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Sephiran wakes in Zelgius’s arms.
He doesn’t remember falling asleep. His shoulders ache and he’s lying half across Zelgius’s lap, half on cold flagstones. Hardly comfortable, but they’ve slept in worse places over the years. And Zelgius is warm, his strong arms cradling Sephiran with surprising gentleness.
The ghostly glow of the Tower of Guidance filters through his eyelids, and knowledge settles onto him like a dull weight. This is the last day. Or if not the last, then as close as makes no difference.
His hands tighten on Zelgius’s shirt. He smooths the fabric under his fingers, lets one hand wander up to the open collar and brush across his skin, following his collarbone, feeling the ridge of scar tissue that crosses it.
“You’re awake, I see,” Zelgius says, his voice an amused rumble.
“Yes.” Sephiran opens his eyes slowly, and Zelgius’s steady green gaze falls across his face like lamplight. “Please tell me you haven’t been sitting on the floor all night.”
“It’s only been a few hours. I though you could use the rest.”
Considerate to a fault, as always. “Thank you,” Sephiran murmurs. He shifts, pushing himself upright so he can wrap his arms around Zelgius’s broad ribcage and lay his head on his shoulder. He can feel the steady drumbeat of Zelgius’s heart through his shirt. He’s always been so fiercely alive, his Zelgius.
He chokes back sudden tears. It’s not fair, that Zelgius should have so little time left. The goddess’s judgment will sweep everything clean, regardless of who Sephiran loves.
A gentle, calloused hand strokes his hair. “Don’t mind me,” Sephiran says into Zelgius’s shoulder. “I’m overly sentimental, that’s all.”
Zelgius makes a noise of disagreement, and tips Sephiran’s head back to kiss him. Sephiran closes his eyes again; the salt from his tears stings his lips. The kiss deepens, and Sephiran tightens his arms around him, his weak heart longing to stay like this forever.
But something has changed. He tilts his head aside as he tries to think. There’s a different flavor to the tower’s rarefied air, a hum of activity disturbing the halls that thrill with the goddess’s presence. Something familiar—
Ah. His heart leaps almost painfully, a jolt of anticipation. Yune and her little army have reached the tower at last. So it will come to a fight after all. He could hardly have expected otherwise. But it will be good to see Sanaki one more time. He’d so hoped he would, before the end.
And the priestess will be with her. Yune’s favorite, his other many many times great-granddaughter. If only he’d—
Well, it’s too late for regrets now.
“They’re here,” he says, and looks up in time to see Zelgius’s expression sharpen.
“As we planned, then.”
“Yes.” So many plans. Twenty years of unimaginable work, of weaving threads and moving pieces across the entire continent, to bring everything to this point. And now here’s that upstart Crimean mercenary once again, crashing through his careful schemes with the same bullheaded disregard he’d shown three years ago. Stubborn to the very end.
But Sephiran still has one more piece on the board. The last obstacle he can throw in Ike’s path, an immovable object to meet the boy’s unstoppable force. He felt the current of electricity that went through Zelgius at the thought that Gawain’s son is near. This is what he’s been waiting for: the purpose he’s forged for himself, as though he were a blacksmith shaping his life into a blade. All to fight one man.
Zelgius kisses him again fiercely, almost hard enough to bruise, and gets to his feet, stretching as he rises. His armor is laid out carefully near one of the walls, stark black against the tower’s luminescence, waiting. The blue light shines on his raven-dark hair, and Sephiran’s heart twists in his chest.
A memory comes back to him, unbidden. Years ago, now, early in his tenure as prime minister, just after the Senate had roundly rejected the last and weakest of his proposed reforms. They’d sat up in his rooms, late at night, sharing a bottle of wine. Zelgius had been carefully formal at first, unaccustomed to this intimacy, but slowly he’d relaxed. Their hands had brushed, reaching for the bottle, and Sephiran had held on, winding their fingers together. And he’d said, bitter with the dregs of anger, I’m going to do it, I’m going to end the world. There’s no point to any of it. Let the goddess sweep it all away, I can’t bear it anymore. Conscious, even in the throes of his despair, that this was the first time he’d spoken his plans aloud to another soul. He’d watched Zelgius in the flickering lamplight, waiting for his face to change, for the shock and revulsion to set in.
But Zelgius had given him a long, considering look, and said, What do you need me to do? As though Sephiran had asked him for help redecorating a room.
Do you understand me? he’d said, desperate. I mean the goddess’s judgment. The death of everyone, the entire continent. Even me. Even you.
And Zelgius had let go of Sephiran’s hand and gotten up from his chair, graceful as a panther. He’d knelt before him, eyes fixed on Sephiran’s, and said, with a knife-edged smile, If you wish it.
Here and now, Zelgius puts on his armor, vanishing into the black metal piece by piece, as though it’s swallowing him up. Sephiran hands him the sword, his own hand closing around Alondite’s hilt just for a moment. As though by touching it he’ll feel some echo of the woman who wielded it more than eight hundred years ago.
Soon, he thinks. You’ve waited for me for so long, my love. I’m almost there.
As Zelgius belts the sword to his waist, Sephiran’s eyes catch on the long scar across his breastplate where Alondite’s twin had cracked it open, a mark that will never fade. He remembers how Zelgius had fled back to him from the ruins of the castle, weak as a ghost, more dead than alive. Sephiran had stripped him out of the armor with shaking hands, muttering every healing spell he’d ever learned, stammering and tripping over the syllables. He hadn’t known he could still feel fear like that.
