I closed my eyes and exhaled shakily. There it was.The question. Now it would begin. The speculation and the planning, and thewhat ifs,when we all knew there was no hope. Not any longer.
Every attack had resulted in an unraveling. So many troops dead. Bhartina, several of the djinn from Shantivan. Jasha and his troop, Arpita and many of her Danava kin, and Keyton…vanished. I’d thought on his disappearance from the battlefield a lot. According to Chaya, he didn’t possess the ability of transference. So someone would have had to remove him from the path of danger. I couldn’t imagine Mizikiel using his power to save one drohi, but I knew a force that might have intervened.
Priti.
She was Death. She had the power to intervene if she wanted to. And yes, there were rules and all that, but Priti…she’d find a way to bend them for the people she loved.
But if she had taken him, did it mean that he was dead?
I set aside the contemplation to focus on the matter at hand.
Getting into the mountain.
I’d run the situation over and over in my mind, but there was only one conclusion.
Mizikiel had won.
Our numbers were a fraction of what they should be, and with the unraveling activating every time we attempted to get close to the mountain, there was no hope of reaching him.
He’d taken sanctuary in his realm while he finished off our world, and his failsafe meant that he no longer needed an army to fend us off.
We were fucked. It was that simple.
So what now?Joe had asked.
There was only one thing to do. “We have fun.”
“What?” Joe said.
I looked each of them in the eyes. “We have fun. We spend the night with our friends and our loved ones. We make love, laugh, sing, dance, whatever. We celebrate this life, and tomorrow we attack the mountain in waves, so hard and fast that maybe…maybe we find a way through. And if we don’t, then we die trying. Better than sitting here and waiting to be unraveled. We go out on our own terms.”
Silence reigned for several moments, and then Bina stood and reached out a hand to Thanil. “Take me to bed,” she said.
Blue joinedthe anchors in a tent we’d set up just for them. Araz and I stayed. We circulated among the troops, stopping to join the various campfires and listen to their stories, to know who they were and honor them. Every time our paths crossed, I saw the sorrow and impotence in his eyes. He was a god, and yet he was powerless against Mizikiel, against the power of destructionthat he wielded. Powerless to get though the barrier of unmaking using transference.
I’d asked myself why it was taking so long to end this world. Surely he had the power to take us out in a blink? Surely this wasn’t the usual method of ending a world. Bit by bit, instilling fear, pain and panic? So why?
If I could get to him, look in in the eyes, face-to-face, I’d ask him.
If…
My stomach ached, nausea a steady pulse in my chest. I wanted this night to last forever. For time to stop still right now.
Stragglers joined the camp the later it got. Unknown faces. Survivors from other parts of Prashikshan, drawn to the royal domain, to this small camp in the upper most layer of Shahee Kshetra. I searched their faces looking for Erabi, Ravi, Kalani, or Pashim. I couldn’t staunch the hope that maybe they were alive, that maybe they’d avoided the unraveling at the camp. But every face was a new one.
A male figure stepped out of a tent to my left, seven feet tall, dark hair threaded with crimson. He finished tying a cloth around his waist for modesty and looked up at me with bright yellow eyes.
My chest warmed, and a true smile curled my lips. “Pakshiraj, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing you in this form.”
A smile touched his lips before falling away, and I realized my words carried the implication that we’d have time for me to try.
“The Vaayu Raaja domain is gone,” he said softly.
I exhaled sharply. His home…the tree. Gone. “Gods…I’m so sorry.”
He inclined his head. “We will attack tomorrow with all that we have left.”
“You heard the plan?”
