But Raeth didn’t listen.
I was getting closer, dodging slabs of broken rock, dodging clusters of the strangest fire I’d ever felt—not hot, but cold, devouring trees, devouring buildings. My head pounded, my magic wailing with overexertion at having to constantly reorient myself, over and over.
But I didn’t miss a single step.
Raeth was at the shore. At the docks. Many, many presences surrounded her—so many I struggled to separate them from each other. Human. Vampire. I couldn’t count them. Too many. More coming. Pouring onto the shore in a wave of sea froth and magic and explosives and bloodthirsty rage that I could feel throbbing in my veins.
{Sylina!}
Asha’s voice was sharp as she called to me. Even a little afraid.
I’d never felt my commander’s fear before.
I’d never disobeyed her before, either.
Because in that moment, Raeth screamed. Another explosion of dark magic roared through the air, so powerful that when it faded, I was on my knees, splinters of the pier digging into my flesh.
And Raeth was simply gone.
It is difficult to describe what it feels like to sense the death of a Sister. I could not see her. I could not hear her voice. But when you’re near another of the Arachessen, you can simply feel them the way that one feels the body warmth of another, all their threads connected to yours.
All that, all at once, severed.
The dead did not have threads.
Raeth’s color was purple. Sometimes it was a little warmer when she was happy or excited, a glowy pink hue of delight. Sometimes it was colder when she was moody, like storm clouds at sunset.
Now it was nothing, a hole in all of us where Raeth should have been. It was strange how viscerally it reminded me of another distant memory, a memory I was no longer supposed to have, of how it felt to witness life snatched away in the unforgiving jaws of war.
Asha felt it, too. Of course she did. We would feel it everywhere.
{Let her go,} Asha said again. {Come back. We need to leave now. We’ll complete our task another time.}
Task? Who cared about that limp-dicked little nobleman now?
I had bigger game.
Because there he was.
Even in the sea of vampires and magic, he stood out. His presence was bigger than all of theirs, a gravitational force. All the rest of it—the countless souls, the grey of the sea foam, the cold of the night—framed him like a throne, as if the universe simply oriented itself around him as he rose from the surf.
Even then, through the chaos, with the lack of information I had, I knew I was witnessing something deadly and incredible and horrible. I knew, from that first moment, that he was the leader.
I’d burn his presence into my soul after that. Every angle of him. Every scent that war carried across the sea breeze. Even from this distance, I could sense his appearance through the threads—that he wore fine clothes, and even finer armor over them. His hair was long and reflected the moonlight, soaked in salty tendrils around his shoulders.
And of course, there were the horns. Black as night, protruding from his upper forehead and curling back. They were like nothing I’d ever witnessed before. The product, surely, of some dark, unknown magic.
He was cursed. He was tainted. I could feel that even from here. And as he stepped right over Raeth’s body, I didn’t even think as I reached to my back and withdrew my bow.
I was a fantastic shot. Human eyes are fallible. But the threads are never fooled.
I had a perfect opening. A single thread stretching from me to him, straight to his heart.
{Get back here, Sylina!} Asha commanded.
{I have the shot.}
{You’re too far.}
I was not too far.
I drew.
{We can’t sacrifice another Sister here!} Asha roared—so strong her words made me lurch, my head splitting.
He stepped onto the shore. The thread between us stretched tight. I felt his head turn. Felt his gaze fall to me. Felt his toxic magic shiver down the connection.
{Sylina, the Sightmother commands that you come back.}
I could make it.
I could make it.
My hands shook. Every shred of my focus went toward cutting through all these sensations, falling only on him. Nothing else existed.
But the Sightmother’s stare was on me, too. A Sister did not disobey the Sightmother.
I lowered my bow and backed away, fleeing into the chaotic night. By the time I reached Asha, I had so overexerted my magic and my senses that I was stumbling over rocks in the road. I knew I had a punishment waiting for me at the Keep, but I didn’t care.
It was punishment enough. That moment.
The moment I let him go.
I’d think about that moment for a long, long time.
2
When they take your eyes, they take them slow—an offering given in pieces every day, rather than all at once.
The Sightmother told me then that it meant more to Acaeja that way. A single act can be made in impulse. It can be rash. It can be regretted. But it can never be rash to decide every day for one year to give your goddess your eyes, and mean it each one.
It was a fair trade. The Arachessen, after all, saved me.
I was ten years old. Older than most. I was acutely aware of that then and would remain aware of it forever after—those ten years of life that separated me from my Sisters. Most of them barely recalled the process of their initiation, nor did they remember the life they had before coming here. The Arachessen and the Salt Keep were all they knew. Sometimes I pitied them, because they would love this place even more if they understood what it had been like to live beyond it.
I did. I remembered it all.
I was old enough to remember the way each drop of Marathine extract burned going into my eyes. I was old enough to remember the visions that came after, visions that would leave me jerking awake at night with tears crusted to my face. And above all, I was old enough to remember that even that pain was an embrace compared to the outside world.
People thought that we were so isolated, that we did not hear the things they said about us. Foolish. We heard everything. I knew that people talked about us like we’re insane—as if we’d made some unimaginable sacrifice. It was not a sacrifice. It was an exchange: Close your eyes, child, and you will see an entire world.
Contrary to what people thought, we were not blind. The threads of life that ran through our world, and our mastery over them, told us everything we needed to know. Everything and more.