And in the end, this is what we choose because this is who we are.
We believe in giving people a chance to be better.
The floodwaters swell the banks of the Mara as we guide the ash from the mountain into the cleansed soil. All of this happens in the space of a heartbeat, the destruction of generations undone in one shining moment of rebirth.
The power surges between us. In our final act, we quiet the mountain once more, the land where the temple once stood now covered in a river of black rock.
“Ready?” Ronan asks.
“Ready.”
Then we touch the altar, and as we’re pulled back down into our bodies, we wind back in time through the history of Avaris: King Aurelian’s scouring, a farmer working the fields, a great battle in the plains, the burial of the altar in the ground, the temple burning and crumbling, a knight and his princess climbing to the temple, the town on the hillside beingconstructed, the temple rock being cut from the ground, and finally, a woman in a simple laurel crown climbing the hillside, her people trailing behind her.
She plants a flag there, and I know who she is because Ronan knows who she is: Queen Elissa, the first God-Queen of Selara.
We find ourselves in our bodies once more, clothed in robes made from the unfamiliar woven materials of her time, the seams bound by a thick thread. We’re back on the hillside, but the altar isn’t there. It hasn’t been made yet.
Queen Elissa invites us to join her. She speaks to us in a language we can’t quite understand, the words familiar but the pronunciation so different that we miss much of what she says. The only words that are clear are friend and fortune. She’s a fortune-teller, an oracle.
A prophetess.
Ronan nods, and the power hums its approval.
She places her hands over each of our hearts, her eyes rolling back in her head. A scribe steps forward with a slate and chalk. She speaks, her voice low and warm:
Whan ligte is derk and derk is ligte,
Whan that sonneles day claymeth sterreles nigte,
Whan Vahloes child ioineth Vaylaes blod,
The wurlde shal ende in fyr and flod.
Her brown eyes widen when she reads back what the scribe has recorded. “The ende of the wurlde.”
Then time marches forward again around us, the temple going up and coming down, the battles raging, the farms being harvested, until finally, we stand back on the hilltop naked, a river of black rock leading down into the ash-strewn plains.
The skies overhead clear, the red fading into blue as the day dawns.
The altar remains, but the torch and the sickle are gone. We quietly dress, the world-altering power fading between us until at last, it silences.
Our own powers endure, Ronan’s light and my shadow, now forever inseparable. And between us, the golden thread of fate, shining and brilliant.
It is enough. It is more than enough, I realize as I look at him, my partner through all the lifetimes of the world.
It is everything.
Chapter Forty-Nine
The streets of Faros are blanketed in a thin dusting of ash, not from the fighting, which has ceased, but swept in by the winds, bringing some of the ashes of Avaris onto the fields and floodplains of the Mara.
When we return to the palace courtyard on Kira’s back, we find it empty. I reach out with my feelings—Ronan’s power, now completely my own—and find the others in the ballroom, gathered by the windows watching the aftermath of our actions as the swollen banks of the Mara recede.
A tentative peace seems to have formed in our absence. Seth chatters away at Adria, who stands tensely among her guards and commanders. Taran regards her suspiciously as Octavia and Quinn joke loudly near the doors to the balcony, disturbing a group in the corner who are praying, Cyrus among them.
“Sir,” says Taran, spotting us first. He rushes over, checking us for wounds.
“My gods, Ronan, what happened?” asks Quinn. “Are we safe?”
