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She waits.
She trusts that Eris will shepherd the Guardians and that the infinite ambition of those undying half-children will deliver her. They will enter the court and challenge its king and dance in its killing ground, and they will master the school of sword logic so mightily that they will overturn its teacher and forsake the crown.
Soon.
But soon may not be soon enough, because Oryx roams the hallowed spires and melancholy shores of the Dreaming City. He stands looking out over the mists of her beautiful creation, and he laughs.
She can feel him there like a thorn in the meat of her palm. She scolds herself for not factoring Shuro Chi's love into her design. Then she berates herself for this nervous energy, this fretful self-cannibalism.
Lungless, Mara remembers the sensation of a deep breath. Enacts it in her mind.
She remembers the singularity before her.
She waits.
—
She travels across the Ascendant Plane.
The voyage across the sea of screams threatens to erode her edges as no other trial ever has. In Oryx's throne world, she had a semblance of an identity. Treasure. Spoil of war. Defeated queen. Repugnant and alien and Not Me, but she could use these contortions as guideposts to trace her way back to herself.
Here in the emptiness between throne worlds, she has nothing but what she can carry.
The burden is growing heavier, but she is not alone.
He tries to speak to her from a place of high contempt. In doing so, he invites her into his topography.
She steps out of howling and finds her footing upon a plane of swords and madness and all-consuming curiosity.
"Who are you?"
The question summons an almost-forgotten answer deep within the rapidly solidifying shape of her.
"I AM MARA SOV. STARLIGHT WAS MY MOTHER, AND MY FATHER WAS THE DARK."
The thing that once was called Toland flees before her darkness/light/shadow/majesty. And she rests within this scrap of a world, before resuming her journey through the Howling.
—
She feels Oryx's true death in both halves of her soul, a full imagined exhale before the aftershock reaches his throne world.
It crumbles around her like stone, like ash, like veils in a breeze.
Eris Morn's friends have succeeded. The Guardians have slain a god.
She steps through the ruins. In the end, there is nothing. Nothing but Mara Sov and the howling of rampant, untamed logics.
Her great and terrible gamble has paid off.
The rest is up to her now.
—
Joy wells in her heart when her searching fingers trace the edges of Eleusinia.
She has passed through the desert. She has reached the far side of the chessboard. She is alive, or soon will be.
She opens the door and her joy dies on the threshold.
Her throne world is desecrated.
Not annihilated, as Oryx's was. The pillars and terraces and courtyards still retain their shape. But the roots have rotted, and the geometry festers.
She should have known she would not be the only one to plan for such eventualities.
Oryx's bootprints pucker like scars in the labyrinth that was once only her own.
She sits a while beneath Sjur's statue, then follows his tracks through the ruins of Eleusinia, back to the Dreaming City.
—
She is home.
But it is not the same.
Shuro Chi has been Taken. Kalli and Sedia, too.
And Riven - She used to sit in the shade of those wings. Laugh at the riddles that rumbled in that mercurial throat.
This creature is all teeth and broken promises, transformed by the expectations of another scheming, secretive sister.
"I cannot stay here."
These are the first words that pass through this throat. Her throat, though it shares none of the molecules that comprised the code of her former body. They scrape and ache as they pass through her lips.
Again, if only to remind herself that she is alive:
"I cannot stay here."
