A permanent transformation. An end to the fading, the hiding, the constant fear of discovery. A place in a world that had never had a place for me.
But also: the loss of everything I’d been. Every possibility of returning to the human lands, of reclaiming my father’s inheritance, of building some semblance of the life I’d expected to have before Mabyn’s poison had ended everything.
“Why?” I asked. “Why would you do this for me?”
He reached out. Took my hands in his. His fingers were warm, and I felt the echo of his heartbeat through our joined palms.
“Because you chose me,” he said. “At the market. When you could have chosen anyone, the wolf, the serpent, any of the monsters who bid on you, you chose the death-speaker. The king that everyone feared and no one loved.”
He sank to his knees.
I stared down at him. The Raven King, kneeling before me, his eyes fixed on my face. His hands still held mine, warm and steady.
The grave, or him.
The slow fade into nothing, or a transformation into something new.
The cold comfort of death, or the complicated warmth of a life I’d never imagined.
I looked at the king kneeling before me. At the monster who had seen what I was and wanted me anyway. At the only creaturein all of Alia Terra who had ever looked at my wrongness and called it sacred.
“You,” I said. “I choose you.”
OLWEN
We descended for what felt like hours, time moving strangely in places close to the Realm. Morveth led the way in silence, Lowen clicking at my heels. The walls changed as we went, smooth stone to rough rock to bones mortared into arches, skulls watching our passage, a city of the dead holding up the castle of the living.
“The ancestral crypts,” Cador said. His voice was quiet, but it carried in the stillness.
“Every Raven King for a thousand years is buried here. And before the kings, the clan elders. And before them, the first ones who learned to speak to ravens and walk the Realm.”
“How far down does it go?”
“To the root of the mountain. To the place where the Shift happened, where the old world ended and this one began.” His hand rested on the small of my back, warm through the wool of my dress.
“The veil is thinnest here. The boundary between life and death wears thin enough to pass through.”
I looked at the walls. At the bones. At the skulls that had once held minds and memories and loves and fears, now empty and silent and waiting.
“Will I die?” I asked.
“Yes.”
The word should have terrified me. Instead, it settled heavy in my chest. I’d died before. I could die again.
“And then?”
“And then you come back,” he said, squeezing my waist. “Different, and mine.”
The stairs ended.
We emerged into a chamber so vast the torchlight couldn’t reach the walls. The ceiling was lost in darkness, and the floor was covered in bones.
Not scattered, not haphazard, but arranged into patterns, spirals and concentric circles that spread out from a clear space at the center where the stone was smooth and black and polished to a mirror shine.
Altars stood at the cardinal points. Simple stone slabs, each bearing offerings I couldn’t identify in the dim light.
Morveth moved to the northern altar and began lighting candles. One by one, small flames sparked to life, casting dancing shadows across the bone-strewn floor.
