When she blinked again, the ghost of a girl stood before her, ocean eyes and dark hair falling still.
“May?” she whispered.
The snow spirit knelt by Ana, brushing her cheek with a cold finger, and a warm feeling of peace spread through Ana’s body. The fire in her bones calmed and from far off, the wind seemed to bring echoes of words with it.
A world,May’s spirit whispered,where a small earth Affinite can grow flowers from the sidewalk.
Another silhouette appeared before Ana, glimmering pale. Her memory filled in the gold of his hair, the fawn of his skin, the spring green of his eyes.
It’s all right, sistrika,Luka said softly.I’m here. Bratika’s here.
Another boy whose eyes had always smoldered coal-gray, whose hair she’d always remembered as the shimmer of a flame.
We have finished what we have started, Ana,Yuri murmured.We have come full circle.
From the edges of her vision, other shapes were forming. Papa, Mama, Markov, Henryk…all those too soon gone.
A tear slid down her cheek, dripping into the curl of her lips. Lying there on the ice in the midst of the Silent Sea, and blood bruising in her battered body, she could do nothing but gaze up at the sky above.
The clouds had parted. A cold breeze brushed against her face, bringing with it the scents of her beloved empire—of snow and pines.
In the very end, she was a daughter of Cyrilia.
As Ana lay, the last of her strength seeping from her, she caught a glimmer of light in the predawn skies above. Slowly, she turned her head to face it.
The sun was rising at last, its rays crowning the gap between sky and sea, staining it a triumphant, bloody red. The worldbasked in the light of the early morning, beautiful and ancient. It was humans who had inflicted ugliness and hatred upon themselves.
And it was humans who would fix it. Humans, who had the propensity for so much good, for so much evil.
Whose choices defined them.
A new world would be born.
Ana turned her gaze back to the skies and closed her eyes.
Exhaled.
Slowly, the sun breathed life into the sky. Wind continued to stir over the gentle waves that glittered like glass in a stretch of perpetuity. An era of bloodshed and war, come to its end; the crimson reign of the Cyrilian monarchy laid to rest at last.
The wall of glaciers appeared suddenly, startlingly: a set of jagged structures yawning up like colossal teeth, breaking the monotony of the slate-gray waves and pale, watery sky. It felt as though he were approaching the fabled edge of the world, and as he urged his cutter forward, Ramson couldn’t help but think of all the legends and lore surrounding the Silent Sea and all the lives lost to it.
He would have braved the ends of the world for Ana.
He kept a steady grip on his wheel as he entered the maze of glaciers. Sound echoed inside, throwing off his senses: the slosh of water reverberating over and under, mixed with the creaks and groans of his brig. Earlier, a vicious wind had thrashed at his boat and torn at his sails while the sea had clawed at his hull with vengeance—now, all had fallen eerily still.
At last, in the narrow opening before him, Ramson caught sight of something different. A stretch of pale, glittering blue, unfurling like land that wasn’t land.
It was an expanse of ice.
Flotsam drifted before it: pieces of wood, splintered sails,parts of smashed-up ships already being swallowed by the ruthless waters.
A terrible thought came to mind: that Ana and Daya had met the same fate.
Ramson lurched to the stern of his cutter, heart threatening to pound out of his chest as he searched the debris.
A sudden rumbling sounded from above, followed by a series of cracks. When Ramson looked up, it was too late.
He jumped, just as a massive slab of ice smashed into his cutter.
