“It’s not for you. It’s not a favor. It’s the cruelest thing I could do.”

She meant it.

Dying was easy. Living was so much harder—that was the most important lesson Altan had ever taught her.

She glanced down at Kitay.

He was awake, his face set in resolve. He gave her a grim nod.

That was all she had to see. That was permission.

She couldn’t release him. Neither of them knew how. But she knew, as clearly as if he’d said it out loud, that he intended to follow her to the end. Their fates were tied, weighed down by the same culpability.

“Come, now.” She linked her fingers around Nezha’s. Closed both his hands around the cold, cold hilt as lightning arced around them, between them. Brought the blade round to the front. “Properly this time.”

“Rin.” Nezha looked so scared. It was a funny thing, how fear made him look so much younger, how it rounded his eyes and erased the cruel grimace of his sneer so that he looked, just for an instant, like the boy she’d first met at Sinegard. “Rin, don’t—”

“Fix this,” she ordered.

Nezha’s fingers went slack in hers. She tightened her grip; she had enough resolve for the both of them. As the dirigibles descended toward Speer, she brought Nezha’s hand up to her chest and plunged the blade into her heart.

Epilogue

She was so small.

Nezha couldn’t register the choking gurgles in her throat, the glassy panic in her eyes, or the warmth of her blood as it spilled down his hands. He couldn’t, or he would shatter. As Rin bled out over the sand, the only thought running through his mind was that she was so small, so light, so fragile in his arms.

Then the twitching stopped, and she was gone.

Kitay lay still beside him. He knew Kitay was gone, too—that Kitay had died a bloodless death the moment he plunged the blade into Rin’s heart, because Rin and Kitay were bonded in a way that he could never understand, and there was no world where Rin died and Kitay remained alive. Because Kitay—the third party, the in-between, the weight that tipped the scale—had chosen to follow Rin into the afterlife and to leave Nezha behind. Alone.

Alone, and shouldering the immense burden of their legacy.

He couldn’t move. He could hardly breathe. As he stared down at the tiny body in his arms—so limp and lifeless, so utterly unlike the vicious human hurricane he knew as Fang Runin—all he could do was tremble.

You bitch, he thought. You fucking bitch.

He realized dimly that he ought to be glad she was dead. He should have been fucking delighted. And rationally, intellectually, he was. Rin was a monster, a murderer, a destroyer of worlds. Nothing but blood and ashes ever trailed in her wake. The world was a better, safer, and more peaceful place without her in it. He believed that. He had to believe that.

And yet.

And yet, when he looked at that broken body, all he wanted to do was howl.

Why? He wanted to scream at her. He wanted to shake her, throttle her, until she answered. Rin, what the fuck?

But he knew why.

He knew exactly what choice she’d made and what she’d intended. And that made everything—hating her, loving her, surviving her—so much harder.

Fix this.

He tilted his head back. His knees shook from a wave of exhaustion washing over his limbs, and he took a deep, rattling breath as he contemplated the monumental task before him.

Fix this? Fix this? What did he have left to work with? She’d broken everything.

But theirs had always been a broken country. It had never been unified, not truly; it had only ever been held tightly together by steel and blood, a facade of internal unity, while factions always threatened to split from within. Rin had forced those tensions to the surface, and then to their breaking point. She’d forced the Nikara to confront the greatest lie it had ever told about itself—that there had ever been a united Nikara Empire at all.

And yet, she’d laid a foundation for him. She’d burned away all that was rotten and corrupt. He didn’t have to reform the Warlord system because she’d destroyed it for him. He didn’t have to face backlash from the crumpling system of feudal aristocracy, because she’d already wrecked it. She’d wiped clear the maps of the past. She’d hurled the pieces off the board.

She was a goddess. She was a monster. She’d nearly destroyed this country.

And then she’d given it one last, gasping chance to live.

He knew she hadn’t done this for him. No, she’d done him no great mercy. She’d known that his future—the future she’d just assigned him—was full of horrors. They both knew that Nikan’s only path forward was through Hesperia—through a cruel, supercilious, exploitative entity that would certainly try to remold and reshape them, until the only vestiges of Nikara culture that remained lay buried in the past.

But Nikan had survived occupation before. If Nezha played his cards right—if he bent where he needed to, if he lashed back at just the right time—then they might survive occupation again.

He didn’t know how he’d weather what came next, but he had to try.

He owed it to her to try.

Nezha lowered Rin’s body to the ground, stood up, squared his shoulders, and awaited the coming of the fleet.

Dramatis Personae

The Southern Coalition and Its Allies

Fang Runin: a war orphan from Rooster Province, former commander of the Cike, the last living Speerly

Chen Kitay: the son of the former Imperial defense minister, heir to the House of Chen, Rin’s anchor

Sring Venka: an archer from Sinegard, daughter of the former Imperial finance minister

Liu Gurubai: the Monkey Warlord, a brilliant politician

Ma Lien: bandit chief, member of the southern leadership

Liu Dai: member of the southern leadership, Gurubai’s longtime ally

Yang Souji: resistance leader from Rooster Province, commands the Iron Wolves

Quan Cholang: the young, newly appointed Dog Warlord

Chiang Moag: Pirate Queen of Ankhiluun, aka the Stone Bitch and the Lying Widow

The House of Yin

Yin Vaisra: the Dragon Warlord and leader of the Nikara Republic

Yin Saikhara: the Lady of Arlong and the wife of Yin Vaisra

*Yin Jinzha: the oldest son of the Dragon Warlord and the grand marshal of the Republican Army, killed by Su Daji

Yin Muzha: Jinzha’s twin sister, Vaisra’s only daughter

Yin Nezha: the second son of the Dragon Warlord

*Yin Mingzha: the third son of the Dragon Warlord, killed by the Dragon of Arlong as a child

The Trifecta

Su Daji: formerly the Empress of Nikan, aka the Vipress, calls on the Snail Goddess of Creation Nüwa

Jiang Ziya: the Gatekeeper, calls on the beasts of the Emperor’s Menagerie

Yin Riga: the Dragon Emperor, presumed dead since the end of the Second Poppy War

The Hesperians

General Josephus Tarcquet: the leader of the Hesperian troops in Nikan

Sister Petra Ignatius: a representative of the Gray Company (the Hesperian religious order) in Nikan, one of the most brilliant religious scholars of her generation