“Nightmare,” she said. “I know you. One of your kind nearly murdered me. I can’t witness this again.” A pause. She heard the gentle, measured cadence of Zahir’s breath. “As a fellow daughter of an immortal lineage, as kin of a kind, I ask you—please. End this.”
The air shuddered, light rippling like liquid.
The statue didn’t change. Nonetheless, the nightmare moved.
Arwa heard something within her skull, her hindbrain—a scraping, screaming thing, noiseless and yet furiously loud. She saw Zahir clutch the back of his head, swearing. The fear poured through her again with a sudden vengeance. The awe was gone. The clarity of her mind was shattered. There was nothing but fear in her now, pure and clean and thick with rising blood.
The shadows clasped closer to the effigy, crawling across its surface. The nightmare was unmoving, was still faceless, still a hollow simulacrum of holiness. Arwa shaped a sigil on trembling hands, demanding its name. It did not flinch. Did not respond. In fact, it showed no recognition at all.
Around it the darkness of the daiva moved, shifting in understanding. But it wasn’t enough.
Fear had a way of stripping everything from a person. It denied even dignity. She could feel her eyes, her nose, streaming. Blinked hard. She could not move. Could not think. She could barely remember her own name.
As the fear wiped her clean, she felt something rise to fill the void. The taste of ash filled her mouth, clouded her skull.
The realm of ash was here. Just beyond her skin.
She leaned into the feel of it, ash rising ferociously through her mind. When she did so, the light altered. She saw the nightmare’s blank face shift.
Saw the serrated curl of lips. Teeth.
In the realm of ash, the nightmare wore a face. In the ash, where the dead lived, it walked. And somewhere, deep within the storm waiting upon her path, she heard its voice, a cool and terrible thing.
You called me. Kin.
She touched her hand to Zahir’s. He took it. But the touch of his skin didn’t make the presence of the realm fade. The ash surrounded her still, formless white air, a rain of dark dust. It was calling to her, unmooring her from her skin.
“Can you see it?” she asked.
Zahir gripped her hand tighter. Looked at her. She could see his struggle to remain calm and conscious. His jaw was tight; thoughts flickered across his face like winged things.
“I can see the—nightmare,” he said carefully. “The daiva. I can feel the fear. Is there anything I’m missing?”
She wet her lips. “The realm of ash,” she said. “Its voice. I can hear it in the realm. I think if I enter I can… communicate with it.”
He stared at her.
“Arwa,” he said. “No.”
There was a crashing noise from above them. A sharp breath. Arwa turned. There were women on the stairs; Eshara behind them, face gray.
“What—” choked out Diya.
“Don’t let them come down here,” snapped Zahir. He hadn’t looked away from Arwa. “It isn’t safe. Eshara.”
“I won’t,” she said thickly. Raised her voice. “Step back. Now!”
The nightmare shifted forward. The shadows of daiva whirled around the nightmare like a great cloak, following it, coiling around it. One of the women shrieked, and together they stumbled back.
“I can feel it,” Arwa said. “The realm.”
“You’ll lose yourself,” Zahir said urgently. “It’s too dangerous.”
“I need to understand it,” she said. “I need to stop it.”
“It doesn’t have to be you.”
She swallowed. Throat dry.
“I think it does.”
“I have flame,” he said. “I have a dagger. At least let us go together. Let us do this properly.”
“Nothing to make you sleep, though,” she said. “And it’s here. It’s here now.” Her voice wavered. “Zahir, I was not lying. I can’t live through such death again.”
“Arwa,” he said. Eyes wide, his face an open book. “Please don’t.”
She did not need a fire, an opiate, a sleeping mind, a closed set of eyes. She had been carrying the realm of ash since the moment she leaped from the dovecote tower, the daiva’s great wings around her. It rested in her eyes; it was in her skin. It had been waiting for her patiently. It was time to meet it.
She felt Zahir’s hand on her wrist, heard him bite out her name, all sharp edges to its usual soft syllables.
“Arwa, don’t—”
She released a breath and—fell.
She opened her eyes.
She was still in the House of Tears, slumped over, Zahir whispering her name desperately as he held her and lowered her carefully to the floor. But she was also in the realm of ash. The clay lanterns flickered on the floor before her, even as the world unfurled, vast and gray. Memories swam about her. Great forests carved of shadow. Lakes of pearlescent black. A familiar desert roiled beneath her feet as a storm howled over her head.
She rose from the bed of her blood roots, and looked at none of it.
The nightmare stood before her.
It was all sharp skeletal lines, white and brittle. Its eyes were silver, flat and inhuman. It was no longer faceless, and it was no longer still: its head was all shifting angles. Curve of a jaw, sharp knife of a nose. Bones likes blades. Around it moved a sea of daiva, silent, clinging to its flesh.
She heard its whisper again. Sibilant. Soft.
Kin. How pleasing, to speak to someone worthy of my voice.
Her dreamed flesh shuddered. Her true flesh recoiled, distant echo of her racing heart, her tense limbs.
“I hear you in my skull,” said Arwa.
Fear belongs to the flesh and soul both.
It did not walk toward her. Instead, the realm seemed to… contract. It was suddenly before her, loping around her, its footsteps the sound of snapping limbs. She felt her distant lungs expand and contract. The nightmare circled Zahir as he held her body, as he controlled his own breath. Fear belonged, too, to the worlds of the living and the dead. She saw that now.
Breathe. Breathe. Just so.
The daiva know your blood.
“I am Amrithi,” said Arwa, even though it felt far from the full truth. “Old one, I am Amrithi through my birth mother. That is why the daiva recognize in me.”
No. It is your blood the daiva know. They broke oaths upon it. They remember.
“Broke oaths,” she echoed.
It smiled. The surface of its face was a dozen fragments, moving unevenly, scraping against one another. She saw teeth like points of light.
The one who holds you has old blood of the Empire. His bloodline know a great deal of oaths. Shall we speak to him of it?
“You don’t touch him,” Arwa said sharply. “He is mine.”
The nightmare cocked its head.
Yours.
“Mine,” Arwa said firmly, feeling the burn of the words distantly, the hunger in them, and the fear of them too.
I suppose I cannot take what belongs to my kin. Wet, strange curl of its mouth, pale flesh peeling into a simulacrum of lips. So, kin: Shall I tell you what you could be? Shall I tell you the tale your fear spins?
“As you told Captain Argeb? No, old one.”
It placed the cold points of limbs against her dreamed flesh. Its face shifted once more, forming into something almost human.