I wish I could touch him. I wish he could feel what I feel.

“Perhaps you and I are doomed.” My voice is raw, aching. “Doomed to always hurt. But what we do with that hurt is our choice. I cannot hate. Not forever. Are you not tired of it, Nirbara? Do you not seek rest?”

He looks at me and shudders, so alone. So I reach out and pull together the shreds that remain of him. The scraps solidify into the shape of a child, a young boy with brown eyes, and when I pull him into my arms, he collapses. Together we weep over all we have done and all that has been done to us. Though I do not speak, I pour what love I have into this, the truest manifestation of a broken creature.

How long since anyone offered him comfort? How different would his life be if the greed of man had not led to his madness, and the hurt of millions?

We kneel, locked in that embrace as the suffering of years swirls around us. Until he pulls away, and he is a child no longer, but a man. He is a shadow I recognize, who pulses with the gravity of thousands of years and thousands of souls. I see all that he has done and I choose not to hate him.

The maelstrom around us slows.

“You didn’t deserve this,” I whisper to him. “None of it. But those you hurt, they didn’t deserve it either. End this madness. Release your pain. Stop fighting Mauth.”

Rage sparks in his eyes at the mention of his father. “Mauth would have us forget,” the Forsaken says. “He would take the pain of the world and lock it away—”

“So that we might be free of it,” I say. “But I will not forget.”

Rehmat. I call to her with all the force of my mind. Her light is a beacon through the swirling silver mist, and in a moment, she is beside me.

But she does not speak to me or even look to me. She has eyes only for her Meherya.

“My beloved,” she murmurs. “Come to me now, for I have waited long years for this, our last union. Come now, and give me your pain. I must bind you, that you may never release this agony upon the world again. You must submit to me.”

“Finally, Rehmat,” the Meherya says, “I understand the meaning of your name.” He turns to me. “Do not forget the story, Laia of Serra,” he says. “Vow it.”

“I swear I will not forget,” I say. “Nor will my children. Nor theirs. As long as one of my line draws breath, Meherya, the Tale will be told.”

The very air shudders with the force of the vow, and a deep crack echoes beneath me, as if the axis of the earth has shifted. I wonder what I have bequeathed to my own blood.

The Meherya lifts his hand to my face, and I feel his sorrow and his love, extant still, despite all that has happened.

Then he turns to Rehmat, who opens her arms, drawing him to her. Her gold body shudders and splits, exploding into hundreds of burning ropes, inexorable as they wrap around him tighter and tighter. He does not resist. He is lost within the binding as it drains him of his pain, his suffering, his power—and releases it back to Mauth.

The maelstrom slows, dissolving first at the edges as it drains back through the rift the Meherya opened. It thins, disappearing faster and faster, swirling blue, then gray, then white, until finally there is nothing left.

I stand upon the promontory, though it is riven down the middle as if struck by a giant hammer. The rift is only a few feet away from me, closing before my eyes.

Rehmat is nowhere to be seen. I find that I regret her loss. I regret not being able to say goodbye and not thanking her. And I regret that she never told me the meaning of her name.

A voice whispers in my ear. “Mercy,” she says. “My name means mercy.”

Then the Queen of the Jinn is gone, dragging her prisoner with her to some unknown plane where I cannot follow. In that moment, the wind ceases. All falls silent. All goes still.

For the Beloved who woke with the dawning of the world is no more. And for a single, anguished moment, the earth itself mourns him.

LXVIII: The Soul Catcher

The plateau splits down the middle as I emerge from the maelstrom. The earth shudders with the force of it, a tremor rippling through the Waiting Place, eliciting great arboreal groans from the woods.

The shaking drops me to my knees, and I slide back toward the tree line. A figure emerges from the cyclone, and, as suddenly as the storm entered this dimension, it drains away, as if through a crack in the air. All is silent. Even the trees do not move.

Then the figure at the edge of the plateau collapses, and the world breathes again. I scramble to my feet, and at the sound, she turns.

