I stare down at my knees and the floorboards between them. Dark specks on the gnarled wood. Metallic sick-sweet of blood in the cold air. The Hymn of Relent flows through my ears, washing away thought.

The Hymn. Crackling nearby. Swallowing me deep, freezing me in the static of its innards. If it ends, someone rewinds it. Saliva pools inside my mask. Strips of shadow section the floor- the bars of a cell door. We are in a prison.

Boots trudging on wood. Door opens. Mire of shadows sweep in, shift around. Whispering voices- words not for me. Lock turns, cell door creaks open. Shadow floods over me. Rough fingers take my chin, tilt my face upwards. Above me, a woman in a blue coat. Young, but bags under her dark eyes and grease in her short hair. Examining me. “Lovely things, though,” she murmurs, cigarette smoke thick on her breath. “Aren’t they?”

“Not Brea.” A man, elsewhere in the room. Another cell squeals open. “Not after that one got done with her.”

The woman tilts her head. “Bit of a mad dog, aren’t you, pretty?” She strokes her calloused thumb beneath my chin, then slips it up under my mask.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Another man, outside the cells.

She shushes him. “Only a bit of fun.” Drool oozes out from the chin of my mask as she lifts it, running down her thumb. A thin smile creases her face. “Yeah,” she whispers. “Dirty mutt indeed.”

“You stick your fingers in there and she’ll bite ‘em off,” growls the second man. Feathers rustle and sluggish legs rise to their feet.

“Not like this.” The woman’s thumb grazes my lower lip. “Go on, pretty beastie.” She slides it into my mouth. It tastes of copper and sweat and gunpowder. “Just a little suck.”

I suckle her thumb.

“Would you stop fuckin’ around?” I see the first man pass behind the woman’s shoulder. Vaschael, slumped and silent, follows behind him. “The Major only wants the big one. Now come on before she locks you in here.”

The woman’s smile fades into a grimace. “Alright.” She pulls her thumb out, trailing my saliva with it. I crane my head after her, eager to serve, but she’s already stepping out of my cell. I settle back onto my knees as she pushes the door shut, and the second man re-locks it.

Inert once more in the Hymn’s depths. Spittle half-frozen on my chin. Eventually the prison door opens again, and Vaschael is led back into her cell. The soldiers leave. This time, the Hymn of Relent fades away with them.

Submerged for so long, it takes some time to surface. When I do, I remember the woman’s face. The feeling of her calloused thumb against my tongue. The taste of sucking the dirt from beneath her fingernail. What she called me. Mutt. Beast. I’m thankful for it. It was a much needed reminder of things I’d begun to forget.

“Big Sister?” This is Sholanan, her voice small and nervous. “What happened?”

“Wh...” I can barely hear Vaschael muttering. I look around but can’t see her. Only the three earthen walls around me and the cell door in front of me, outside of which is a wooden table and a lamp, offering meager amber light. “What happened...” She groans- for all her splendor, the Hymn of Relent seems to drag her the deepest. “They took me to Jeio,” she finally says.

“What did she say?” Sholanan’s tone is tense. She remains astray.

“We’re to leave tomorrow at dawn.”

“Oh.” Sholanan sounds relieved. “That’s good. Right? We need to go home.”

I clench my jaw.

The seraph heaves a weighty sigh. “I was hoping to give you all more time to rest first,” she says. “More time to loosen Charith’s grip over you.”

“Oh...” My sisterpet sounds like she’s about to argue, but doesn’t. “Right. That’s right.”

Vaschael manages a weak chuckle. “You don’t sound convinced.”

“I just... Very much want to go home, Big Sister.”

I try to wriggle my hands out of the coarse rope tied around them. Such naivety. Such willful ignorance. To think I’d almost fallen for it. To think I’d begun to accept there was a path other than that set by my Queen. What strange deliverance, that Brea would be the one to steer me back to Her grace. Bitter as it tastes, I’m also thankful to her. She reminded me of our place: rivals. Two dogs snapping at each other’s throats for the honor of best serving their mistress.

Brea must be here as well. She’s silent, but I smell her blood. I hope she remains silent. I hope she stays bound and bleeding, until Vaschael carries her back on high. It will get her out of my way. It can’t be long until dawn, however. It was afternoon when I caught Brea pilfering what was mine, and while the Hymn of Relent flattened my sense of time, I can feel in the stiffness in my muscles and the throbbing pain in my knees that we’ve been in here a while. A taut silence fills the prison now. Vaschael, it seems, has no more words for us. Good. The quiet will help me think.

