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Yasha is sitting in sunlight.
The breeze carries the smell of caramel and oranges from the fair ground further downhill, where the circus has joined another travelling troupe to entertain a crossroads farming town.
A light weight settles on the crown of her head, but she doesn't startle. It's too idyllic here in the grass and wildflowers to be afraid.
"Pink's a lovely colour on you," Mollymauk says with a grin, settling against her side easily. A crown of flowers is perched between his curling horns, a stray stem threatening to catch in his dangling jewellery. He tugs on her grey shirt teasingly. "If you'd just let me add a little bit..."
"Maybe another day," she says like always, shooing his hands away from her side. He huffs, still smiling, and stretches out in the soft grass.
It's easy, being with Mollymauk. Warmth settles in her chest where she was sure there was nothing but cold stone and storm clouds now.
Thunder rumbles, distantly, but she's caught up in the way sunshine plays off his skin and scars. Something about this moment seems important. She needs to remember it.
One red eye cracks open. He smiles, a soft thing just for her.
"Karra-du," he says quietly, Infernal rolling of his tongue like catching sparks.
"Shivashel," she sings back in the language that lives in her blood.
Something about this moment seems important.
He twines his fingers with hers, a striking contrast of pale and tattooed purple skin.
This feels important.
"You are more than what the world wants to make you," Molly tells her. She can't look away from his eyes, his teeth, the lithe line of his body next to the broadness of hers.
Thunder rumbles, roars. This feels important.
She wakes.
-
The Orphanmaker walks across the dead land like a construct, like a monster, like a storm.
"Here," Oban hisses, pleased. He stands above a gaping chasm, impossibly dark even as the sun reaches its zenith.
She unfurls creaking bone wings and draws her blade across her forearm, sending divine blood and words into the abyss.
The Abyss calls back.
-
Yasha's in the rain, head tilted back and arms outstretched. The wild wind makes the strange land around her feel familiar.
Someone comes up behind her, but she's too content to pay them heed.
"What are you doing?" Mollymauk calls over the pounding of rain against the packed dirt road. He's at the edge of the shelter of the tree line. "We have tents for a reason!"
"It's not the same," she tells him for the nth time.
A spark takes hold in her chest, a half-forgotten giddiness that prompts her to spin and grab him, twirling him further out into the storm. He squawks, flailing and trying to pull his hood up, but he's soaked in seconds. His expression, sour but trying not to laugh, feels familiar. Is familiar.
Her chest aches, empty, but not as bad as before.
"Happy now?" He grumps, kicking mud at her shins like it would bother her. "There's velvet on this coat, you're not supposed to get it wet!"
"Sounds like a poor fashion choice."
His offended huff of laughter jumpstarts her heartbeat. The numbness starts to fade.
"Never change," he says fondly, shaking his head. He loops his arm through hers, angling back towards camp. The organized chaos of dinner preparations sounds like it's in full swing, and someone's already picked up a set of pipes.
She thinks about dancing without music, the sparse coarse grass a rustling chorus under their feet, Zuala snorting with laughter and tripping both of them until they fall.
It's Molly at her side now, chattering on about Mona's hair and Toya's dolls and Bo hoarding the good whiskey. A drop of icy rain rolls down the back of her neck, her hair plastered to her face and shoulders.
"I like coming back to this," she says as she realizes it. Molly hums, butting his horn against her bicep.
"I like it when you come back," he replies. He squeezes her arm tighter. "Even if it takes a while. You're worth the wait."
-
The thing they release tears a mother roc from the sky, screaming.
Oban wraps her arm with pristine bandages. They feel dirty on her skin - or maybe it's the skin that feels dirty.
He pulls her hair, pinching the white ends between two red claws with a sneer.
"It doesn't suit you, Orphanmaker."
She nods, eyes fixed on the ground. She knows it doesn't.
-
"What does it mean?" Molly asks.
It's late, the camp quiet around them. The tent they share is dark - they can both see, but only in shades of grey. She finds that she misses his eyes.
