by Jay Kristoff
She looked down into the dark below, the rolling, ink-black chill.
I know what I have to do …
Sorrow in his chest, bleeding and raw, reaching out and filling her own.
You don’t have to carry me all the way, brother. No one does. Just take me to the heart of it and let me fall.
THE SKY IS FULL OF DEATH. IT WILL CATCH YOU BEFORE YOU LAND.
It doesn’t have to be you.
I PROMISED, REMEMBER?
Until the end …
THIS THEN IS THE END?
She looked around her, the raging storm, the dark beneath, the island stretching away in every direction to press its lips to the sky.
I think so …
SO BE IT.
He nodded, spread his wings wide, slowing their pace. It seemed for a moment all the world hushed, gravity pulling her down, momentum pushing her forward. The pair of them, hanging still, like a single, perfect raindrop in the second before it began to fall.
I LOVE YOU, SISTER. NEVER FORGET. BUT AS YOU SAY, THERE IS NO NEED FOR BOTH OF US TO DIE THIS DAY.
A blindside from above.
An impact from behind.
Buruu dipped his wing, twisted his body. The blow knocked her loose, senseless, tumbling from his shoulders and out into the void. A gale roaring all around her, gravity seizing hold as she plummeted toward the dark. Toward the maws of a hundred deadthings, roaring up from below on rotten wings.
FORGIVE ME, YUKIKO.
She closed her eyes, trying and failing to swallow her fear, her heart shattering into a million pieces.
FORGIVE ME.
And toward the gate she fell.
Alone.
* * *
Kin could hear bodies slamming against the shoulder-level entry, the tortured screech of buckling iron, the engine’s rising tempo as he pushed them into the redline. Turning the Earthcrusher’s head, he could see his brethren speeding away, flightless False-Lifers or wounded soldiers cradled in their arms. Soldiers were fleeing across the black snow, blood and gore and bodies in their wake. Hundreds had been cut down as they fled, but the monstrosities seemed incapable of straying more than a few hundred feet from the pit’s edge, howling in frustration as the army pulled back. And when they’d emptied their lungs in rage at being denied their prey, they turned toward the Earthcrusher, lips splitting beneath the press of jagged fangs beneath.
The goliath positively crawled with them now, staggering under the weight of hundreds, crusted like limpets all over its body, smashing seams, tearing hatchways. The loading bay doors were torn wide, the Earthcrusher’s belly now overflowing with hellspawn, more flooding through the breach by the second. Towering abominations were locked with the behemoth—twisted giants of skinless flesh, all tentacles and eyes and seething hatred. Kin was swinging the only functional arm with all his strength, sweat slicking his brow.
Freezing wind moaned through the shattered viewing portals. Izanami’s song hung in the air, almost clear enough to make out the words, a pale whispering layered upon itself, an echo of a mother he’d never known. The temperature gauges were trembling in the red, warning lights flashing, a claxon wail deep within the Earthcrusher’s belly driving the demons to frenzy.
He heard the spaulder hatchway give, the clattering and screaming of the oni pouring through, tearing the elevator doors apart. It’d only be seconds until they clambered up the shaft on talons of bone and black glass, smashing their way onto the bridge to find him in his feeble metal shell. Death so close he could taste it, feel its breath upon his neck.
Kin peered through the bloodstained viewports, looking for a distant speck in glowering skies. Some final sight of her, some last moment to share. But he could see only darkness, brief strobes of blinding lightning, smoke and blood and death. His words to Misaki hung in the air, their warmth fading now in the face of finality, their truth slipping up and away into the gloom.
“No one who is loved dies alone.”
A prayer on his lips. A fragile hope in the face of hopelessness.
He slammed the throttles forward, flooding the intakes with burning, boiling chi.
The alarms rose in pitch, one final desperate plea to the madman at the controls, pushing the Guild’s mightiest creation beyond the edge of tolerance.
A spark flared somewhere in the Earthcrusher’s belly.
Vapor rushed toward it with open, hungry arms.
Ignition.
* * *
Plummeting.
Weightless.
The song of the wind and the stench of death all around, tears of ice crusted in her lashes. A black snowflake, falling, falling, down into the nothing she wished she’d always known. She could feel it below her, shying away from the blood in her veins. The ending she’d bring. But the carrionbirds would tear her to pieces before she reached the dark. She closed her eyes, welcoming the finale that would drown the fear of being finally and truly alone.
