Arwa felt no more at ease in the realm of ash than she had the first time they had entered it. The feel of being cleaved into two halves was still distinctly terrifying. Dizzying. But she had enough familiarity with it to now marvel at the smaller elements of its overall strangeness: the pulse of the blood roots, shifting across and beneath the facets of her dreamed skin. The refracted strangeness of her own limbs, and Zahir’s, as they rippled and changed, glittering beasts of glass.
Zahir was entirely still. As he pondered, the ground shifted beneath them, pale-leaved.
“Are you prepared?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said finally. “We must try. It’s our purpose, after all.”
Ourpurpose.
“Together, then,” Arwa said softly. “Lead the way, my lord.”
They walked along his path, deeper and deeper into the realm of ash. As before, the trees loomed and changed. Arwa saw figures moving in the gloom. It became harder and harder to move through the ash. She could feel the tightening grip of the blood roots, and far away, the beat of her own heart, the rattle of her own breath in her lungs.
The air was closing around her.
“That’s it,” he said, when Arwa’s grip tightened. “Hold on tightly.”
They had moved far. Far. It felt like centuries had slipped away beneath their dreamed feet, trampled bloody and soft. Around them the world narrowed. Arwa felt strangely crushed. Every step was growing harder.
Beneath them the haze of the ground had altered.
They were standing upon sand. Pale, white sand.
“This reminds me of Irinah’s desert,” she told him. Her distant heart speeding, jaw tight. “We must be close to him. The Maha. Surely we are?”
“I think I can feel him.” She felt more than heard the trembling hope in Zahir’s voice. Around them the branches of the trees twisted, becoming sharp knifepoints that speared the ivory sky.
She felt the sand rising around her ankles. Her distant breath felt shallow, far too shallow. Her ears strangely ached, full somehow of the howl of a storm, wailing—
“I don’t think I can go farther,” she told him. “My flesh. My head—”
“I know,” he said. “The pain is—”
“Too much,” Arwa wrenched out. “My soul hurts. I did not know a soul could hurt.”
Zahir paused, silent. An unreal wind blew the sand around their feet.
“The bridge is not strong enough after all,” he said finally. “Despite your blood. We’ll have to rethink.”
He took a step back, leaning into the tug of those roots. Arwa felt the moment soul and flesh joined, like a piecing together of two halves, roots fusing her whole—
She woke. Gasping.
Her limbs ached strangely. They felt like ill-fitting clothes; they felt as if she had outgrown them. A moment, and the feeling passed. But still, she didn’t move, her face pressed to the blanket beneath her, her breath and tears damp on the cloth.
“Lady Arwa.” Zahir’s voice. “I have water.”
She took it and drank gratefully, straight from the carafe.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Fine.”
“I will do some study,” he said. “We cannot go farther, if the realm affects us so. Can you stand?”
“I think so.”
He stood and stepped back, allowing Arwa to rise to her own feet. She followed him then back into his library. She steadied herself with a hand on the shelf, making a show of staring at each book in turn to hide her weakness, and following the titles with the brush of her fingers, as she had seen Zahir do many times before.