I must return to my Queen, and my window to do so is closing fast.

***

“...won’t like it...”

“...she say we couldn’t...?”

I’m drifting along the edge of sleep when I hear voices outside the prison door. Our jailer, and the faithful- the gaggle who’d prayed to us shortly after we arrived. My head sags. If there’s any mercy down here, the jailer will send them away. A thin silence settles in, long enough that I think he must have. Then he says, “A few minutes, then.” The door creaks softly open and many light footsteps enter. Hushed prayers begin a moment later, just beyond the bars of my cell.

I screw my eyes shut, as if that will keep the memories out. Soft little wings fluttering through immaculate corridors. The warmth of sunlight and the comforting drone of a choir in harmony. A love so effervescent, so vast and swollen in my chest that it feels like I might rupture. My chest seizes with the beginning of a sob. I swallow it. These memories are not mine anymore. Only a dead woman’s beautiful dreams. I let them flash behind my eyes, then fade back to darkness.

Amidst the hushed choir, I recognize a voice. I squint through the bars. Knelt before my cell is Winter. I can’t think of her as the Proxy- that’s only another fizzling dream of a former life. She’s shrunken and dim, hair falling in loose curtains down her thin shoulders. All of this has revealed some bitter truths I can’t shake, even now. Our guiding star was only ever just another trained dog.

Winter notices me looking. Something like hope blooms behind the glass in her eyes. Something like love. I crack a bitter smile behind my mask. Of course this beaten-down cur still loves me. She has no choice.

Wait.

She has no choice.

I consider this. She isn’t mine yet. At least, that’s not the impression Vaschael gave me. Something about an imprint needing to be broken. Yet Winter is fixated on me, regarding my minutest movement with the same reverence one might follow the sun’s arc across the sky.

I get an idea. Not a plan- it’s too simple, too desperate. There’s no time for a plan. This will have to do. Shuffling closer to the bars, I lean towards Winter. Her lips stop moving. She does the same, her forehead almost touching the steel, her gaze all dull animal trust. It’s a shame; she is so pretty like this. But the idea of owning her was only another delusion, another illusory hope I let myself believe in a time of weakness. Hopefully Vaschael will enjoy her.

Bringing my face as close to hers as I can, I whisper my idea to Winter. She pulls back, the dimmest look of shock in her face. Yet she doesn’t argue. That reverence outshines her doubt. My smile becomes easier. Perhaps she isn’t mine, but she believes she is.

“You’ll do it, Winter.” I whisper, my words for her alone. “Right?”

A moment of hesitation. But then she drifts back to me. She imagines a leash affixed to her silver collar, imagines that I hold it and now use it to drag her in. I am a black hole pulling her towards my depths. Not out of malice or hurt or even hunger, but only out of function. I consume her because that’s what I do.

She nods. “Yes, mistress.” The softest, most loving whisper. “I will.”

I don’t remember being led outside. One moment I was in my cell, dozing in the silence after the flock left. Then the Hymn of Relent reached my ears through the prison door. Then I found myself in the shadowy forest, my sisters and the hounds huddled around me. Brea’s back is turned to me. Sholanan’s face is raised to the amber sky, as if she expects a great shining hand to reach down and scoop us up. All three of us Virtues are stripped to our undersuits. Vaschael, armored again, is running her fingers along the hounds’ collars, perhaps checking them for something. The dogs stare up at her with their stupid, loving eyes. Somewhere in the trees, a bird trills a song to the dawn.

“You’ll come back for Imeshan, right?” Sholanan’s voice breaks the still. “You won’t leave her, Big Sister?”

Vaschael’s shoulders fall. “Someone will be sent for her,” she says. “We won’t abandon her. That’s all I can promise.”

I deflate. It isn’t that I forgot that Imeshan was also still down here. More that I hadn’t the mindfulness left in me to wonder what might have become of her. Faintly, I hope someone does find her.

But that isn’t my concern.

Looking to Winter, I meet her eye. Her face slackens. With fear? With reverence? Simply with focus? In the dim light and long shadows of dawn, I can’t tell. All I know is that when I give the signal, she will obey. Hopefully, it will be enough.