The rush of wings, an intake of breath, the tang of ozone. Something hit her out there in the black beyond her eyelids, feathers and fur and warmth, dragging her back up into hateful sky.
Yukiko opened her eyes, fingers digging into jet-black fur, lightning crackling along the edges of his wings. A mournful cry split the air, and she reached into the Kenning, recognizing the shape of the one who’d saved her.
Sukaa …
~ YES. ~
Why?
~ BECAUSE HE ASKED. ~
… He asked?
~ BECAUSE I WILL BE KHAN WHEN HE IS GONE. ~
She looked above, saw Buruu speeding across the clouds, twisting and rolling between the flailing swarms of corpse-hawks. And as he flipped over, dipping his wing to the earth, she saw a figure on his back, a smoking iron-thrower in his hand, fist wrapped in Buruu’s mane. The pair moving together like poetry, cutting the sky to ribbons and the Yomi birds to pieces.
The one who’d knocked her from Buruu’s back.
Leaping from Shai’s shoulders …
Pushing her …
Yoshi …
Sukaa ascended, a slow spiral bringing them up from the rift below. Hana and Kaiah fought on above, the girl screaming into the wind as her brother flew away, Shai blocking their pursuit with flared wings and flashing eyes. The rest of the pack were pressed tight to Buruu’s heels, cutting down all that stood before him, clearing a path toward the deepest blackness, the heart of the wound, the place she’d been prepared to plunge. But Sukaa was flying away from the hellgate, bearing her back to safety beyond the abyssal edge.
What are you doing? Take us back!
~ SUCH IS NOT YOUR FATE. ~
Hana raised her chainblade, screaming into Shai’s mind.
Get out of my fucking way! Yukiko, make her move!
Yukiko blinked, slow horror rising inside her breast, crashing down into dark and cold and crushing despair.
No. No, he can’t …
~ THE BOY CHOSE. KHAN AGREED. BETTER TWO THAN FOUR. ~
Shai shook her head, sorrow welling in Yukiko’s mind.
*BETTER THEM THAN YOU.*
“No,” she breathed. “No, he can’t…”
She seized fistfuls of Sukaa’s feathers, digging fingers into the flesh beneath, screaming into the minds around her.
You can’t let him! You can’t let him do this!
~ KHAN’S WORD IS LAW. ~
Rage in Shai’s breast, run through with bitter sorrow.
*HE DOES THIS FOR YOU, GIRL. THE ONES WITHIN YOU.*
“NO!”
Yukiko stepped into the Kenning, reaching out for Buruu’s mind, struggling against the bitter, roiling chill spilling from the rift below. The thought too awful to comprehend. To permit.
It couldn’t be. Couldn’t end like this.
Not after everything they’d been through.
“Buruu!” she screamed. “Buruu!”
Blood pounding in her temples, spilling from her nose, reaching down into the depths of herself, stretching to her limits across the
void below, the hatred rolling across its surface. Clutching at him, refusing with every ounce of herself that it must be this way. Her voice was a ragged scream, her throat torn and bleeding.
“BURUU!”
And in the distance, fading with every breath, she heard his faint reply.
YUKIKO.
She clawed the hair from her mouth, eyes filled with tears.
You can’t do this, brother. You can’t!
I MUST.
No. No, it doesn’t have to be this way …
WE KNEW, THE BOY AND I. THE PATH WE MUST WALK. A YŌKAI-KIN MUST DIE THIS DAY. BUT WE LOVE OUR SISTERS TOO MUCH TO ALLOW EITHER OF YOU TO FALL. SO WE FALL FOR YOU.
Not you, Buruu, please, not you …
WHO THEN SHOULD CARRY HIM? MY PACKMATES? MY BRIDE?
You said we’d be together!
WE WERE. AT OUR GREATEST. AT OUR BRIGHTEST. WE WERE GLORIOUS, YOU AND I.
A smile in her mind.
WE WERE LEGEND.
But you promised! You promised we’d be together until the end!
BUT DO YOU NOT SEE, SISTER?
His voice growing ever fainter.
THIS IS THE END.
Buruu, please. Come back. Please gods, COME BACK!
I WAS LOST WHEN I MET YOU. EVERYTHING I WAS. AND IN ALL THAT DARK, ALL THAT DESPAIR, YOU FOUND ME. YOU WHO NAMED ME. ONLY YOU. MY SISTER. MY EVERYTHING.
