I opened my eyes in a world more saturated with color. The red of the sky was more vibrant, more alive, like the blood of the living-fresh, hot, arterial. The scent of smoke and flames on the wind burned my nose and left an acrid taste on the roof of my mouth. The frosty kiss of air chilled by the dead and injured made every hair on my body stand on end, while the heat of red lux flames licked my sweat-glistening skin-ice and fire. Cuts and scrapes I didn't know I had stung. Black blood seeped from my wounds.
But I savored all that.
I relished the iron-tinged heat in my throat and the bite of my own nails into my palms as I stepped past withering ghosts and melting shadows with my winged spear in hand. A chorus of raspy caws filled my ears, drowning out the beating war drum of my pulse as all that remained of Crow's flock joined me, led, of course, by Nannāru. My shadow purred as she coiled inside me like a python, ready to strike at the behemoth I stared down.
Most of this city's sector lay in ruins at its monstrous king's feet, yet the stories-high statue of a knight-still looking so heroic as he impaled a screaming monster at the end of his halberd-still stood tall and immaculate. I caught my reflection in the knives that made up his armor, each silver blade pristine despite the flying ashes and soot thickening the air. My pupils were red with luxlight, a halo orbited my head, and tears-made from both sorrow and rage-streamed unceasingly down my fierce soot-covered face.
I climbed up the statue. The uncoated knives couldn't pierce my glowing skin. A black cloud of crows were my wings. And there, standing atop the knight's helm, I saw him; the knight. The king. The god. The monster.
New eyes popped open from beneath his healing flesh. He upended entire blocks in his rage beneath the whole sun. And I hoped Albrecht was watching me now. Blackburne screamed.
More tears trickled down my cheeks. I sucked in a long, shaking breath. Then I raised my chin and sang, my words stirring the rising ashes.
"Little one, who dwelt in the house of darkness..."
Blocks away, the beast froze. His eyes swiveled around in their sockets erratically, searching the smoke. I continued Crow's song.
"Now you are outside, and you have seen the light of the sun."
A rumble shook the skyline. Hundreds of eyes glared down at me as the beast turned toward me-at the measly little insect at its feet. The kingdom had been smashed and glowed red like a poppy field, and the king of nightmares came for me to put me to rest. Well, I was done sleeping. It was time to end this nightmare.
The kusarikku was awake, and she had a bigger monster to put down.
"Let's go, Monster," I said.
Blackburne screamed and shot out a tentacle at me again. I leaped out of the way from the knight's helm and ran up his outstretched metal arm. The tentacle stabbed into the statue instead, causing it to rock. With my cloak of crows winging me, I rushed up the giant halberd and took a running leap from its giant red blade just as the colossal statue toppled over beneath me. I grunted as I landed on one of the behemoth's many wriggling appendages. The beast tried to shake me off, but I dug my spear into its flesh and held on as the tentacle whipped around.
The beast struck with another tentacle. I dodged. I was unshakable. Everything could have been so perfect, I thought as I locked eyes with one of those unblinking orbs-each one much larger than me. I screamed and leaped from the tentacle, grabbing folds of the slimy flesh of the behemoth's body. Why did you have to ruin everything?
The behemoth screamed again. Every eye honed in on me while I climbed to the top of it. Crows screeched and pecked at the eyes-but they only inconvenienced the terrible creature. I stabbed my spear into the behemoth.
Over and over and over again.
Why did you kill everyone?
Damn it! My spear wasn't sharp enough. Or maybe I just wasn't strong enough. I couldn't break through its skin. I yelled and nearly lost my balance when the behemoth shook itself like an animal trying to rid itself of a pesky little mite. Tentacles unwound and collided with buildings, sending shards of glass and metal shrapnel flying. My skin stung from fresh cuts. Blood trickled from me in rivers. Bruises throbbed. My newly awakened spectral nerve endings screamed.
Why couldn't you have just sucked it up and been happy with what you had? With how things were?
My instincts begged me to run. But I couldn't back down. If I did, everyone would have died in vain. A new eye bubbled from beneath the behemoth's flesh and rolled to glare at me with a red pupil. I didn't recognize the red-eyed woman reflected at me in its wet surface. A waterfall of tears spilled from her eyes. I screamed and plunged my spear into the eye.
You stupid anchored thing!
