“It does not have to be this way,” we say. “You are the Meherya. Meant to love.” I gesture to the battlefield below. “This is not your way.”

“All that I do is driven by love,” he says, and his flame eyes meet mine. My heart—or Rehmat’s—lurches. “Love of all that was taken from us. Love of what is left.”

He’s so close that if my scythe was in hand, I could kill him. Ever so slowly, I edge my arm back. But Rehmat holds me fast. My limbs do not cooperate.

We have to kill him, I remind her. You promised you would not take over. You swore it.

Something is not right, she whispers.

“This is not the way forward.” Rehmat speaks now, though I try to stop her. “You do not honor our love by letting vengeance consume you. You do not honor our people. Or our—children—” The last word is choked off, for the blood magic will not allow her to speak of her life with him. “Show remorse,” she urges him. “Repentance. Dedicate your life to the task Mauth gave you. Restore the balance.”

What are you doing? Now I am furious, for this was not the plan. There is no forgiveness for what he has done.

Rehmat does not bend. Stay your anger, Laia, she says. For something is wrong, and I must draw it out of him.

She does not sound weak, or unlike herself. She seems as stern and alert as ever. And yet she will not move. She will not let me reach for the scythe. I grit my teeth and fight her, scrabbling at it. The Nightbringer grabs my wrist.

“You would kill me, my love?” he says. “Your own Meherya?”

Laia, you must escape here. Rehmat’s voice rises in pitch, frantic. I do not know what he has planned, but you must escape quickly.

I try to back away from him, to reach for the scythe. But I cannot. My body is frozen.

Let me go, Rehmat.

It’s not me! Rehmat shouts. Fight him, Laia! Break free!

But the Nightbringer holds me still, and though I strive against him, I cannot even blink. Through Rehmat’s increasingly frantic exhortations, I hear a voice that has gotten me through so much.

“Laia! I’m here—”

Darin.

He bursts from the woods, but my heart drops, for he hurtles toward the Nightbringer too swiftly. He is yards away, then just a few feet. His scim sparkles with salt, and he raises it high, hoping, no doubt, that an attack will give me a few moments to escape the Nightbringer’s grasp.

“Darin!” I shriek. “Stop!”

The Nightbringer does not even turn his head. He simply releases me, reaches back without looking, and breaks Darin’s neck.

The sound.

It has stalked my nightmares for months. This is how my father died. How Lis died. How my mother’s hope died.

Darin slumps to the ground, dark blue eyes open, but defiant no longer. He is—

My brother is—

He will never forge another scim or draw whole worlds with a few strokes of charcoal.

No.

He will never laugh until he snorts, or hunt down rare books I read, or shoot Elias dirty looks, or tell me that I am strong.

No.

I will never hold his children. He will never hold mine. He will never offer advice or eat moon cakes or tell stories of Mother and Father and Lis with me.

Because he is dead.

My brother is dead.

Laia, Rehmat cries out in my mind. Do not kill the Nightbringer. It is what he wants. What he needs. It is the last—

Her voice fades, for all I can hear is that hellish crack. As I look down at Darin’s broken body, I see my mother and my father. I see my sister, Nan, Pop, Izzi. I see the endless Scholar dead, all of us brutalized children of war who have had everything torn from us. Homes. Names. Families. Freedom. Power. Pride. Hope.

Laia, Rehmat whispers. Heed me. Please. Listen.

But I am done listening.

LXII: The Nightbringer

Laia’s face contorts with a horror I know well. She trembles, consumed by her suffering. A sound halfway between a snarl and a keen shreds her throat, and seconds later, she flings Rehmat out of her mind. My queen’s glowing form sprawls onto the ground behind me.

Laia’s hands tighten on the scythe. Rehmat scrambles toward her. Whether her foresight has told her what is to come or she simply knows me best, I do not know. It does not matter.

“Please, Laia,” she pleads with the girl. “It’s what he wants.”

