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Nightingale’s voice grew hoarse "I do not understand why ananke guided ive birth to their own destruction?"

Ananke Echoes and reverberations of fate "Destruction?" echoed Akiva, hollow All his life, it had been made clear to him that he was not his own, that he was only a weapon of the Empire, a link in a chain; even his name was only borrowed And he had broken free, claimed himself He had claimed his life as a medium for action--action of his own choice--and he had believed that he was finally free

He didn’t understand yet what Nightingale was telling him, or why Scarab held his life in question, but he understood this: All along, he had been ensnared in a far greater web of fate than ever he had ever dreamed

His heart pounded, and Akiva knew that he was not free

"It shouldn’t be possible to take without a tithe," Nightingale repeated She said it heavily, significantly, as though to be certain he understood There was consternation and wariness in her look, and other flickers--blame? Possibly awe? "It isn’t possible for anyone else," she added, her stare undeviating, and a word ca or from his own mind, he couldn’t tell

Aberration

"But you’ve done it three tiaze flickered to Scarab She sed "By thinning the veils…" She hesitated This was it, Akiva knew Here was the truth It lurked behind her eyes, and it was as deep and bleak as any story ever told He caught echoes, shreds He had heard them before Chosen Fallen Maps Skies Cataclysale tried to shy away fro, but Scarab didn’t let her

"You wanted to talk to him, didn’t you? So talk Tell hireen isles, and what he has to thank us for Tell hiht down on us Tell him about the Cataclysavriel on her palrand cavern Chiotten, humans And Eliza, whatever she was now Karou looked to where the girl was standing back by Virko’s side, and she didn’t knohat Eliza was, but that they shared this: They were neither of the more, and each the only one of her kind

"What will you wish?" asked Zuzana

Karou looked back down at the aze back at her It was a crude casting, but it still brought his eyes home to her in a rush, and his voice, so deep it had been like the shadow of sound

"I dreaeon as she awaited execution, and she wished she could show hih no wish could ever accomplish that See e’ve done See how Liraz and Ziri stand side by side She would bet anything that the skin of their ar, was electrified as her own skin had been earlier, when Akiva was near her And there was Keita-Eiri, who just a few days ago had been flashing her ha She stood beside Orit, the angel fro with the Wolf about the discipline of his soldiers And A, as ready, in the body Karou had ray like his last, or horrifying--to go and draw the souls of his children out of the ashes of Loraht together and survived an impossible battle, and who carried with them the mystery of it, and evensense of destiny

Destiny Once again, Karou couldn’t shake the sense that, if there was such a thing, it hated her

As to Zuzana’s question, as she going to wish on this gavriel? What could she wish that would bring Akiva back to her, that would quell this vicious feeling stealing over her that theythey had believed they needed to, and still not be allowed to have each other? Bri

"There are things bigger than any wish," he’d said, when she was a little girl "Like what?" she’d asked, and his answer haunted her now, this gavriel heavy in her hand, and all she wanted was to believe that it could solve her probles that ht She couldn’t wish for the dream, or for happiness, or for the world to just let theavriel would just lie there, Bri to accuse her of foolishness

But wishes weren’t useless, either, so long as you respected their liavriel vanished froan the telling, but Scarab took it over The older wo to downplay the horror of a story that was the essence of horror--as though she feared the warrior before her wouldn’t be able to bear it

He bore it He paled His jaw clenched so tight that Scarab could hear the creak of bone, but he bore it

She told hii who had believed they could lay claim to the entire Continuum, and she told of the Faerers, and how the Stelians alone had opposed their journey She told of the puncturing of the veils, how the chosen twelve had been taught to pierce the very fabric of existence, a substance so far beyond their ken that they od

And she told him what they had found on the far side of one far distant veil And unleashed

Nithilae to naer Nithilam was the ancient word forthe had ever seen them, but Scarab felt their presence, less here than at home, but even now They were always there They never stopped being there Pressing, leeching, gnawing

Being Stelian ht in a house whereto force their way in But the roof was the sky The veil, really, but it aligned with the sky, in the Far Isles where everything was either sea or sky, and so they spoke of it this simply: the sky bleeds, the sky blooms It sickens, it weakens, it fails But it was the veil, ies--sirithar--that the Stelians nurtured, guarded, and fed, every second of every day, with their own vitality

Such was their duty It was how they held the portal closed when the Faerers themselves had failed, and it hy their lives were shorter than those of their dissolute cousins to the north, who gave nothing, but only took from this world they had come to for sanctuary and then claiy to the veil that fools had da force of the nithilareater than monsters, so vast and destructive that, to Scarab, only one ould do:

Gods

Why else did such a word exist, if not to express an unseen i worshiped by her kind, to Scarab they were no ods who only watched froods strove every ined the nithilareat inous suckers--fixed to the veil like glower eels to the flesh of a sea serpent washed up on a beach, pale belly to the sun, dire and dying while its parasites still pulsed Still sucked Frenzied at the end to drain every htmare, what she sahen she closed her eyes in the darkness and felt the writhe of theainst the veil She only told him what the myth said, for in the myth was truth: There was darkness, and monsters vast as worlds swam in it

And when she told hih him, and then the loss It was an echo of what she’d seen a short tiale sent to him of Festival Perhaps the older woman had rief of her own loss It had surprised Scarab to be the one who sahat it did to Akiva, to have his , and histo distance it froain so abruptly