalling.
It was also, somehow, instantly… certain. It was as though Eliza’s sending had spliced itself into all of their life threads and become a part of them.
There was no stepping back from this.
Ziri had caught Liraz’s hand when the first dark sending gripped them, and he held it still. It was the first time either of them had ever held another’s hand, and for them alone, the immensity of what unfolded that night was overshadowed by the perfect wonderment of fingers intertwined—as though this was what hands had always been for, and not for holding weapons at all.
Their wonder was also undercut by sorrow, as the understanding grew in them that they were not yet done holding weapons.
Not even close.
Eliza was a prophet, and she was a Faerer, too, and the first was great, because she gifted them this sending and all that it portended, but the second was greater, because she was the fulfillment of her own prophecy. Maps and memories were in her. Elazael of Chavisaery had, so long ago, journeyed beyond the veils and mapped the universes there, and because of what power-drunk magi had made of the twelve, those maps were all Eliza’s now, and so were her foremother’s memories of the beasts themselves. No one alive had beheld the nithilam or traveled the lands they had laid waste, but Eliza contained it all.
If Scarab was going to fight the Cataclysm, she would need a guide. And she was, and now she had one.
And more than a guide. Anyone could see it. Scarab and Eliza were settled fate and halves made whole from the moment they set eyes on each other. Even Carnassial, silent throughout, relinquished his hopes as quietly as he had ever held them.
And as for the rest of them, they’d all seen the silhouettes in the sending, and they all believed it in the way of dreams, without consideration or doubt. “Some myths are true,” Eliza had said. “Some have already been lived. And in the drift of time, eternal and entire, some haven’t.”
And the rest of them knew two things at once: who the bright warriors were, and what they were.
The “what” was simple, though no less profound for it. They were the godstars, who in the swim of time had not yet come to pass.
And as for the “who”?
The silhouettes were light-drenched, magnificent, and… familiar. They saw themselves, each one of them, from Rath the Dashnag boy who was no longer a boy, to Mik, the violinist from the next world over, and Zuzana the puppet-maker. To Akiva and Liraz, who would never lose their longing for Hazael to be among them. To Ziri of the Kirin, lucky after all, and even to Issa, who had never been a warrior before. And to Karou.
Karou who had, a lifetime past, begun this story on a battlefield, when she knelt beside a dying angel and smiled. You could trace a line from the beach at Bullfinch, through everything that had happened since—lives ended and begun, wars won and lost, love and wishbones and rage and regret and deception and despair and always, somehow, hope—and end up right here, in this cave in the Adelphas Mountains, in this company.
Fate took a bow, so neat it all was, but still it stole their breath away to hear Scarab, queen of the Stelians and keeper of the Cataclysm, say, with a fervor that sent tremors up every last spine, including her own: “There will be godstars. And they will be us.”