As they watched, all that brilliance—from crystalline glass, golden potions, and glowing copper—infused into Shiya. Her bronze began to shine as if freshly poured. Her form appeared to melt and flow. The scratches and dents warmed away. Even her crooked leg grew straighter.
Despite the miraculous healing, Shiya’s mouth gasped open. Her eyes now blazed with a light that could only be described as agonizing. Her fingers curled into crabs of pain.
Rhaif moved closer, but Frell held him back.
“Shiya,” Rhaif moaned.
Within a few breaths, the light began to fade. As it did, her bronze form grew stiffer. All expression faded from her features. Her hands flattened against the copper. Then her eyelids lowered, less like someone drifting into slumber and more like tiny hatches being winched closed. Shiya stood there as the surrounding brilliance dimmed to a low glow.
The heartbeat in the floor also faded.
They all stared, holding their breath.
“What happened?” Frell asked.
Nyx stared at the blankness before her. “I think … I think she’s left us.”
* * *
RHAIF PACED IN front of the glowing cocoon, his hands wringing together in consternation. He breathed heavier, but he still felt lightheaded. He heard the others whispering as he kept vigil.
He remembered finding Shiya in exactly this same posture, a glowing bronze statue in a golden web. He remembered the wonder and exquisite terror of that moment.
Now it was all gone, snuffed like a candle in the dark.
He stopped and pleaded to the bronze statue, Please don’t go.
Still, he recognized the selfishness of this request. He stared at her body, returned again to a bronze perfection. He remembered his earlier worry, when he had watched her hobble along the copper tunnel: Maybe you should have never left your egg. This world is too harsh for even a woman made of metal.
Perhaps his wish had been granted.
Ignoring the risk, he climbed up the ramp and stood in the glow of her grace. He lifted a hand and reached to her chest. He settled his palm against bronze that felt as warm as any flesh.
Tears rose at his loss.
Still, he had to let her go. “Be at peace, my Shiya.”
He lowered his gaze, letting his arm drop away—only to have warm fingers catch his hand.
He stared up into eyes that shone a perfect azure blue; the glass was so lifelike that he defied anyone to say otherwise. She bowed her chin in thanks. Her palm rose and cupped his cheek. His mother’s lullaby echoed again in his head, only far stronger than before.
She let him go and stepped past him. She moved unabashedly in her nakedness. The others drew closer. She moved to a section of wall to the left of the cocoon. She waved a hand, dissolving open an alcove in the wall, the copper vanishing as if it were smoke.
From within, light blazed out. It rose from a crystalline cube veined in copper with a golden mass pulsing at its core.
She removed it with great care, then pressed it against her bare navel.
Rhaif flashed back to the mines of Chalk, to the Iflelen Wryth infusing his bloodbaerne elixir at that same spot. He remembered the poor girl’s life pouring into Shiya, waking her to this harsh world.
Only there was no horror here.
The crystalline cube glowed brighter—then sank into her bronze flesh and vanished. It was as if Shiya were instilling a new heart, one strong enough to withstand this world.
He glanced to the others, who looked on with equal wonder.
Shiya crossed around the cocoon to the other side and repeated the gesture, dissolving open another cubby. No glow greeted her. From inside, she removed a crystal cube resting atop a pedestal. Its facets were so clear it was difficult to discern it was even there. She lifted it free and turned. She then headed over to the glass table, where the shimmering world slowly turned.
Maybe her world.
They all followed.
She held the cube in both palms, and a soft light infused into it. She finally spoke. It was not the whispers of before, but a voice stronger and clearer. Still, it was evident she struggled.
“Much … is lost,” she warned. She glanced with misery across the expanse of broken glass. “I … am not hale … whole.”
Rhaif swallowed, remembering what Xan had told Pratik. Shiya carries the spirit of an old god inside her, one who has not yet fully settled. Maybe that was still true.
“I can only hope to do enough.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, but not from weakness, only confusion and fear. “I will show you what I can … share the little that was left to me by the missing Guardian.”
She glanced back to the cocoon.
Rhaif stared over with a frown. Had someone else once stood there and left? If so, he sensed that abandonment had happened long ago.
Shiya again looked sadly at the ruins of the room. Rhaif now wondered if the damage here had been deliberate or was simply due to some quake, perhaps when the Shrouds were uplifted in the ancient past.
Frell shifted closer. “Shiya, what can you show us?”
She returned her attention to her crystal cube and passed a palm over it. In front of her, the shimmering world suddenly cast off a blazing sun. It shot across the room and stopped high in the air, hanging like a bright lantern. Next, a silvery moon drifted free. It circled above their heads, passing around and around the spinning world.
Rhaif grew dizzy at the pageantry of it all.
“Thus, it began…” Shiya intoned, and waved her hand again. “Over three hundred millennia ago…”
The spin of the globe gradually slowed. As it did, lands sank, oceans boiled, and winds eroded mountains. Great quakes tore the world, uplifting new coastlines, tearing apart others. Finally, the turning stopped completely, leaving one side blazing under the sun, the other dark and shadowed.
Still, time continued to pass before their eyes. Ice piled up on the dark side, while the sun blasted the other to sand. Between those extremes, a twilight band circled the world, ruddy at one edge, shadowy on the other. Lands within that band shone with forests and rivers, or were striped with tall mountains, or rolled with green hills. Blue oceans swirled throughout all, ringing this new world.
But it wasn’t new.
Nyx leaned closer, staring wide-eyed and unblinking at a northern breadth of this twilight circlet. Her voice was pure dismay. “It’s … It’s our Crown.”
* * *
NYX STUMBLED BACK from the revelation, as if it could be dismissed by distance. She refused to believe it but knew it to be true.
“The Urth once turned,” she gasped. She tried to hold this thought in her head, but it seemed too vast.
Frell faced Shiya. “I don’t understand. What stopped it from spinning?”
She stared at the frozen globe. “I cannot say. Much was lost…”
Nyx shifted another step back, grinding crystals under her heel. She sensed the enormity of knowledge shattered and destroyed across this space. Shiya winced at the grating noise, as if confirming this.
Shiya turned to Frell. “That is not the question you should be asking.”
“What is then?”
“To understand…” Shiya returned her attention to the shimmering image of the Urth. She waved a hand over the cube in her palm. “The past you’ve now seen. But this is what’s to be.”
As they watched, nothing seemed to happen. The Urth remained fixed and unmoving, one side blazing, the other side frozen. Then something sped past Nyx’s shoulder, a flash of silver. She ducked from it, startled, only to realize it was the glowing moon.