He thinks, I could order him not to go. And even now, with his longed-for opponent almost within his grasp, he’d obey. My perfect knight.
He could. There’s always a choice. He could have stayed at Altina’s side, all those years ago. Broken, mad thing that he was, he could still have defied the goddess, could have refused to accept that their love had no place in her creation.
And Altina would have died in his arms, but she still would have died, burning through the brief, bright span of years that the goddess saw fit to grant to beorc. Nothing he could have done could have saved her from that, could have saved him from facing the long, long centuries alone.
But they’d have had a little more time.
And now he looks at the proud figure at his side, one hand on Alondite’s crossguard, and feels grief thrum in him like a plucked string. A note struck at the beginning of time that has never stopped sounding. The only song he’s ever sung.
How long, now, until the goddess renders her judgment? Do they have days left? Hours? What are hours compared with the vast bleak span of his life? The end he’s waited for, for so, so long, is close enough that he can almost touch it. And yet—
“Sephiran?” Zelgius asks.
Sephiran steps closer to him, reaching up to cup Zelgius’s face with one hand. “Kill him quickly,” he says, “and come back to me.”
Zelgius smiles against his hand. “I will.”
“Good.” And Sephiran kisses him one more time, and lets him go.
The goddess waits at the top of the tower. It’s a long, weary walk, and her presence only grows more palpable as he ascends, until the walls practically hum with power. His headache intensifies. Spirits cluster thickly along the walls, and he can feel their eyeless attention brush over him like a draft of air.
Preferable, though, to the lower floors, which are practically crawling with people—it’s been all Sephiran and Zelgius could do to stay out of their way over the last few days. Maybe some of the others will be the first ones to stumble across Ike and his merry band. Perhaps it will be that buffoon Lekain and the remnants of what he thinks is his army of chosen ones. A useful idiot, but an idiot all the same. It would be amusing to watch his last illusions shatter.
And Dheginsea is down there somewhere too, all his stiff-necked vows to never be moved coming to naught. Sephiran hasn’t bothered to seek him out; he doesn’t have the stomach to endure another one of his lectures.
At the pinnacle of the tower, the doors to the goddess’s chamber are shut. Sephiran considers them, and decides not to knock. The goddess has hardly been in the mood for conversation since her reemergence. He’ll wait here for Zelgius to rejoin him. He rolls his shoulders tiredly, feeling the familiar ache in his stunted wings.
A wind spirit detaches from the wall and drifts over to him, crackling with energy as it circles him. He waits patiently under its scrutiny, feelings its tiny currents stir his hair and his robes. Eventually, it grows bored and floats away again.
As he turns his head to watch it go, he feels Zelgius’s life flicker and go out, like a doused flame.
Grief crashes down on him with the weight of the whole world. His legs buckle and he collapses to the floor, catching himself on hands and knees. Tears spatter on the stone. He can feel the spirits gathering around him, radiating confusion and concern, but he ignores them. Sobs tear at his throat; he breathes raggedly.
It’s too much. The price is too high.
But he’d always known that it would end like this.
Slowly, painfully, he gets to his feet again, leaning on his staff. He still has one more thing to do. No rest for the wicked.
The doors rear up before him, tall enough that their tops vanish into the tower’s glow. Reaching to the very heavens. On the far side, the goddess is waiting, alien and implacable. He could go to her, Sephiran thinks wildly, he could throw himself at her feet and stain the hem of her robe with his unworthy tears, and beg: Now, please, do it now. I don’t care about your promise to your sister. You can’t let me live like this.
But when has Ashera ever been inclined to show mercy?
He faces the doors again and raises his hands. The magic that pours from him blisters his throat as he speaks the words. Not the magic of a spirit charmer, or a beorc mage, or a heron. Something wrong, something that ought never to have existed. A creature with no place on earth.
Memories flood through him, weaving themselves into the magic. The way Altina would hum to herself, slightly off-key, as she cleaned her swords after a battle. Holding their daughter in his arms, not knowing it was the last time. Sanaki walking beside him at her coronation, clinging to his forefinger because his hand swallowed up her tiny one.
The first time he’d sung for the goddesses, when it seemed like the whole world had stopped to listen. Lying in a bare room in Goldoa, his face to the wall, feeling his skin knitting itself back together beneath the bandages. Misaha’s hand in his. The forest, burning.
A cramped, out of the way armory in Castle Daein, and Zelgius, stripped to the waist, looking at him with troubled eyes beneath a shock of blue-black hair. The hesitant note of hope in his voice as he asked, If I join you, will I be redeemed?
The grief is a physical pain: his heart, breaking in his chest. For a moment he almost thinks he's dying, but he knows he won’t be so lucky. Why would this kill him, when nothing else he’s tried has succeeded?
When the spell is finished, he sags, spent, leaning on the staff to keep himself upright. Every one of his thousand years weighs on him. On weary feet, he shuffles over to the doors to inspect his handiwork. The spell holds them fast; they won’t open while he’s alive. And he can rely on Ike to do what needs to be done.
The spirits have shied away, scattering to the edges of the hall. Sephiran turns his back on the doors, and the light throws his shadow across them like wings. He scrubs the tears from his cheeks, and picks up his staff. He might as well give them a fight, though it will break Sanaki’s heart.
Not much longer now. At the end of everything, there's no time for regrets.
But, weak and sentimental fool that he was, he'd hoped he wouldn't have to do this alone.