Vaschael turns to me. Panic flutters in my chest a moment- did she catch that look? Does she suspect something? No, her face is soft, adorned with a thin, sad smile. “Soon, little sister,” she tells me. “You’ll fly in Mother’s grace again.”

Brea’s shoulders tense.

Turning from me, Vaschael opens one of the pouches on her belt.

I wasn’t sure what this would look like. What conditions I would need to work in. My idea was sculpted from inferences and hope. When my chance would come, what form it would take, I could only guess at.

I decide this is it.

Meeting Winter’s eye, I nod.

Her face goes blank. She is consumed. Then she turns and sprints into the trees.

I don’t see what happens next, because I turn and run the other way.

The trees, the roots and stones, and slopes hiding beneath the snow, the biting cold. None of it slows me. The only obstacles which might slow me, if I let them, are the voices.

“Lakera!” Vaschael, not so far behind me. Emotion chokes her voice. This hurts her, more than any fist or boot or twisted hymn. “Come back! Please, Lakera!”

“Sister!” Sholanan, on the verge of sobbing. “Please come home! Please!”

I wipe away the tears bristling in my eyes, and change my course to go around the lake bed. The trees will help shelter me from Vaschael if she takes flight. Any moment now I’ll hear her wings thrumming above.

Except I never do. Their cries fall away behind me. Then, there’s only my boots crunching in the snow and my breath in my mask.

Home. Sister. The words follow me where the voices can’t, phantoms at my back. I outpace them. My home is at my Queen’s side, the only proper place for a chained thing like me. I have no sisters. Not anymore.

I flag against a tree, heaving for breath.

I have no sisters.

For a weak moment, an insane moment, I look up at the sky. It’s brighter now, the sun a single island of gold in calm waters, the light warm on my face. I wonder: can I still go back? 

I blink away fresh tears to freeze on my mask. Of course I can’t. Ahead is my Queen’s praise. Her fingers brushing gently through my hair. Her praise dripping like honey into my ears, running warm and cloying into my head. Her cold eyes looking down on me with approval. Behind me is a void. Behind me are the spectres of home, sister, Mother, the ghosts of downy little wings and marble hallways. Whatever I left behind in the Heavens is no longer for me. I am shackled to another course. Swallowing hard, I carry on.

It gets easier. I focus on the trees ahead and the little sounds around me, and the thought of what awaits me. She’ll be pleased. Pleased that I remained devoted. Pleased that I came back. Yes. I will be Her champion. Her eternal favorite. I brush my bangs from my eyes. Now it will only ever be me.

I almost don’t hear the soft hiss of snow shifting behind me.

I run again. That little hiss becomes the lurch of cold metal as something sprints after me. At the corners of my vision I spy them- a shadow darting across the lake bed to my right, another winding through the trees to my left. A net of movement and sound and gnashing metal closing in around me.

The one on the left pounces. Throwing myself under it, I roll a short way before the snow bogs me to a stop, then scramble up and on. My only choice is to try and lose them in the trees. Another of the things closes in behind me. “Sweet angel,” it coos, no exertion in its voice. “Don’t you want to go home?”

I wince.

“You were supposed to go, weren’t you?” So gentle, as if the words aren’t bristling with hooks. “We heard your sisters weeping for you.”

Passing under a scraggly low-hanging branch, I grab it and tear it down.

“Perhaps you’d like new sisters.” Closer. “Perhaps you’d like to come home with us.” Its paws crackle through the snow. “Imeshan seems to like it.”

Tightening my grip on the branch, I plant a foot and swing back. Wood shatters against the nephilim’s armored head, throwing the beast off balance. Following my own momentum I spin out of its way as it careens past. I steady myself just in time to see another leaping at me. Fire blooms in my shoulders where it grabs me, pinning me to the ground- the snow cushions me but doesn’t dull the pain. The creak of its jaws opening pulls me to focus. I force what’s left on the branch lengthwise into its mouth to push it away. As metal teeth snap together I notice this amounts to little more than a twig.

It splinters. Jaws yawning again, the nephilim lunges down at me.

Desperation grips me. Grabbing the top jaw to hold it back I throw my free fist into the base of its head, where I judge its doll skull to be. It’s awkward, graceless, I feel my knuckles split and burn in the cold, see beads of rose gold arc from its armor as I hit it again and again and scream into the cold. Screaming rage, screaming grief, screaming hoarse and tearful.