“Are—are you real?” She half lifts her hand, and in five steps, I have reached her and pulled her to me, shaking in relief because she is impossibly, miraculously alive. The rock of the plateau groans, and in moments I have windwalked us away from it, down the tree line to the edge of the jinn grove.

“He’s gone,” Laia whispers when we stop. “Rehmat chained him. At the end he was destroyed, Elias.” She looks down at her hands, and her eyes fill, voice cracking. “He killed my brother. Darin is d-dead.”

What can I say to her that will comfort her? She defeated a creature that defies description—more than a king, more than a jinn, more than a foe. And in the process, she lost the only family she had left in this world.

A wind stirs the trees behind us, and the first of the Tala tree blossoms detach and swirl through the air.

“In flowerfall, the orphan will bow to the scythe,” she says. “In flowerfall, the daughter will pay a blood tithe.” Her dark eyes are red and dull. “Skies-forsaken foretellings.”

“The same foretelling said I would die.” I remember the jinn’s prophecy as clearly as if she spoke it yesterday. The son of shadow and heir of death will fight and fail with his final breath.

“But it didn’t say I’d find my way back.” I pull Laia close. “And it didn’t say that you’d win.”

“Have we won?” Laia says as we stare out at the jinn grove. Soldiers on both sides of the escarpment stumble to their feet, still shaken from the maelstrom. Musa has an arm under the Blood Shrike’s shoulders, and together they stagger away from the front line, anguish emanating from both. Spiro and Gibran carry an injured Afya toward the infirmary tents.

Laia and I walk to the edge of the escarpment, and she gasps, for Keris’s army appears to have taken the brunt of the maelstrom’s wrath. A deep gash in the earth and a few pockets of stunned-looking soldiers are all that remain of the Commandant’s one-massive host.

As for Keris herself, her standard flaps in the wind near the edge of the escarpment. Beside it, she lies faceup, blonde hair streaked with mud, her throat bloody, gray eyes fixed on the sky.

Dead.

Laia releases me, her hand on her mouth. I kneel beside the body of my mother, whose heart and mind will now forever be a cipher. Despite her violence, her implacable hatred, I grieve her loss. Her skin is cold and soft beneath my hands as I close her eyes. My eyes.

Stay far from the Nightbringer, Ilyaas. Such a strange and unexpected warning. Why did she caution me, when she spent so many years trying to kill me?

Perhaps she was never trying to kill me. Perhaps she was trying to kill some part of herself. But I will never know. Not truly.

Just a few feet away, Avitas Harper lies dead too. Now I understand the Blood Shrike’s devastation. We had one meaningful conversation, Avitas and I. It was not enough.

Even as my heart aches for my brother and my mother, Mauth’s magic swells, a wave of forgetting that he will unleash to wash away the mess in my mind.

“No,” I whisper, knowing that he can hear me. “My duty is not yet done. I must restore the balance.”

You will speak to the jinn. Mauth has returned to full power, and his voice thunders in my bones. But you must be clear of mind and heart, Soul Catcher. Not distracted by love and regret and hope.

“That is exactly what I must be distracted by,” I tell him. “Love and regret and hope are all I can offer.”

A long silence as he mulls it over. Laia watches me knowingly—the one person on this earth who understands the bone-deep intrusion of having a supernatural voice in your head that is not your own.

Do not fail me, Banu al-Mauth.

Behind me, the air hisses as hundreds of scims leave their scabbards.

“Look at that, bleeding hells—”

“Must be scores of them living in that city—”

Down in the Sher Jinnaat, across the gash in the earth, figures emerge. Most are in human form, though some wear their shadows, and others swirl in full flame.

“Soul Catcher.” The Blood Shrike limps toward me. Behind her, our ranks of Tribesmen, Scholars, and Martials are already forming up again into neat lines. Her gaze is fixed on the jinn watching us from the Sher Jinnaat.

“The catapults. There are two still working.” She raises her voice. “Load the salt—”

But I turn on her, Mauth’s power filling me, and my voice booms out across the jinn grove.

“You will not touch them.”