"Hm?" She's half-awake, and only because he woke first with a gasp and crawled on top of her.
"Shivashel," he says, mangling the word. It still sends lightning through her. Her arms come up to wrap around his waist, his scarred skin feverish to the touch. "I - before, you sounded -"
Scared.
She was terrified. Because earlier there'd been a fight - rare on the road for such a large, eclectic group, so they were unprepared, stupid - and she'd lost sight of him only to see him stumble and lose a sword, barely dodging a killing blow.
She cards her fingers through his hair, sleep-tousled and soft. His tail winds around her thigh.
"It's hard to explain," she whispers, voice still hoarse from screaming.
"Try?" He asks, voice uncharacteristically small. "Cause I - I have an idea, but I want to you to say it, and then if it is what I think it is then I have one too."
One hand on his back, tracing his ribs and scars. The other in his hair, following the curve of his horns. He breathes against her, his pulse in time with hers.
"Shivashel," she starts uncertainly, the word like a prayer she feels half-sinful saying. "It's like... I don't know if there's a direct..." She takes a steadying breath, feeling off-kilter and vulnerable in a way she hasn't since the first time she cupped Zuala's face gently with her violent hands and kissed her.
"In my tribe, we are made of three parts. Body, heart, and soul. Your body is your tribe's, to work and fight for. Your heart-" her voice catches. "It beats for the one you love, but it beats with its match. There's another soul in the world that matches yours, from when all life was created at once and then split into millions of parts."
She meets his eyes, grey in the dark. He stares back unblinkingly, rapt.
"Your soul is the missing piece of mine," she says to him in a language she doesn't know the name of. Shivashel.
He shivers, dropping his head against her collarbones. The brush of his breath against her skin is gentle, fragile.
"I don't know how I know," he whispers. "I don't know if this is his or - or something else, but I -" he shivers, and she tightens her grip on him. "...I know it means something like 'half-mine', like I own you, but it's not just that - it's 'half-yours', too, at the same time, and it's sitting in my chest like I need to say it but if it's not mine -"
"I'm yours," she says with a conviction she never thought she'd feel again, heart pounding in her chest. "Whatever it is, it's ours."
He choles out, "Karra-du," and it feels like renewal. Like rebirth. Like she's walked through fire and found him on the other side.
"Shivashel," she sings to him, and he hisses back "Karra-du," and they go back and forth until they can say both perfectly, and then they sleep, wrapped in each other.
Their hearts beat together.
-
Her pulse pounds in battle. It's the only reason she knows it's there at all.
There are monsters at her back, following in her footsteps. She is the monster at the back of a fiend, following his footsteps.
Blood slides slick and heavy across her skin, dripping from her blade to turn the churned earth to mud.
He wipes the filth from her hands.
"Our work goes swiftly," he says with a grin that curls too far across his face. "We have always been better together, haven't we?"
She doesn't want to tear his throat out. She doesn't want to rend and tear and burn the army he's summoning one profanity at a time. She doesn't want to scream.
-
This time she knows it's a dream, because she never saw this part.
Beau, bleeding, teeth bared. Nott, frozen, clinging to a cart filled with cages. Caleb, putting the pieces together, knowing what comes next.
Mollymauk, on the ground, the glaive in his chest a pillar, a monument.
He spits blood and pride. His eyes never shut.
The twist of the blade snaps ribs and tears fragile tissue, collapsing his chest when it's pulled out with thoughtless ease. Like it's nothing. Like the sky didn't lose the moons.
She screams, wings snapping out and summoning shadows and lightning. She's unarmed. She's unconscious in a cage that Nott never even reached. She's angry.
She tears Lorenzo's throat out.
"Monster," she howls. She plunges her hand into his chest and pulls out a black stone. It shatters into diamond dust in her grip.
"Mollymauk," she cries, gathering him to her chest. He's limp and cold and his eyes are still open.
"Yasha," Beau says carefully, hands out in front of her like she's approaching a wounded animal. Yasha snarls, bloody and tear stained and awful. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry -"
It should have been you. Any of you. Not him. Anyone but him.
