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Dark infernos in all their hearts.
And the Storm drinks it all in.
“Is your hate worth so much?” I whisper to the Queen.
In the stillness, her attention falls upon me, sharp as lightning. A howl of a thousand overlapping voices. Fury and other things.
The silent moment ends; a crush of noise, and time breaks upon us.
I whisper, “Let’s end it.”
She yields. I breathe her into my lungs, I swallow her down, I pull her through my tear ducts, bind her to me. Jagged pain follows in her wake as my bones shatter, my skin tears, my veins burst. Her power heals me instantly so I can break all over again—she’s too much—
But I can’t stop, I have to take all of her. If I do this, it all ends. The Storm ends, the pain ends—
For the chance that something else will come, something better—
For the chance of breaking this cycle of vengeance—
For even the smallest glimmer of hope—
Don’t hold back,I tell the Great Queen.I can take it. I can hold all of you.
She speaks with just one voice, Ma’s voice:You will shatter.
I can take it.
This time I don’t scream. Pain swallows me whole.
And beyond the pain—a moment of perfect stillness. I unravel past myself, into land and sky and earth. Through stone and wood, air and dirt, flesh and bone, in all directions, a whisper on a ghostly wind, catching snippets of voices from countless conversations, screams and sobbing and a newborn’s wail; slipping through the slimmest gap between two lovers protecting each other with nothing but their arms; tasting the sundust falling from a little girl’s cupped hands as she runs from the Storm’s edge; and going deeper, tasting of each heart and finding a hundred thousand exhilarations, yearnings, terrors, each a starburst,a firework; and rising higher, into billows of curling stormcloud, each band of lightning separating into thousandfold color; slicing through black into a lost world, sliding through what were once farms and through forests of trees gnarled and strange, flowing through the figures of countless cursed, tasting their hearts and finding one familiar; and then sinking into the ground, into the old city, brushing against the watery barrier to the city of dead and hearing the chatter of ghosts; and further, seconds unspooling into centuries and faces and names losing meaning; the stars darkening one by one—
And a face, immense and terrible and beautiful, that presses through the dark and presses a kiss to my forehead, and all the infinite dark tucks itself within me.
I become it all; it becomes me.
My eyes open in a fractured body. Blood wets my lips. The Great Queen is within me—a dark heartbeat, a simmering presence—and she holds my shattered edges together.
A blinding light. Dalca wrenches back from the King, cupping his burnt hands against his chest.
The Great King turns his radiance upon me, but he cannot touch me, not with the Queen brimming under my skin. The air shimmers with heat as he shoots into the sky, a shard of light streaking toward the first ring.
My legs won’t hold me.
I fall.
Arms wrap around me, lowering me to the ground. My cheek rests against a warm chest; I’m held tight in hands covered in burn-darkened lines.
“Look,” Dalca says, voice gruff.
I do. The clouds are bright and soft, aglimmer with iridescent light.
Behind them is unbroken blue. A sky so impossibly big.
Distant bells clang, joined by others, a song I’ve never heard.
The Queen’s curse upon us all is broken.
His voice trembles. “Can you see it?”