But you can’t leave! You’re leaving me alone!
YOU ARE NEVER ALONE. I WILL BE WITH YOU IN BLUE SKIES AND CLEAR WATER. YOU WILL SEE ME IN THE EYES OF THOSE CHILDREN WITHIN YOU, HEAR MY VOICE WHEN THEY CALL YOUR NAME.
He filled her with a loving, crushing warmth.
THIS IS NOT THE END FOR YOU.
Sobs wracking her body. Aching in her lungs. Too impossible to grasp. Too cruel and unfair. Of all things, this was the price they had to pay?
This is what their folly had cost them?
Him?
I CHOOSE THE EASY PATH, SISTER. IT IS A SIMPLE THING I DO NOW, TO CLOSE MY EYES AND SLEEP. IT IS YOU WHO MUST ENDURE. WHO MUST REMAIN AMIDST THE WRECKAGE, AND TEACH THOSE WHO COME AFTER OF WHAT WENT BEFORE.
Buruu …
GOOD-BYE, SISTER.
Don’t. Please gods, don’t say that …
WHAT THEN SHOULD I SAY?
Tell me you’ll see me soon. Tell me we’ll be together again.
BUT WE WON’T.
We have to be! I can’t go on without you!
YOU DO NOT MEAN THAT. YOU ARE STRONG AS MOUNTAINS. ALWAYS HAVE BEEN. ALWAYS WILL BE.
But you’re the best of me. The one who makes me strong. Who will I be without you?
YOU WILL BE WHO YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN.
His voice almost lost beneath the flood of her tears.
YOU WILL BE YUKIKO.
Just a whisper now.
I LOVE YOU.
Just a breath.
GOOD-BYE.
* * *
They hurtled across the sky, water-swift, formless and perfect. The gloom was filled with horrors and the snows with poison and all about them was death and sorrow and suffering the color of raven’s claws. But they walked between it all, hand in hand, voices echoing in the dark of each other’s minds, here in this ringing solitude.
Here we are, Mockingbird. Tiptoes at the edge.
ARE YOU READY?
Yoshi thought of a beautiful boy, a smile he’d see again soon.
Doubtless.
They fell, down through the flood of shrieking black, spiraling toward the ripples on the face of the dark. Closer. They could hear it as they approached, louder with each passing second, the song, the words within, clear enough to finally discern. A song of love and hate, of loss and longing, of the fear and sorrow entwined with abandonment. Forgotten. Alone.
Closer.
Yoshi focused on the deepening dark, drawing near, eyes wide, every sight, every sound sharper than he’d ever known. Behind him, he heard the Earthcrusher crack wide and daub the sky with fire, a blast-wave of heat and impossible light filled with the screams of the Endsinger’s children. A burning sponge to wipe the chalkboard clean. And to his utter amazement, he found his lips curling in a crooked smile.
Strange thing, this life.
Thunder rolled in the black, a woman’s scream beneath, almost too faint to hear.
IT IS INDEED.
If you’d told me last summer what winter would bring, I’d have called you liar, Mockingbird …
MUCH CHANGES WITH THE SEASONS.
… Not everything.
THE SHAPE OF HEROES, CERTAINLY.
So I look like a hero to you?
The thunder tiger smiled into his mind, speeding toward the black.
A blinding arc of lightning seared the sky.
YOU LOOK LIKE AN ORDINARY BOY.
All became bright.
SO YES, YOU DO.
And daylight bloomed.
53
EPITAPH
All was ashes.
Ashes on her skin and in her eyes. Caked upon her face and painted on her lips and smeared thick across her tongue. Tears cutting through the snow-white mask on her cheeks.
A ringing silence filled her ears. Echoing with the thundering boom of the Earthcrusher’s demise, the fading remnants of the Endsinger’s song. But all around her was still. All within her was empty. Nothing at all.
She stood on the snowcapped ground, numb and freezing. Hana knelt amidst the frost, wailing, screaming, fingers into fists and tearing at her hair. But Yukiko couldn’t hear a thing. Couldn’t grasp it, didn’t want to, any or all of it. Swimming insubstantial in the air around her, flakes of ash and black snow filling the space where understanding once lingered.
There had been light as he left her. Sound that wasn’t sound. An inhalation as wide as the sky, bringing all down to nothingness.
Nothingness.