A tentacle slithered alongside my ankle and wrapped around my leg. I sliced it apart. Two more took its place, so I ran, digging my spear into the creature's body the whole way, spilling a thick coagulated fluid that writhed like it was made of thousands of black maggots and eels. But it wasn't deep enough. The wound healed shut in my wake. My body ached and shook from both shivers and sobs. I panted from exertion. But my breath caught in my throat when I saw the red stone glowing on my scarred wrist. Everything went blurry as my eyes watered even more.
You stupid, stupid girl!
The behemoth shrieked. Nannāru cried out-a warning. I heard the wet fleshy sound of a tentacle cutting through the air before I saw it. Nannāru flew to my side and tugged at a strand of my hair with her beak before disappearing into the black cloud of ash and dust. I jumped blindly from the beast, following the crow a hair's breadth out of reach of the striking tentacle.
The wind was knocked out of me when I landed on a rooftop and rolled to my foot. The behemoth continued to writhe behind the wall of smoke that separated us. Nannāru called again ahead of me, and I followed her, heaving myself over debris and leaping from one building to the next. Blackburne followed, never letting me out of his sight. The behemoth and I kept pace with each other.
I ducked beneath a swiping tentacle and jumped over another, catching the lip of the next roof with my free hand in the nick of time. Nannāru cawed at me frantically while I heaved myself up onto the roof.
I stood before the beast, beneath the sun. I was higher than him now. But a hell of a gap separated us. The creature's body throbbed, just like a giant heart. I wondered if, somewhere in all that flesh, the last shreds of Blackburne's heart still lay.
My fingers drummed my spear. I held one of the spear's winged tips to my face. I hadn't been able to pierce through his hide with this...
I touched my thumb to the red stone on my wrist.
Everyone has a weakness, Vale had told me.
"Find it," I said to myself.
Yet another enormous eye bubbled through the creature's flesh, right in front of me. Two red-eyed creatures glared at each other through churning smoke.
I smiled.
Blackburne's eyes, however, had been easy to cut into.
"Nannāru!" I called out.
My crow landed on my shoulder and shook her feathers, ready for my command.
"I need cover," I told her.
The crow took off, rattling for the rest of her flock.
While a murder of crows enveloped me, I lifted my spear again and whispered to the lux coating it. "And if you can hear me, I need a hand."
My spear glowed hotter at my words.
The behemoth screamed, and its voice shook the skyscraper I stood atop of. More tentacles unwound and slithered for me. Every single one of its eyes followed me as I dodged its appendages on the rooftop. The air filled with thousands of screaming crows like smog. Blackburne growled when he lost sight of me.
Then I saw all of his eyes flick toward a raucous noise. In the heart of the cloud of crows, Nannāru screamed, and the voices of her brothers and sisters joined her. Tentacles shot from the beast, whipping right past me and skewered the middle of the cloud, right for Nannāru. Every red pupil on the beast flared.
I made for the edge of the roof. No hesitation. I stabbed my glowing spear into the ground and used my momentum to propel myself forward, weapon in hand and a gust of wind at my back.
And below me was the beast. Only this time, I wasn't some dangling morsel. I was an avenging archangel. I broke free from the crows. A single pupil below constricted at the sight of me. I stared into the void, which stared back.
And it looked terrified.
I sneered down at it. "Made you look."
I thrust my red-hot spear through his cornea and into his flaming pupil, rupturing his eye with an explosive pop. With my charged lux, I tunneled into the slime-filled orbit, through the back of his socket. I fell through its hide and landed inside the frigid dark cavern of its cranium. The beast was hollow inside.
Go figure.
Walls of wet flesh spasmed at my intrusion. I didn't care to watch where I stepped and cut through any strings of flesh in my way as I limped through the slimy atrium. It had to be in here somewhere...
A heart pounded loud and fast-like it was stricken with fear-but it wasn't mine pounding. I sliced through another web of flesh, and there I saw it.
It was a tiny, shriveled thing, suspended taut in strings of black flesh. Every step I took toward what was left of Blackburne's heart made it pound even faster. I glowered at the organ-at Blackburne's last shred of humanity. I watched its frayed, atrophic muscles spasm and writhe as if in pain.
Two cities had fallen to end the pain of a mourning father, a father who no longer even remembered his son. My fingers twitched. This heart was empty of all of Blackburne's memories of his life and his son. But deep inside my own heart, I carried his shadow's pain.
I wrapped my fist around the frantic organ and dug my fingernails into it, relishing the behemoth's furious scream from outside. Second-hand memories would have to do.
