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She gazed at the figure floating before her, a translucent form that flickered and wavered in the dim light.
It was the spectral visage of a once mighty king.
He was draped in ice-white robes and crowned with an aether-encrusted crown. His features misshapen in despair, a wraithlike holdover of the past.
She closed her eyes, and he was gone when she flung them open again.
Taking a shaky breath, she reminded herself of her promise, the same one tattooed on her heart, soul, mind, and skin of both arms.
‘One oath, two blades, three tragedies, four slays, five fates.’
A sleek ship darted from behind a far-off mountain rise and sliced through the atmosphere, burning hard out of Isato’s orbit.
Inside its bridge, the woman stripped off her armour.
She removed her vital metsai undersuit and laid down her two still-pulsing swords on the surface of the wrap-around panel.
‘How did it go, Sana’a of Shotelai?’ a quiet, steady voice emanated from the racing gunship’s console.
‘Well enough.’
The woman could not hide the weariness and devastation in her voice.
Nor the spasms in her swollen joints, and she took a sharp breath, willing more tik? to siphon through her metsai covering.
It flooded in, and she sighed in relief, almost slumping over the bridge’s smooth surface.
‘Success?’
‘Always. Took much longer than the planned six months, however.’
‘It’s what was needed to earn their trust.’
Sana’a huffed. ‘Can’t wait to be fokkin’ done with this oath-life. Still, the funeral horns for Gudit and Isaya ring all over Isato, and the Drákon army is floundering. Nothing they didn’t all deserve.’
‘How do you feel?’ the intelligence ventured.
The shikari shrugged. ‘That I’ve slain two more of my father’s plotters? Nada.’
‘How do you really feel?’
As if her heart had been plunged into an icy abyss, her very essence shattered into millions of crystal slivers floating in a bleak void.
‘Let it go, Sika, I’m fokkin’ drained and exhausted.’
Aside from the fact that her body still trembled with the weight of guilt, her shoulders slumped from her soul’s invisible burden.
The heaviness threatened to swamp her.
Her hands crept to her chest as if trying to hold onto the last remnants of her lover’s presence.
Isaya had been kind to her, even a good lover at times.
For a fleeting moment, she longed to touch the hand that would never stroke hers again and feel his embrace once more.
The thought slipped between the million jagged pieces of her shattered, grieving ka.
It flowed not with sorrow for her prince but for a notion, once living and breathing, now long gone.