The hole seemed gone. The wound in the world closed, replaced with ruptured earth—just ordinary dirt where once the rift had lay, a gentle rain of ashes tumbling from the sky to press it with frozen lips. Its edges were crusted with metal shrapnel, demon corpses, fallen soldiers, incinerated to charcoal and black sticks amidst melted snow.
The hole seemed gone. But she could still feel it. Inside her.
In the space he’d once filled.
Men drifted through the ashen fog, coalescing from the mist to stare. Morcheban and Shiman, rejoicing, embracing, weapons thrust to the sky, to the storm raging overhead. The Thunder God pounded his drums, echoing the victorious howls. Amaterasu gleamed behind the clouds, the darkness abating, drifting back to the gloom of any normal winter’s day.
She could hear none of it.
Not a thing.
The remnants of the Everstorm pack stood about them, feathers fluttering in kindling winds, black and white caked with gray. So pitifully few. Dragged once again to the edge of extinction. Grief in their minds for their fallen packmates, their fallen Khan, this hollow victory bringing cold comfort in the face of their loss. Shai hung her head low, couldn’t meet Yukiko’s eyes. Sorrow like a flood, drowning all inside her. A loss too vast to comprehend.
Sukaa stood tall, emerald eyes burning in the ashen wind, the strongest and fiercest of the bucks who remained. The one whom the Khan had entrusted to wing his sister to safety.
~ NEVER AGAIN. ~
His thoughts echoed in the Kenning, in the bridge still lingering between them in the weeping girl’s mind.
~ WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN, THIS. IF BOND WITH MONKEY-CHILDREN CAN BRING OUR RACE TO RUIN, WE WILL BOND NO MORE. WE GO. NEVER RETURN. LEAVE YOU TO YOUR ASHES. ~
He turned to Kaiah, standing vigil over Hana’s weeping form.
~ COME. THERE IS PLACE FOR YOU IN MY PACK. BLACK AND WHITE TOGETHER. WE ARE GRAY. ~
Kaiah growled, hackles flaring, glancing down at the girl at her feet.
- I STAY WITH HER. ALWAYS. -
The Khan stared hard, finally nodded.
~ SO BE IT, SISTER. ~
He turned
to his pack, his gaze imperious.
~ WE GO HOME. ~
Sukaa took to the wing, tiny whirlwinds of ash and snow rising beneath the thrashing of his wings. The other arashitora followed, leaping into the air one by one after their Khan, black and white, until only Kaiah and Shai remained.
The females looked at each other across the ruins, the shared loss of mates between them, pity welling in Kaiah’s eyes. Shai’s gaze shifted to the girl standing still and numb in the cold, arms wrapped about herself, hair whipping in the ash-choked wind.
*GOOD-BYE, YUKIKO. WE WILL NOT MEET AGAIN.*
The beating of mighty wings. The rush of frozen gales. The warmth of Shai’s thoughts, fading slowly. Yukiko closed her eyes.
She could feel them again, the lives around her, the swelling of the Lifesong beyond the wall of herself. Aleksandar the Kapitán, making his way through his men, kneeling in the snow beside his niece and cradling her in his arms. The tattered remnants of the sky-fleet above, Kurea last of all, Captain Blackbird’s ship barely aloft, her struggling engines spewing blue-black smoke. Kaori stood at the bow, Piotr beside her, fingers entwined.
Fingers entwined.
Even in the midst of all this death …
Yukiko put her hands on her belly, felt for the warmth there, her power surging anew now the dark had swallowed itself. Their strength in her, flooding, burning, an affirmation of everything they’d fought and suffered and died for.
… there is life.
All around her, thousands of sparks flaring in the space beyond the wall of herself, the song of life drowning the fading echoes of the Endsinger’s hymn. Yukiko looked out over the ashes to the new plain the hellgate once filled, the ruins of the sundered Tōnan mountains to the west, the heart of Guild power in Shima now reduced to broken rock and good, fresh earth.
The snows would fall. The chill would reign for untold nights ahead. But soon enough, the weather would shift, the sun would rise. Spring would come, and with it, the children inside her, the seeds now sleeping in the ground. This place would be a forest again. Trees would grow here. Birds would sing. Life would bloom. She could feel it in her head, in her heart, reaching out across the ruin, feeling the sparks all around her. The pain of her headache a welcome sensation after the numbness, the warmth of the blood dripping on her lips a relief after the wind’s freezing bite.