Laia ignores my queen, as do I. Rehmat does not exist. Nor does the battle below. This moment is between me and the girl I loved. The girl who helped to save my people without realizing it. The girl I betrayed and spurned.

For a moment, as she raises the scythe and surges toward me, I am moved by pity. I want to hold her. To tell her that soon, all of our pain will disappear. The world will be consumed by suffering incarnate, and there will be no survivors, not even my own kin.

All will be well, for all will be darkness, I wish to say.

For I did love her, this brave, wild-haired, gold-eyed girl, terrified yet defiant, hesitant yet determined. I loved her for all that she was and all that she would become.

The scythe whistles through the air and slices into my throat. Once. Twice. Three times.

Laia is not careful. The training the Blood Shrike gave her has been forgotten, robbing the grace from this murder. She does not kill me. She kills all of her suffering. All that has been done to her, her family, her people.

But as Keris said, there are some things that do not die.

Pain lances through me, ice penetrating the fire that burns at my core. My legs give way, and I am on my knees, staring up at her, weeping in gratefulness.

Tears streak down her face as she comprehends what she has done. For Laia’s soul is intrinsically good. She drops the scythe, her body shuddering. But she does not understand fully. Not yet.

Though it takes great effort, I shift from flame to flesh, to the human form she knew, red-haired and brown-eyed, bleeding, fading away at the edges. Perhaps this, at the end, will bring her some comfort.

“Laia. Laia, my sweet love.” Though she will not believe I loved her, it is the truest thing I have ever said.

For though Rehmat lived within her, it is Laia of Serra who walked beside me on the last leg of this long journey. Laia of Serra who defied me and ensured the doom of her people and her world when she swore to defeat me.

The Sea will come for me now. It will punch a hole into this world. It will consume me. After months of hunting and killing and hoarding suffering, I realized that the despair of humans would never equal mine. That the only way to release the maelstrom, to bore a hole between this world and Mauth’s, was to pour a thousand years of my own pain into the Sea of Suffering.

“Do not weep, love,” I whisper to her. “This world was a cage. Thank you for setting me free.”

My body goes rigid, and the Sea is within me now, bursting out from Mauth’s dimension and through me into this accursed one. For a moment that feels like an eternity, I stare up at the sky, pale blue, with wisps of cloud ambling across it.

My memory takes me to the River Dusk. Rehmat sits beside me, warm skin pressed to mine, her dark hair piled high on her head. Our children are but babies, and they dance between flame and shadow, tumbling over me, giggling as Rehmat and I point out stories in the clouds.

Such a beautiful day.

And then all that I am, all that I was ruptures and splits. The Sea pours through me, compressing into something minuscule and impossibly heavy. Not darkness but emptiness, the whitest white, the absence of hope and the fullness of suffering—trenchant, tentacled suffering.

On the battleground below and in the Sher Jinnaat, my kind stop and pivot toward me. They feel it, the breach between worlds. They streak up, perhaps hoping to stop it. The Soul Catcher erupts out of the forest, moving beyond the strength of any human, grabbing a stunned Laia, tearing her away from the monstrous thing taking form within me.

My corporeal body disintegrates, but I still exist. The Sea wraps itself around me, consumes me. Every last scrap of my essence is suffering. Not the Meherya anymore, nor the King of No Name, nor the Nightbringer.

But something else entirely.

Part V

   The Mothers

LXIII: The Soul Catcher

I do not know what makes Laia scream so, not until I am nearly to the plateau and see Darin slumped on the ground, his neck broken. Her cry is endless, sorrow upon sorrow, as if it is not just her screaming but a thousand sisters and daughters and mothers who have lost their loved ones to the madness of war.

She whips her scythe across the Nightbringer’s throat, hacking at him again and again. But something is wrong, for though his body jerks, his arms are relaxed. He uses no magic to stop her.

Because he has been waiting for this moment. Because if he wants enough suffering to release the Sea, then he is the only creature alive who can provide lifetimes and lifetimes of it, all at once.