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“I’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” said her god.
“I would have come sooner,” said Rin. “But I was warned against you. My master . . .”
“Your master was a coward. But not your commander.”
“You know what Altan did,” Rin said in a low whisper. “You have him forever now.”
“The boy could never have done what you are able to do,” said the Phoenix. “The boy was broken in body and spirit. The boy was a coward.”
“But he called you—”
“And I answered. I gave him what he wanted.”
Altan had won. Altan had achieved in death what he couldn’t do in life because Altan, Rin suspected, had been tired of living. He couldn’t wage the protracted war of vengeance that the Phoenix demanded, so he’d sought a martyr’s death and gotten it.
It’s harder to keep living.
“And what do you want from me?” the Phoenix inquired.
“I want an end to the Federation.”
“How do you intend to achieve that?”
She glowered at the god. The Phoenix was playing with her, forcing her to spell out her demand. Forcing her to specify exactly what abomination she wanted to commit.
Rin forced the last parts of what was human out of her soul and gave way to her hatred. Hating was so easy. It filled a hole inside her. It let her feel something again. It felt so good.
“Total victory,” she said. “It’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“What I want?” The Phoenix sounded amused. “The gods do not want anything. The gods merely exist. We cannot help what we are; we are pure essence, pure element. You humans inflict everything on yourselves, and then blame us afterward. Every calamity has been man-made. We do not force you to do anything. We have only ever helped.”
“This is my destiny,” Rin said with conviction. “I’m the last Speerly. I have to do this. It is written.”
“Nothing is written,” said the Phoenix. “You humans always think you’re destined for things, for tragedy or for greatness. Destiny is a myth. Destiny is the only myth. The gods choose nothing. You chose. You chose to take the exam. You chose to come to Sinegard. You chose to pledge Lore, you chose to study the paths of the gods, and you chose to follow your commander’s demands over your master’s warnings. At every critical juncture you were given an option; you were given a way out. Yet you picked precisely the roads that led you here. You are at this temple, kneeling before me, only because you wanted to be. And you know that should you give the command, I will call something terrible. I will wreak a disaster to destroy the island of Mugen completely, as thoroughly as Speer was destroyed. By your choice, many will die.”
“Many more will live,” Rin said, and she was nearly certain that it was true. And even if it wasn’t, she was willing to take that gamble. She knew she would bear full responsibility for the murders she was about to commit, bear the weight of them for as long as she lived.
But it was worth it.
For the sake of her vengeance, it was worth it. This was divine retribution for what the Federation had wreaked on her people. This was her justice.
“They aren’t people,” she whispered. “They’re animals. I want you to make them burn. Every last one.”
“And what will you give me in return?” inquired the Phoenix. “The price to alter the fabric of the world is steep.”
What did a god, especially the Phoenix, want? What did any god ever want?
“I can give you worship,” she promised. “I can give you an unending flow of blood.”
The Phoenix inclined its head. Its want was tangible, as great as her hatred. The Phoenix could not help what it craved; it was an agent of destruction, and it needed an avatar. Rin could give it one.
Don’t, cried the ghost of Mai’rinnen Tearza.
“Do it,” Rin whispered.
“Your will is mine,” said the Phoenix.
For one moment, glorious air rushed into the chamber, sweet air, filling her lungs.
Then she burned. The pain was immediate and intense. There was no time for her to even gasp. It was as if a roaring wall of flame had attacked every part of her at once, forcing her onto her knees and then onto the floor when her knees buckled.
She writhed and contorted at the base of the carving, clawing at the floor, trying to find some grounding against the pain. It was relentless, however, consuming her in waves of greater and greater intensity. She would have screamed, but she couldn’t force air into her seizing throat.
It seemed to last for an eternity. Rin cried and whimpered, silently begging the impassive figure looming over her . . . anything, death even, would be better than this; she just wanted it to stop.
But death wasn’t coming; she wasn’t dying, she wasn’t hurt, even; she could see no change in her body even though it felt as if she were being consumed by fire . . . no, she was whole, but something was burning inside. Something was disappearing.
Then Rin felt herself jerked back by a force infinitely greater than she was; her head flung back, arms stretched out to the sides. She had become a conduit. An open door without a gatekeeper. The power came not from her but from the terrible source on the other side; she was merely the portal that let it into this world. She erupted in a column of flame. The fire filled the temple, gushed out the doors and into the night where many miles away Federation children lay sleeping in their beds.
The whole world was on fire.
She had not just altered the fabric of the universe, had not simply rewritten the script. She had torn it, ripped a great gaping hole in the cloth of reality, and set fire to it with the ravenous rage of an uncontrollable god.
Once, the fabric had contained the stories of millions of lives—the lives of every man, woman, and child on the longbow island—civilians who had gone to bed easy, knowing that what their soldiers did across the narrow sea was a far-off dream, fulfilling the promise of their Emperor of some great destiny that they had been conditioned to believe in since birth.
In an instant, the script had written their stories to the end.
At one point in time those people existed.
And then they didn’t.
Because nothing was written. The Phoenix had told Rin that, and the Phoenix had shown Rin that.
And now the unrealized futures of millions were scorched out of existence, like a sky full of stars suddenly darkened.
She could not abide the terrible guilt of it, so she closed her mind off to the reality. She burned away the part of her that would have felt remorse for those deaths, because if she felt them, if she felt each and every single one of them, it would have torn her apart. The lives were so many that she ceased to acknowledge them for what they were.
Those weren’t lives.
She thought of the pathetic little noise a candle wick made when she licked her fingers and pinched it. She thought of incense sticks fizzling out when they had burned to the end. She thought of the flies that she had crushed under her finger.
Those weren’t lives.
The death of one soldier was a tragedy, because she could imagine the pain he felt at the very end: the hopes he had, the finest details like the way he put on his uniform, whether he had a family, whether he had kids whom he told he would see right after he came back from the war. His life was an entire world constructed around him, and the passing of that was a tragedy.
