Deeper and deeper she went. Ink-black trees that had once been Zahir’s surrounded her. The sand glowed, as rich and wild as the Haran sea. She was unraveling from her own flesh, step by step. The pain faded. She looked up at the sky, which was a lidless eye, blazing with fury and storm light.
She had walked Zahir’s path. She had stumbled through her own out of desperation. But she had never walked it deliberately. The realm raged around her, sweetly familiar, a thing born from her own soul, and terrifying for it. Irinah unfurled itself beneath her feet, real and mortal and yet so far away. It shifted about her like a dream.
On her path loomed her past. Doors opening to opulent rooms. An overgrown garden. Blades and—
She stopped. Froze.
Around her loomed Darez Fort.
Before her were Darez Fort’s great gates. And before them lay Kamran, all riven ash, slumped, a knife through his gut.
“You are not my blood,” she whispered, gazing at him. “You should not be here.”
But he had been her husband. She’d wed him in the Ambhan way: placed her marriage seal around his throat. Worn his, until his death. Vowed that her soul was bound to his, all through her mortal lifetime.
She walked toward him. Kneeled by him. His face was a void. His head thrown back, hand reaching for nothing.
“I wish you were here,” she said. “And yet I don’t. We should never have wed, husband. We were so ill-suited to one another. And yet I so desperately wanted to be the wife you needed. Did you know it, Kamran?”
He could not answer her. He was a shadow. If she touched his ash, breathed it…
“I do not want to keep you. I want to let you go.” She would have wept, if she could have. “That is wrong, and I know it. But I do not want to mourn you forever. I do not want to be the silent widow you deserve.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and pressed her hand to the gates. And pushed.
They were ash. No more than ash. They fell to dust around the press of her hand.
His dust crumbled behind her. She kept on walking.
A moon bloomed in the sky above her, opening like a flower.
The trees were melting around her, collapsing into reams of words, which spread their limbs across the sand. Poetry. A piece of the Hidden Ones lived in her too.
Her soul had traveled the breadth of Irinah. Her soul had traveled the breadth of the realm of ash.
The realm of ash wasn’t always straightforward. It could be made of tales and of the dead. It could lead to your childhood. It would always pass through your greatest griefs. Arwa was beginning to understand the poetry of the Hidden Ones, all those many tracts of longing and loss, as she never had before.
The realm of ash contracted around her. She knew, then, that she had come near to the end of her journey.
Mehr waited, ahead of her.
Her sister was seated, cross-legged on the sand, with her back to Arwa. Her hair was loose, curling over one shoulder. Arwa could see the curve of her neck. Whorl of her ear. She was entirely still. It was as if she had been in the sand all this time, waiting for Arwa’s end. Waiting for Arwa to find her way home.
Arwa took a step forward. Another.
There was a shout, and a screech of laughter and—a child. It ran up to her sister, flinging itself into her sister’s arms. Mehr murmured something, and the child laughed again. It was a chubby thing, with big curls, babbling volubly away. But Arwa could not listen to it. She could only walk forward and stare at her sister, who was brown-skinned and smiling and moved as a living woman moved, lifted and lowered her shoulders, tilted her head to hear the child speak.
All the times she had seen Mehr in the realm of ash—in fragments, between the smoke of the storm, or standing lamp bright before the bodies of the Amrithi dead—Mehr had been too far to see clearly. But Arwa saw her now. This was not her sister as Arwa remembered her, with guarded smiles and wary eyes. This woman was older, softer in the face with skin darkened by sunlight, a grown woman with a fall of loose curls and a face that smiled easily.
This woman was alive.
Arwa felt as if she would shatter. As if she were truly a thing of glass, fragile enough to fragment. She could not hope. She could not hope.
And yet—
“Mehr.” Her voice came out of her without her bidding. Thin as a reed. “Sister. It’s me.”
Mehr turned. Froze.
Arwa did not know what Mehr saw, what strange thing peered at her through the worlds, fleshless and terrible. But Mehr looked at her and looked at her, and began to shake.
“Arwa.” She rose to her feet. “Arwa?”
The child murmured something in a small voice. But Mehr said nothing. She stared at Arwa with wide, stricken eyes.
“It can’t be,” Mehr whispered. “Little sister. What has become of you? Where are you?”
“I’m here,” Arwa said. “I’m—home.”
“I’m dreaming,” Mehr said numbly. And yet she took a step forward, grief and yearning written into her wide eyes. “I’m dreaming you again.”
“I’m the one dreaming,” said Arwa. “You’re dead and gone and yet I want you alive so much I sicken with it. But how can you be alive, when I’ve grieved you so long, and I stand in the land of the dead?”
Mehr made a sound—a wordless gasp, as if the air had been stolen from her lungs. She took a step forward, her hand before her, and Arwa stumbled back. Back.
“I can’t,” Arwa said. “I can’t lose you again. I can’t watch what will become of you, don’t you see? I can’t watch you leave me.”
“Don’t go. Arwa. My dear one. Don’t go. Stay with me.” Mehr’s hand was still before her. Held out like a hope. “Stay, my dear one. Please.”
Arwa stopped. The ash was quiet around her.
She held out her own hand.
Arwa braced herself for Mehr to turn to dust before her: for all Mehr’s strange, bright ash to shatter and leave Arwa with nothing but grief and memory and the cruelly stolen promise of her sister, returned to her, whole and safe and alive.
Their hands touched.
Skin. Warm, callused. Grip of Mehr’s fingers, reaching between two worlds.
Mehr met her eyes.
“I’ll find you,” she said. “Wherever you may be, Arwa. I will.”
The worlds shifted. The wheel turned. She fell back into the cold of the realm.
She clutched her hand tight.
She could not think of whether her sister lived after all. She could not think of her parents, and the cruelty those who loved you could inflict, for the sake of that same love. She could not think of what she’d seen: the hope of it, too rich to be borne. She could not think of anything but reaching her ash.
She forced herself to keep on walking.
Finally, she came to it. Her sea of dead.
She kneeled upon the sand, between bones and limbs and shattered ghosts. The end of her path had come. Beyond it lay starry darkness, stricken with the shadow of dreamfire.
A world of the Gods, perhaps, or of the daiva. But Arwa would not walk there today.
Today, she pressed her forehead to the sand, a supplicant and a mourner. She could not weep here. Could not be as bodies were: soft and hurt and grieving.
She thought of how it had felt at the House of Tears, when she had opened the door to all the ash within her. How much it had hurt her and scared her.