All around me, the nephilim titter.

It’s not until I pull both my legs under the one on me and kick it square in the weaker armor of its gut that I manage to push it off. This buys me just enough space to roll away and run. My vision swims with white-and-brown blurs as I flee. “Stay with us, bright one,” another purrs. The absence of malice in its voice- the innocence of it- makes it sting all the more. They dance at the edges of my vision, creeping in then pulling back into the shadows. Telling me the next attack will come from the sides.

It comes from the front. One leaps into my path and then rears up to grapple me. No armor. No weapons. I have only my hands to grab its wrists with, only one leg I can spare to lance a knee up into its abdomen. I hit it once before its tail wraps around my ankle, and the world falls out from under me. Again only the snow saves me from cracking my skull against the earth. A small comfort as I find myself dragged through the damp cold. Buried pebbles and twigs rake at my back. I try to grab and kick but iron spines hook into my clothes, all I can do it writhe-

-until it releases, sending me rolling through the slush. I catch myself and struggle to rise, icy cold and searing pain prickling together across my body. I spot the grey hump of a small stone jutting out of the snow. Meanwhile the nephilim are sauntering closer. Taking their time. Rage surfaces through the roiling mire in my chest. I grab the rock and wrest it free from the frozen soil.

I lurch around to face them nephilim. They circle around me, lazily, their folded wings twitching along their backs. A fourth has joined the three already after me. There is no way out but what I break open myself. Just outside my field of vision a twig snaps. Spinning around, I sidestep one as it charges me, wrapping my arm around its neck. It drags me a short way until I bring the rock down on its spine. Sparks and flecks of rust spray from the impact. It wrestles with me but I hit it again, again-

Another’s tail coils around my arm. I plant my feet, pulling against it with all I have.

Another grabs my hair and wrenches me back. The sudden stab of pain and motion throws me off, and the first one thrashes free.

The one on my hair lets go so the other can whip its arm to spin me off balance. I stay upright just long enough for yet another to headbutt me in the gut.

Now they drag me up and pass me between themselves. I can’t breath. Pain and vertigo blur my vision. A tail whipping across my mask, dislodging it. Claws raking the small of my back. Each one has a new bruise or cut waiting for me, gifts eagerly given. I think I hit one back with the rock. Something strikes my wrist in turn and I lose grip on my weapon. My head swims and my body flails, a doll kept animated by pain, until one ends it at last by throwing its shoulder into my chest and hurling me back against a tree.

Shaken and battered, I can only sag down the trunk to heave at its base. Dead leaves and powdery snow rain down onto me. Is that copper I taste in my mouth? I try to open my eyes but see only a swirl of dim color.

A misty shadow approaches me.

I want to defy it. Fight as long as I can, however futile it may be. But that idea keeps me flattened. Futility. This is it, isn’t it? Years of service to the Queen-Minister. Whatever gulf of time serving the Goddess before that. All the sisters I was taken from in that life, and the ones I abandoned in this. None of it means anything now, here among the dead trees and quiet snow in the backwater of a dying world. Such beautiful things could have awaited me if I’d returned to my Queen. Such beautiful things could have awaited me if I’d let Vaschael bring me home. Now, I will have none of it.

Unworthy of Her praise, a failure. A chance to escape, rejected. What is left to fight for?

I feel the nephilim’s tail curl around my throat and the blade at its end tilt my chin up to face it. Its head is a blunt black wedge filling my vision.

“I knew you would do this,” it says. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to help yourself, Lakera.”

That voice seeps through the haze in my skull.

“You have this way,” it continues, “of dooming yourself. Doing the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time, following the exact wrong instinct.”

It’s familiar. Raking its way down my ears into my head. I blink, trying to focus.

“This is an odd thought to have now, I suppose.” Its jaws open, revealing the panel at the back of its throat. “But of all the things you’ve done, sister, I think trying to go back might be the one that angers me most.” The panel lifts. Golden eyes shimmer back at me from the shadows within.

I place its voice.

Imeshan’s lips pop into that vacant doll smile. She’s paler now, but it’s her. My stolen sister. Her face is the same stiff porcelain mask all the nephilim wear, but there’s still light in her eyes. Where they are pretty corpses puppeteered by steel strings, she is very much alive.

And she hates me.

