Zahra nodded. “Yes, Eliana. I pledge this to you.”
Eliana gave her a grim nod. “Then do it. Quickly.”
Without warning, Zahra collapsed into a twisting cloud of light and shadow. Her new shape resembled great, jagged black wings.
Then she rushed at Eliana and disappeared.
And Eliana opened her eyes—and she saw.
? ? ?
Unlike when she had seen the Emperor, this vision was all too clear.
There was no fog blocking her sight. She felt the steaming hard ground beneath her feet. The air was close, rippling with heat; her nostrils burned from the ash darkening the air.
Movement at the corner of her eye made her turn. A woman stood watching her, tall and ebony-skinned, wearing a suit of tarnished platinum armor. Her thick white hair fell in braids past her hips, and gold paint rimmed her dark eyes. Massive wings of shifting light and shadow spanned out from her back.
“Zahra?” Eliana whispered.
Even Zahra’s small nod was magnificent. “As I was during the Angelic Wars. Before the Gate. Before the long curse of the Deep and the loss of my body.” Then she pointed. “Look, Eliana.”
Eliana squinted across the fire-ribboned plain, and images rushed at her like the horrors of a nightmare:
A woman stood on a distant flat plinth. She raised her arms and carved a blinding door from the sky.
A castle flashed white, then fell, and from the abyss around it rushed a wave of ruin. There was a cry of pain and fear, a chorus of thousands—millions—and then silence.
The screams of a woman in a bloodied bed.
A baby, held tightly in the arms of a boy. Eliana peered over the boy’s shoulder, and she knew as she stared at the infant that the face looking back up at her was her own. Then she turned to see the boy, and—
A vastness of black, filled with screams too alien to belong to either human or animal. There was a light on the horizon and a figure standing beside it. Eliana cried out, crushed by the lonely weight of this place, and ran toward the light—
She was back on the firelit plain, watching a woman kneel beside a dismembered, blood-soaked corpse. The woman’s back was to Eliana. She wore a suit of black armor and a crimson cloak. The woman moved pale hands over the corpse, knitting across skull and collarbone, down chest and across severed hips. The air around the corpse shimmered, shifting, and then the woman sat back, calm, and the corpse jerked, gasped, and staggered to his feet. He was no longer a corpse. His skin was whole and new, his limbs intact. He took a few unsteady steps before falling to his knees. He looked down at his body and then threw out his arms and shouted to the skies—with joy, with relief, with fury.
The woman rose, smooth and silent, to her feet.
“You’re working faster now,” said the man beside her, whom Eliana had not noticed before. “Well done.” He drew the woman into an embrace, and Eliana stood frozen in horror as their faces came into view.
The woman was dark-haired and unspeakably beautiful, with a face so pale and faultless it could have been carved from porcelain—save for the shadows stretching dark beneath her green eyes and the small, hungry smile curling her mouth.
Eliana brought shaking fingers to her own lips.
My mouth, she thought and then touched the brittle ends of her own tangled dark hair. My hair.
And the man standing beside this woman—blue-eyed instead of black but with the same lovely pale face and untroubled poise that graced the painted portraits in Lord Arkelion’s palace. Black hair, mud-caked cloak, a bloodstained sword at his belt. He guided the woman’s mouth to his, and she clung to him as if their kiss was the only reason she remained standing.
The Emperor.
Eliana frantically backed away, tripped over another corpse, fell to the ground hard.
The world shifted, darkened.
She blinked.
She had returned to her cell, and Zahra hovered quietly in front of her—a mere distortion of the air once more, ephemeral and wingless.
“Please breathe, Eliana,” Zahra urged gently. “I know it is a great deal to understand.”
Eliana gasped for breath, tears streaming down her face. Her skull felt too heavy for her body. Her skin still felt flushed from the battlefield’s flames.
“That was him,” she croaked. “That was the Emperor. But…”
“That was the Emperor before he called himself the Emperor. When his name was simply Corien. He was the first of us to escape. And I am sorry that he was.”
Remy was right. The thought kept circling through Eliana’s mind. They’re angels. The Emperor, his generals, Lord Arkelion, Lord Morbrae. Remy was right.