She stands, staggering. Her Mollymauk is the heaviest burden she's ever carried. Her second chance. Shivashel.
She carries him away, until she can't carry him any further. She's overtaken a distant storm, the wind howling the way she can't anymore.
The chains are still there. She's still in a cart, in a cage, unaware. She's standing over him, wearing his blood, wishing she could bleed for him.
Where do you find your strength?
She screams wordlessly into the gale. The sky screams back.
Where do you find your strength?
She screams until she can't anymore, and then she cries. And then she answers, "With the ones I lost."
The earth rises to meet her, binding her in place. Mud hardens into steel. She lets it pull her flush to the ground, her cheek pushed into the dirt. She feels like filth.
You can break them. You can be free.
She can't.
-
The Orphanmaker hesitates.
She still strikes, but there's a pause, a moment. Oban doesn't notice, for now.
She kills for him. For the cause. For the King who will remake the broken world.
For now.
-
"Here now," Zuala says, her voice quiet and sad and echoing strangely. "Breathe with me." Yasha feels arms wrap around her, familiar, pulling her tightly to a warm chest that she longs to bury herself in like a body in a grave.
She could have died in these arms, if she were stronger.
Zuala's fingers are gentle, combing through Yasha's hair. She takes out every braid, unknots every tangle, leaves beads and blue ribbon scattered around them until Yasha is bare and boneless.
"He was lovely," Zuala says, quiet and sad and adoring. "The other half of my heartmate."
"To have you both..." Yasha whispers, her voice all but gone. "To be whole -"
"You were never broken," Zuala says fiercely. She shoves and prods until they're facing each other, hair loose and mingling. Her face is fierce, like this is a battle she's determined to win. She's missed this, missed her, the way she bares her teeth and furrows her brow and leans in close enough to share breath.
Yasha kisses her, because what else can she do? Her heart, her wife, here and as close to living as she'll ever be again, because Yasha was weak. She's always been weak, and she always will be, so she kisses her. Because it will hurt in the morning to wake up alone but at least for now she has this.
"You were never broken," Zuala whispers again, pouring the words into her mouth. "My love, my heart, my Yasha, you have always been strong enough."
A lithe body presses against her back, trapping her between two bodies. A tail wraps around her waist, and a hand brushes her hair away from her neck. His lips meet her skin, feverish and soft.
She sobs, pressing back into him - she wants to live in Zuala's chest and breathe through Molly's lungs, wants them to consume her, make use of her because she's little more than spare parts without them -
"None of that now," he scolds. "So cruel, so slow to forgive yourself for things that were never your fault."
"Our Yasha," she whispers, reverent, cupping her face with work-worn hands. "So convinced that we made you that you forget how you made us."
-
Oban means to march on Rosohna. He means to shatter the Beacons.
"We must plunge all Light into shadow," he says with great importance, like he speaks prophecy. "Because from the darkness, great things come Crawling."
She nods, studiously sharpening her blade. She thinks he sounds foolish, a raving madman - but then, he hasn't rested in weeks, pushing the limits of even a creature like him. He seems to subsist only on a dark divine fervour that she's been unable to summon, one that she assumes she once felt, when they last travelled together.
The gibbering mouths of the Laughing Hand croon mournful, hungry songs. It will hunt tonight, loping out into the wild lands with the other horrors she's helped release to find anything with a pulse to tear open and devour.
Oban sits across from her, snatching her whetstone from her grasp. He wants her attention, always.
"When our work is done, what will you ask for?"
She stares at him.
"Your mate is long gone," he says casually, not noticing how she grits her teeth. "But that's little trouble for our Master, I'm sure. It will be a wonderful new world you bring her into."
She pulls her second whetstone from her bag and starts sharpening again, the screech of metal enough to drown him out.
That, she remembers, is what was promised. It's why she Fell. The chance to see her again. The promise that if no holy power would bring her back, the darkness would.
Looking around now at the monsters she's unleashed, at the unhinged fiend she follows, she wonders if it's been worth it at all.
