The path that would lead to Morganya.
Alone, Ana began to walk.
Ash fell from the sky. Not ash—snow,colored the same dirt-gray as the storm clouds. They swirled, gathering weakly in broken shapes around Ana. Syvint’sya, little spirits of snow, limping, ears drooping, shivering.
Dying.
Ana felt it, too: an unraveling in her bones. Above, the Deities’Lights shuddered to a slow stop, glimmering weakly. Aterrible cracking noise reverberated across the sky. Something was so terribly wrong. The moaning wind all around seemedto carry Tetsyev’s and Ardonn’s whispers.The unbalancing of the world.
Ana looked across a stretch of pure blue ice and sawher.
Morganya glowed. The diamond-and-white-gold crown on her head appeared dull in comparison to the radiance emanating from her skin. Long black hair trailing down her back, she hunched over the surface of the ice. She’d taken off her cloak and her bare arms were covered in curling patterns of frost. When she looked up, ice clung to her eyelashes and hair, coating them white. A jagged hole gaped from the ice before her, the ocean water pooling inside it trembling. Lights flickered within with the same erratic desperation as those in the sky earlier.
Ana clenched the wooden map tightly in her hands to stop them from shaking.
Her aunt’s bloodred lips curved in a smile. “Still following in my steps, Little Tigress?”
“You feel it, don’t you?” Ana replied. Somehow, at the end of the world, she found it easier to speak, as though the knowledge that she was steps, breaths, away from death held her voice steady. “The energy here—no human is meant to survive this, mamika. The legends hold true.”
Morganya straightened. The ice mirrored her perfectly, amplifying her cruel and terrible beauty. And Ana saw that it wasn’t frost that splintered across her face; it was veins, blood running blue. Her aunt’s face had paled, as though something here were drawing the very life from her. “We were never meant to be human, Little Tigress,” Morganya said, her voice resonating across the stillness. “We are meant to be Deities.”
“You have seen what happens when humans try to play at being gods,” Ana said. “It began before any of us, when theydiscovered blackstone and tried to restrain Affinites. When the siphons were used against Affinites.”
“And I am correcting course,” Morganya continued calmly. “I will hold the Heart. I will have the power to reverse the balance of this world. Those undeserving will bow to us, as they were always meant to.” She stretched out a hand, her face slipping so easily back into kindness, into the soft, demure aunt Ana had known her entire life. “My love, you of all people should understand how it feels to be wronged. You remember the names they called you, the way your ownfathertreated you, the nights locked away in your chambers, the childhood taken from you. Do not forget who it was who did that to you. Do not forget why that happened to you.” Eyes glowing an otherworldly green, suddenly welling with sadness. “The world reviled us, my love. It gave us nothing. Anything we want in this world, we must take it with our own hands.”
Morganya’s voice washed over Ana in soothing waves, a lullaby opening its arms to her. Ana felt herself sinking into the soft gray. Memories stirred sluggishly in her mind, called upon by a phantom voice: her father, turning away from her and shutting the doors to her chambers behind him; the screams at the Salskoff Vyntr’makt as she sat in a river of blood weeping for help; the long white fingers in the dark that held silver scalpels to her skin.
All because she was an Affinite. All because the Deities had chosenher.
Why is it wrong, then, for us to do unto them what they have done unto us?a voice whispered in her head.
In the back of her mind, a voice screamed at her—but for what, she could no longer remember. There was something shehad to do, something very important…but soothing waves of her aunt’s words continued to wash over her, pulling her away. She had the impression she was drowning, but the water here was warm, and she was comfortable.
Morganya’s smile stretched. “Stay with me, Little Tigress,” she crooned, and in a flash, she closed the gap between them, her fingers cold as they touched Ana’s cheeks.
Ana felt herself smiling back.
“We were cut from the same cloth, my child,” her aunt continued. “Be with me. Together, we can take back the world.”
“Yes, mamika.” The words tasted so strange yet so sweet on her tongue.
“My powerful princess. I will give you this empire. I will sit you on a throne by my side, dress you in a crown of jewels and a dress studded in diamonds.” A pause. “Just wait here.”
Morganya tapped Ana’s temple with a thumb, sparking daydreams that swirled in Ana’s head like showers of silver. Her, at the Salskoff Palace again, beneath the Hall of Deities, sitting in her throne. A white-gold crown nested in her hair, diamonds and jewels glittering at her collar. The world bowing at her feet with a sweep of her hands.
Just as she’d always wanted. Just as it was always meant to be.
But—no,came a faint, insistent voice in her mind. There was something so, so wrong. It might have been what she’d wanted, once, but now, the whorls of dreams that eddied like stardust only tasted repugnant, reviling. Shadows began to spread through them, cracks of crimson that crawled upward.
And suddenly, the Salskoff Palace flashed in her head, broken and burning.
To create a future, one first had to destroy the past.
The visions cleared. The cold rushed back in.
Ana blinked, just as Morganya plunged her hands into the hole in the ice.
A rumbling noise started, reverberating from somewhere deep, deep down, as though the entire ocean itself were groaning. The glaciers surrounding them seemed to tremble with an ominous energy; the air hummed a low, thrumming note. The surface of the sea churned like boiling water, moving to the stir of Morganya’s fingers. Beneath the ice, a glow grew brighter and brighter, buoyed upward by the shifting waters.
