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“Stupid bitch.” She howled, the blows landing one after another, frequent as raindrops in the wet season. “All you had to do was lie there.”
It went on until Clare’s vision blurred and she saw, through the Song’s eyes, the moment she would have died had its power not snapped out of her and crushed first her mother’s throat and then the man’s. Had it not closed over Clare’s wounds and taken the pain.
Standing whole in the falling down hovel that was her childhood home, staring at the dead who would have killed her, seven-year-old Clare had built the Song’s prison. Had she been in the habit of lying to herself, she would have said she built it because she was horrified by what the Song had done.
But she had built it because she’d reveled in it. In the power and freedom and lack of fear, and she had felt just enough of its penchant for destruction to know that if she let it run free, it would burn the world down.
Not burn it, the Song whispered to her now. Unmake it.
She felt the storm inside her once more, what it had been whispering in her mind since her childhood. A ceaseless, endless song of destruction.
Clare roared her fury at the Song. I did not survive Renault County, survive Simian, simply to be unmade. For it all to mean nothing.
That is…not how I see it. The world I made has become unkind. It is time to wash away that unkindness. That hurt.
If you can wash it all away, why not fix it?
Because I cannot.
Numair scrabbled for purchase, finding it just as the wind knocked him over the cliff, his hands grabbing onto rough rock that sliced into his palms, slicking his hold with blood. He heaved himself back onto the clifftop and grasped another rock, pulling himself forward while the winds buffeted and tore at him.
Twenty feet ahead Clare hovered, her feet six feet off the ground, arms held out by her sides, her face an incongruous mixture of serenity and rage. For a moment both emotions flickered and the winds lessened. He gained his feet, sprinting for her even as the momentary lull eased and the winds renewed, their efforts redoubled for the brief respite they had taken.
His magic cast out, searching for anything living to come to his aid. It found answer in the gnarled shell of a tree atop the cliff, its branches sweeping to catch him behind the back and send him hurtling into the calm of Clare Brighton’s storm.
You mean you will not, Clare accused.
A parent cannot intercede every time their child makes a mistake, else the child has no life of its own. Should the child become a monster outside of control, the parent must accept that they have failed, and destroy the atrocity they have made.
And I am the atrocity in this story? Verol? Quin? Numair?
No. Not everything made has turned rotten. But that which has outweighs that which has not.
So we suffer twice? We live through their horrors and we have our perseverance brought to nothing so we can pay for their deaths with our lives?
Try not to think of it as death. You will return to what you were before. What you all were before.
It hit Clare, then, why part of the world was destroyed every time the Song was born into a person. Part of you.
Yes.
Why? Why now?
I was…lonely when I cut off a piece of myself to make this world. The power its creation, its sustainment, took from me meant that I could not take part in it. So I slept, and I was content to watch in my dreams that which I had made.
Images filled Clare’s mind of a world she understood must be this one, and yet it teemed with more life than she could ever have imagined. A great beast roamed the skies, its scales iridescent silver in the sun, massive wings spread wide. A chimera creature flitted next to it and the two spiraled down toward the ground, nipping and chasing in play.
They landed next to a horse with a horn sprouting from its forehead, standing at the side of a great fall of water several hundred feet high. The city built into the cliffs beside that fall took Clare’s breath away. Hanging gardens cascaded from rocks and cracks in the cliffside, and nestled between them were thatched outcroppings teeming with the cheerful bustle of contented people. They moved between dwellings via rocky outcroppings or long, looped rope ladders.
Birds darted this way and that, and it was all so idyllic that it did not seem to Clare like a real place at all, but simply someone’s idea of a perfect place.
Halzhenna, the Song whispered, the first city of humankind. This is what I hoped for, when I tore myself apart to make this world. And it was beautiful, for a time.
Halzhenna faded, replaced by a place Clare only knew because the Song knew it. Aidenmarra, the city where the slave trade first came to life.
I gave so much of myself to make this world that to walk wakefully in it, I must take something back. When I dreamed of what was happening in Aidenmarra, I took the city back, and I walked this world through Ilara’s eyes. She was the first to bear me in this world and she bore only a fraction of the power I hold in you. We destroyed the slave trade, and when she died, I gave back what I had taken, returning to sleep, confident that I had fixed what had gone wrong. That all would be well again.
But Clare saw that it was not. Before her eyes the eons flashed by, revealing a litany of humanity’s penchant for cruelty. Slavery returned, this time in Densara. The caste system grew in Maharan. War upon war shed rivers of blood and all that she saw covered only the global scale of humanity’s depravity. It did not cover the everyday lies and abuses, rapes and murders, thefts and starvation.