Working her claws under the edge of my mask, she tears it off and throws it away. Then she glares at me, expectant.

“I’m sorry,” I wheeze. It’s all I have for her.

“No, you aren’t.” Her voice is so serene but those eyes betray her. Blazing gold, threatening to explode out and incinerate me. “If you’d returned home, you’d have been content to forget me here. If you’d made it back to Charith, you’d be happy I was gone, because you’d have that much less competition.”

I wilt. She’s right.

“Do you remember home at all?” Imeshan tilts her head. “I don’t. I never got Vaschael’s coddling. I never got those beautiful flashes of a better life, where I was sacred and whole and loved. I only remember that I hated Charith, even as the poison She filled me with made me love Her. This gives you one saving grace, Lakera.” She leans closer. Her breath reeks of burnt oil and spoiled meat. “It was such a relief when you failed to save me. It was the only escape I could imagine.”

I lower my eyes from her glare. She needles her tail tip harder into my chin to force me to meet it.

“We all celebrated your failures, of course.” The vacant calm of her voice shudders as it gains an unsteady edge. “Every shot you missed, every time you weren’t the favorite. Always for the wrong reasons, of course, but all the same, every little victory over you was our private joy. Save for one.” Her lips twitch. “You could have least saved Getye. She at least should have had the chance you did. Even if you still fucked everything else up, she at least should have gotten to escape.”

Getye’s humming surfaces in my mind, that jaunty little tune she comforted herself with as she died in a hole in the earth. I can’t look away. I can’t speak any defense. Every word is a barb anchoring itself deep in my flesh. The slightest movement will vivisect me and spill every fetid thing within out for Imeshan to pick through.

“I can’t forgive you, Lakera. If we returned home and lived a thousand years in peace, I could never forgive you.” Imeshan’s smile fades, until there’s something like resignation on her face. Too hollowed to maintain her anger, too distorted for her doll’s serenity to break. “How lucky for you then, that she already has.”

She?

Oh.

Imeshan’s tail uncurls from my throat and she slinks away. Now I can see the pale shadow looming in the trees beyond her, dirty white trenchcoat stirring in the breeze, a ceramic mask beneath its hood. The Hierophant.

I meet its lidless gaze. Two bullet holes in reality, pulling me in. It extends a hand to me, clawed digits clicking as they uncurl. I cannot stand, pain still wracking my body, yet I can’t reject it. So, I crawl on hands and knees. A craving grips me, feeling those black eyes fixed on mine. They promise me the only peace I deserve now. 

“I wish she’d taken us sooner.” Imeshan, musing softly by my side. “Perhaps at the Ghost Forest, while Getye was still with us. It’s easier, Lakera. Even in the cold and the darkness and the gore, she’s kinder than Charith. You’ll see.”

Pushing myself up to my knees, I reach up for the Hierophant’s hand. It hunches down, helping me do so. I grip the bony length of its finger, never taking my eyes away from its. The dark within its sockets is the dark of a quiet bedroom in the dead of night, as I’m curled up warm and comfortable beneath the blankets. It’s the dark of a night sky in the winter, looking up at the still gulf above through the window while a fireplace crackles nearby. It’s a silent, serene oblivion. An abyss in which nothing more can hurt me.

The Hierophant brushes a hooked claw over my cheek, the tip tracing a dull, pleasant pain across the skin. Then, it pulls me up to my feet. “Sweet angel,” it coos in a voice that had once been the Proxy’s. “My angel.”

My lips shudder into something that feels like a smile. “Your angel,” I whisper. In the void of its stare, I find understanding. Acceptance. The Hierophant sees the shattered thing I have become. Unlike the Proxy, it did not break me for its use. It only offers to give my pain a purpose. Unlike Vaschael, it does not desperately grasp at the ashes of a former life. It promises me a new one. A new star to follow.

It cups my chin with the tips of its claws. A little pit forms in my stomach, seeing an orifice open in its wrist. The tendril slithers out, down between the Hierophant’s fingers and around my neck, coiling damp and taut. Twining its hand around my new leash, the Hierophant turns and leads me away into the forest. 

The nephilim pad beside and behind us. We’re going west, I think. Away from both the Denskans and Cratavn. Is there a bone factory in the west? If so, that must be where it’s taking me. I will be emptied and refilled, a new body of metal built onto my flesh, the comfort of a simple new purpose in my being. I shudder, taking comfort in the surety of my collar.