Someone else's life flashed before my eyes as I implanted all the shadow's memories into the heart, returning them whence they came. The beast struggled, trying to dislodge the ghost inside of it. But I hung on tight and searched through his mind and exhumed every long-buried memory of his family-of Albrecht-the son whose bones his other half mourned over for centuries. Blackburne no longer had emotions, but I did. I was human again. I let all my pain and sorrow and anguish spill into him until it overflowed. And I chanted, smiling, as I did.
"The little one has roused you, the little one has startled you.
So may sleep fall on him, and may he return to his dream."
It might not matter to the rest of the universe if all the souls in After blinked out of existence. But it sure as Hell mattered to me, and that's all I cared about. My body weakened while Blackburne continued to struggle, but my resolve was strong. With every loss I had suffered, my soul had broken into millions of tiny sharp pieces. And I let Blackburne feel every sting of every broken shard.
Was it all worth it, monster?
The beast tore itself apart, trying to rip me out of itself. Gashes opened in its flesh, letting luxlight illuminate its hollow core. Gobs of black flesh splattered all over me. But it was no use.
Tears carved rivers of white in my ash-covered face. I squeezed the heart tighter. Moments of joy and sorrow shared with Webb, Vale, and Crow-afterlives ended and cut short because of his reign-flowed through my veins into the beast like a vaccine.
White streaks of Light bleached the heart and spread, consuming the inner spasming walls of the cavity of flesh. "Die," I commanded of the king.
The heart swelled and burst. The beast exploded into millions of tiny globules. And, just like how I arrived in the afterlife, I fell from a star-filled sky.
I blinked awake in a sea of black, evaporating slime. Wherever the slime disappeared, it revealed the skyscrapers of After that still stood, now polished and clean. I sat up and hugged my knees to my chest, alone save for the sun that spun above in a sky now bled free of its scarlet color. But something squirmed amongst the last of the slime, trying to escape. Nannāru dropped from a leaning streetlight and pecked at the little wriggling bit of flesh, making it hiss. The crow hopped over to me with the morsel in her beak. She dropped the creature in my waiting palm.
"Good girl," I told her, overjoyed to see her unscathed.
The last of the behemoth evaporated away, but the little blob of flesh, no longer than a finger, remained in my hand. I poked at the black slug that oozed across my palm. It reminded me of the shred of Blackburne's heart I used to carry in a jar in my pocket, except this time it was an actual slug. A single eye opened where I assumed the creature's head was-although it was next to impossible to tell one end from the other. It glared hatefully at me, pupil black against a black iris. This wasn't a piece of Blackburne, this was Blackburne. "Look at you now," I teased. I poked it again.
It arched its body and hissed, not like a shadow hissed, it was more like a hissing cockroach.
His pupil remained black. There was no trace of luxlight under his skin or any white scars. He had been stripped of his lux powers. I contemplated just stepping on him, but he was stuck this way, and I couldn't think of a more fitting end to Blackburne's reign.
The slug tried to slither down my arm, making a very slow break for escape, but I pinched him between my thumb and forefinger and peeled him off of me. "Yeah, no. You're coming with me. We'll find a nice jar for you."
There was more hissing at that.
Nannāru took the slug from me for safe-keeping and flapped into the city. I wiped the trail of slime left behind from my arm, taking off the ashes coating my skin. My lux scar still shimmered, white and pure.
I still had my powers. I was the last lux-touched ghost.
And I gasped when an idea came to me. I hurried through the ruins of After, and dug through debris, finding Vale still sleeping where I left her. I fell to my knees and cradled her head in my lap, feeling for the first time the soft velvet of her skin. Since the beginning of my time in After, I always wanted to know if a catatonic ghost could ever wake up. Now, ribbons of luxlight emanated under my skin.
Back in Aḫ-ḫur, the catatonic shadows awoke. I was the one who woke the sleeping shadows. That was my gift from Albrecht. I just hoped I could do it again. Hollows and shadows weren't really all that different. I shut my eyes and whispered, "Please..."
Like before in Aḫ-ḫur, a fiery tingling trickled across my scar. An unseen aura pulsed from me like a ripple.
And Vale took my hand and whispered, "Skye?"
In another life you were my babe
In another life you were the sunshine of my lifetime
What would you trade the pain for? I'm not sure
So much for stardust
We thought we had it all, thought we had it all
Thought we had it all, thought we had it all, thought we had it all