Page 115 of While the Dark Remains
Eleven Years Ago
Year4189, Month of the White Lady
Daeros—Tenebris
I am not sure who pulls me away from the cliff, only that someone does.
The whole world is shaking, ice flying off the mountain, wind turning to knives that slice across my skin and make blood dribble warm and wet down my neck.
“Brynja. Brynja,Stop.” My father’s voice, bellowing in my ear.
And I realizeIam doing it: shaking the world, ripping the mountain apart, killing us all.
I stop.
The mountain settles.
The earth calms.
I blink and see Lilja’s body beside us in the snow. I brought her back up to us in my frantic mind-storm, too late, too little.
Her neck is twisted, her arms and legs bent at odd angles, bone piercing white through her pale skin. Her wings are little more than sticks and rags now, no magic at all pulsing in the ruin of them.
I stare at her. I can’t stop staring.
Somewhere, someone is roaring.
It’s me.
My father cannot heal her. Not even the Prism Master of the Iljaria has the power to bring someone back from the dead.
Yet my parents shout petitions to the Gray Lady anyway.
She doesn’t answer.
Lilja stays dead in the snow.
And King Kallias watches, his blue eyes glittering. Like he isn’t at all surprised.
Year4189, Month of the Prism Lady
Iljaria—the Prism Master’s house
We stand on the hill outside my parents’ house. Lilja is dead, dead. White face and white hair, wrapped in a shroud of gray. The shroud is silk and embroidered with flowers, but it is still a shroud, and she is still dead. She ought to have lived three centuries or more. All she got was fifteen years.
Father sings the funeral chant as her body rises into the air.
My heart burns with sadness, but my eyes are dry.
Brandr sobs in the chair we brought up the hill for him because he can’t stand for any length of time. I didn’t know. I didn’t know he loved her, too. I hate myself for not including him when I wriggled my way into the trip to Daeros. He didn’t even have that last week with her, like I did.
“We surrender Lilja Eldingar to the stars,” says Father, and he sings the song of unwinding, a magic that is as old as time itself.
Lilja’s body bursts into thousands of glittering sparks: her magic, released from her mortal frame.
And now she’s truly gone.
But it isn’t over.