Behind us, gunshots. The rattle of an SMG. Bullets cracking wood and pinging off armor.

The nephilim fall away to deal with it. I hope that they do. I can’t be dragged onto any more disparate paths. Let this be it.

The gunshots close in. Snow rasps and sickly trees splinter. No one calls for me. That’s a mercy, at least. The Hierophant runs a claw through my hair. I nudge my head up into it, ignoring the slight prickle of pain it carves down my scalp. Let this be it.

Boots crunch over the frozen path. Gunshots ring in my ears.

I try to pick my pace. Pull ahead so the Hierophant will have to follow. This is fruitless. The Hierophant leads. It tugs me back to walk at its side. I whimper, the sound pitifully small even without my mask. Let this be it.

Behind us, a roar of racing flames and a swell of heat washing over my back. I start to turn around, intending to end this myself-

-and see a blade of silver flame rip through the Hierophant’s chest.

It pauses, and peers down at the weapon. Watches the fire writhe and spit like boiling mercury along its length. The moment lingers for long enough that an idiot hope blooms in my mind, as if I can’t smell its flesh burn. This will be insufficient to kill it. It will pull the blade out and slay its attacker, or break her to join me in this new life.

Exoskeleton cracks as the blade tears upwards through the Hierophant. It arches itself as if to pull itself free, just before its head is bisected. The leash slips from my neck as it crumples forward, spewing black smoke and hissing grease and oil.

As sudden as they came, the flames sputter out, taking their warmth and light with them. Mournful wails rise from the forest- the nephilim, grieving their dead mistress. I turn around. Two lay dead along the path behind me. At my back, wavering on her feet, heaving steam through her mask, is Brea.

She lowers her sword, lets one hand drop from it so her arms dangle at her sides. Her right eye remains subsumed by purplish swelling- my parting gift to her- and some of the stitches across her forehead have popped, letting sweat run from her mussed hair run into the cut. Still, she’s here. Panting and beaten, she’s here, her good eye fixed on me.

I can’t look much better than her. My legs shudder beneath me, my heartbeat could crack open my chest. The pains of my own beating have started to bloom again through my body. Out here in the dying forest, beneath the empty blue sky, without superiors, we are both just suffering things.

Shakily, I reach a hand towards her. Brea flinches from my touch at first. But she knows just as well what we are now. Maybe better than I do. The knowledge is a balm, it seems, soothing years of animosity. She lets me cup her cheek. Lets me trace a thumb along the edge of her mask. For a moment, she even leans into my touch. I run my fingers up her temple, into her hair. Her eye fogs over with tears. I love you, sister. She doesn’t say it but I feel it in the slight tremble running through her body, the way her breath hitches at my touch. Despite everything, sister, I still love you.

I hook my thumb under her halo and rip it off.

At first she just blinks. Feeling that something just happened but not registering what. Not until she sees the sunlight glint off her halo as I toss it away into a snow bank. Her stare widens, glassy. No rage. No hate. Just a stunned hurt. Then it begins. The twitching. The guttural sputtering in her throat. She tries to dive for the halo but I grab her by the arm. She tries to wrestle herself free but her strength is quickly bleeding away, good eye flickering gold.

“L-La...” She swats at my hands. “Lakeeerr...”

I lean in, and place a tender kiss on her forehead where the halo had been. She knows. She understands. This is why I can’t abide her. She’s pulling me back- denying me my oblivion. I can’t be saved again, not by her or anyone. I’ve fallen, furthest of all. I love you too, sister. But I can’t forgive, nor be forgiven.

Brea writhes and wheezes, “Lakerrraaa...”

I shove her down into the snow, where she spasms and chokes.

Turning away, I find two of the nephilim hunched over the Hierophant’s corpse, sobbing into their helmets. I recognize one as Imeshan by the particular way she snivels. “Imeshan,” I say. Breaking my vow of silence a final, necessary time. “Let’s go.”

She sags over her mistress’s remains.

Storming up beside her, I grab one of her wings, try to drag her along. “Now, Imeshan.”

Pulling out of my grip, she remains in her misery.

I watch her a moment. Listen to her blubbering and Brea’s wet gasping. Then I turn north, onto the lakebed, letting them drown beneath the silence as I return to my Queen alone.