-
Nott unlocks her cage and frees her from her bindings. The battle raging beyond the spelled, stinking cart sounds dire, the sounds of her friends in pain beating at her ears. The sound of Mollymauk aching in her chest.
She tears Lorenzo's throat out, screaming.
Molly jumps into her arms, wrapping tightly around her, trembling with adrenalin and exhaustion and terror and relief.
"Don't put me down," he begs, voice muffled in her shoulder. She's only heard him sound so desperate after his worst nightmares. "You're here, we're okay, Yasha..."
She holds him, carries him away from the hulking, cooling body on the ground. Snow begins to fall, turning the world crystalline and pure around them.
"I'm with you," she tells him, over and over until he starts to calm. "I won't fail you. I won't lose you. Shivashel."
He shudders, his teary smile pressing into her skin like a welcomed brand. He breathes "Karra-du" into her shoulder as the last of the tension leaves his body. He kisses her lips, her cheeks, her forehead. She rests her lips on the pounding pulse point in his neck, lets the thunder of it soothe her.
She sets him down beside Beau, who's fussing over Jester with bandages in one hand and a water skin the other. She spares Molly a glance, knocks her leg against his, and goes back to convincing Jester to use a little healing magic on herself, arguing that she's fine, everyone's fine, Molly's just a baby and Nott's already got Caleb half-mummified but you're hurt, Jess, c'mon...
She stays standing, casting her eyes over the group. Sees them bloody and tired, sees the shock setting in along with disbelieving joy.
Caleb, pale but proud as he scans the rest, momentarily meeting her eyes with a nod and a flickering half-grin. Nott, ferocious and gentle, prodding Fjord's aching shoulders and telling him to suck it up and stretch while running a hand through his hair. Beau, leaning into Jester - or maybe Jester leans into Beau, both of them looking impossibly young.
Mollymauk, half-asleep, covered in his own and others' blood, smiling to himself.
Her tribe.
She thinks of dry, sharp grass. Towering purple and grey trees. The half-feral hunting dogs, the ease of accumulating scars, the bonfires and funerals and weddings and births. Zuala, a bright spot of colour, a gentle breeze, simple joy.
The iron around her wrists is cold enough to burn and heavy enough to send her to her knees. Her friends are laughing and touching and living around her, unaware. Mollymauk is breathing.
"You forget how you made us," Zuala says with a fond, sad shake of her head. Her hand is cool and calloused against Yasha's cheek, brushing away the beginnings of tears. "You're more than a body made to fight and kill. More than someone else's heartbeat." Soft lips meet hers, lingering, sharing breath. "You're more than what you've lost, dearheart. More than your pain."
She strains against her bindings, wanting to feel Zuala with everything she has and is. She wants to hold her.
She wants to be strong enough to be happy again.
Caleb makes a bubble, a dome of light that will protect them, make sure they don't lose anyone again. Jester smiles, shaky but genuine, leaning into Fjord's side with her tail looped around Beau's wrist. Nott passes around a flask. They're planning their next steps, mapping their way to Shady Creek to finish the job and head back to Zedash. The conversation sounds like fragile hope. They're planning a future, together.
Molly's lying in the road in moonlight. Bloody. Dead. Buried.
She's alone, grieving, angry. She's on a boat, thinking about how much they both would have loved the ocean. She's fighting alongside these strangers that pulled her from a second hell, trying not to get attached. Seeing pieces of her pain in all of them, realizing that there is more sadness that binds them than joy. She's learning secrets, sharing secrets. There's an empty space at her side and in her chest, but there's little time to think about the ache when she's always racing to keep up, to keep them safe.
The tunnels. The Dynasty. The Barbed Fields. Zombies and mirrors and a many-mouthed horror and Oban -
She's following, but is she really? Is she walking? Who's in control? Her chest is a gaping void, a hollow centre in a brittle shell.
She's weighed down by iron, by pain, by guilt and grief and simmering rage. Oban's coiling grip is just another chain.
She pulls, and feels something start to give.