“I won’t,” she said thickly. Raised her voice. “Step back.Now!”
The nightmare shifted forward. The shadows of daiva whirled around the nightmare like a great cloak, following it, coiling around it. One of the women shrieked, and together they stumbled back.
“I can feel it,” Arwa said. “The realm.”
“You’ll lose yourself,” Zahir said urgently. “It’s too dangerous.”
“I need to understand it,” she said. “I need to stop it.”
“It doesn’t have to be you.”
She swallowed. Throat dry.
“I think it does.”
“I have flame,” he said. “I have a dagger. At least let us go together. Let us do thisproperly.”
“Nothing to make you sleep, though,” she said. “And it’s here. It’s here now.” Her voice wavered. “Zahir, I was not lying. I can’t live through such death again.”
“Arwa,” he said. Eyes wide, his face an open book. “Please don’t.”
She did not need a fire, an opiate, a sleeping mind, a closed set of eyes. She had been carrying the realm of ash since the moment she leaped from the dovecote tower, the daiva’s great wings around her. It rested in her eyes; it was in her skin. It had been waiting for her patiently. It was time to meet it.
She felt Zahir’s hand on her wrist, heard him bite out her name, all sharp edges to its usual soft syllables.
“Arwa, don’t—”
She released a breath and—fell.
She opened her eyes.
She was still in the House of Tears, slumped over, Zahir whispering her name desperately as he held her and lowered her carefully to the floor. But she was also in the realm of ash. The clay lanterns flickered on the floor before her, even as the world unfurled, vast and gray. Memories swam about her. Great forests carved of shadow. Lakes of pearlescent black. A familiar desert roiled beneath her feet as a storm howled over her head.
She rose from the bed of her blood roots, and looked at none of it.
The nightmare stood before her.
It was all sharp skeletal lines, white and brittle. Its eyes were silver, flat and inhuman. It was no longer faceless, and it was no longer still: its head was all shifting angles. Curve of a jaw, sharp knife of a nose. Bones likes blades. Around it moved a sea of daiva, silent, clinging to its flesh.
She heard its whisper again. Sibilant. Soft.
Kin. How pleasing, to speak to someone worthy of my voice.
Her dreamed flesh shuddered. Her true flesh recoiled, distant echo of her racing heart, her tense limbs.
“I hear you in my skull,” said Arwa.
Fear belongs to the flesh and soul both.
It did not walk toward her. Instead, the realm seemed to… contract. It was suddenly before her, loping around her, its footsteps the sound of snapping limbs. She felt her distant lungs expand and contract. The nightmare circled Zahir as he held her body, as he controlled his own breath. Fear belonged, too, to the worlds of the living and the dead. She saw that now.
Breathe. Breathe. Just so.
The daiva know your blood.
“I am Amrithi,” said Arwa, even though it felt far from the full truth. “Old one, I am Amrithi through my birth mother. That is why the daiva recognize in me.”
No. It is your blood the daiva know. They broke oaths upon it. They remember.
