I knew what I had to do. It was what Tanzi wanted me to do, what she’d wanted me to do all along.
To go beyond.
To be free.
All these hours and days and weeks, I had had only one purpose: to reunite with my Sisters and my Lazy Bug.
All these years, I’d thought this was my future. I would become a powerful Sightwitch Sister and join the ranks of those who protected Sirmaya—and who one day joined with her forever in sleep.
But my Goddess was dying. If I finally took hold of what I’d always wanted, it would mean turning my back on a world that needed me.
I couldn’t do that, and Captain had been right all along. Back on the Way Below, he’d been right: there was not one set path for me. I could choose another. I could make my own Sight with clarity and purpose and thinking beyond.
Tanzi had said there was another way to heal Sirmaya, so I would find it.
I splayed my fingers on the ice, right over Tanzi’s heart. It was so silent now. So still. “I’ll come back for you,” I whispered. “I’ll heal the Sleeper, and you’ll wake up again.”
Then I gathered up Eridysi’s diary and the gold leather pouch, and with my chin held high, I left behind all the people I’d ever loved.
The ice, however, had a different plan in mind. I reached the exit, ready to march back into the main spiral, when a loud crack! rattled through the room. Everything shook, hard enough to topple me.
I found my gaze level with Trina’s. She looked so young within the ice.
Ice, I realized, that was moving. Too surprised to react, I watched as three crystals lanced out from beside Trina’s head.
More cracking sounded around me, echoing and solid. I looked down to find ice rising up from the floor.
It wasn’t until the ice slid its claws around me that I finally moved.
I bolted for the door. Ice erupted from all angles. Bigger, fiercer. Stalactites to pin me down.
This tomb did not want me to leave.
I dodged. I leaped. I hit the spiral pathway, where the Rook hovered in place, panic clear in his frantic wingbeats.
He saw me. He cawed. Then he folded his wings and dropped like a stone.
“Curse you!” I screeched, slinging left. “I can’t fly!”
I couldn’t blame him for leaving me, though, for as I launched my legs high, ice began to fall. A tremor from a dying—a cleaving—Goddess.
I ran.
I don’t know how I mustered such speed after so much exhaustion. After losing the one thing I’d wanted: my family. Yet somehow, by the grace of Sirmaya, I ran faster than I ever had before.
The world around me misted into a streaming haze. Ice rocketed toward me, sentient and grabbing. I ducked, I dove, I twisted and turned. I hopped, I stumbled, I ran, ran, ran.
“I don’t want to sleep!” I tried to holler between bounding steps. “I want to heal you! I’ll find another way—no sleeping!”
The ice did not listen. The tremor did not stop.
I reached the bottom floor, where the Rook screeched and flapped at what little remained of the exit. If I’d thought it tight before, it was nothing compared to now. I wasn’t sure I could even fit in there, much less squeeze all the way through.
The Rook squawked a warning.
I dove sideways. Half a beat later, ice smashed to the ground. A huge column of it shattered outward, and as each shard hit the ground, it reached for me.
No. No. No. What little power I possessed was a drop of water compared to the other Sisters. Thousands of them slept in this mountain, from the thousands of years we’d been protecting Sirmaya. With my mind, my drive—I would heal the Goddess from the outside.
I would not succumb to the sleeping.
I hit the exit and flung myself inside. Cold wrought the air from my lungs, and ice razored into my chest, my legs. Shrinking! This space was shrinking! And the ice would not let go. Over and under, it crowded in, trying to hold me down.
“Release me!” I shoved sideways. Harder. Harder. Blood streaked the blue behind, but I couldn’t stop. The Rook had squirmed ahead, and since he was still moving, there had to be a way out.
Time stretched into a strange, incongruous thing measured in grunts and cracks and endless straining. Until finally I was there—I could see a sliver of darkness that could only be Paladins’ Hall.
As if sensing how near I was to escape, the ice closed in all the harder. A shackle sliced around my left wrist. Then another around my ankle.
I tugged, I fought, I screamed, “I don’t want to sleep! I am going to heal you! Let me go!”
Still, the ice ignored me. It pulsed outward, a vise to clamp off my breath, to smash in my skull.
Still, I battled and reached. Blood and tears mingled in my mouth. There was the hall—right there. I was so close, so close.
I reached it.
Even now as I write this, I do not know how. The ice moved enough for me to free my wrist and ankle, then I toppled headfirst through the doorway.
But I wasn’t safe yet, for the ice was not stopping at the door. It was thrumming outward, trying to claim me even as the door’s halves swung in.
Please shut, please shut.
The door did not shut, and in a stone-trembling roar, the ice burst out. It was coming for me.
I scrabbled around, my mind a clash of rules and fruitless prayers. Rule 35: Stay calm, for panic serves no one.
Please, Sleeper, help me. Please, please.
Rule 13: Never leave a fire untended.
“Enough,” I hissed at myself. “Focus, focus.” What were my options? I was alone on the ledge with the Rook nowhere to be seen—nor Captain. I hadn’t thought he would be here, but I’d hoped.
How else was I going to leave this platform? Even without the ice, I needed a way off.
Fighting to ignore the approaching ice—so loud, so loud—I scuttled to the edge of the stone and stared down.
A galaxy of stars met my eyes.
We had flown right over it, and I’d never seen.
As I stared at the stars—not true stars, but spirit swifts swirling and dancing amid nine lights placed in perfect coordination—I realized that the answer stared up at me.
I laughed then. The sound burbled out, a pot boiling over in my belly.
For it was right there. The answer to the Nine Star Puzzle was right there and had been all along.
Suddenly, I knew what Tanzi had been saying all these years. Think beyond, Ryber. Think beyond.
She meant beyond the framework of stars. I had always assumed that I had to keep my chalk inside the slate, but it wasn’t true—nothing in the instructions ever said I had to.
I tore out my map, and there, right under my nose, was my second answer: the way off this ledge. It was even scribbled on the paper.
Palladin’s Hall, 38.
It’s what all these numbers on the map were. Rules. But I’d been so trapped inside the framework, I hadn’t thought to think beyond.
Tanzi had recognized that the stars, the Rules—none of it was real. It was only what we chose them to be.
I stuffed the map into Eridysi’s diary, no time to fold it. The ice was at my heels, and I had to go. Now.
I threw a final glance down. If I was wrong, then it was a long way to fall—a very long way to fall.
But I wasn’t wrong.
This was my true path. One without structure, without Sight or guarantee or anyone at my side to help me forge ahead. Yet I knew what mattered most, and I would do whatever it took to get there.
Just as I had found the Supplicant’s Sorrow all alone as a child, I would find a way to heal the Goddess. And when Sirmaya was healed, when her sleep was calm and there was no more risk that this world would end, then I would return for my Sisters. I would return for Tanzi.
And with that purpose held tight in my mind, I stepped off the ledge.
I did not fall to my death. The bridge had been there all along, even if I could not see it. What is life except perception?
This was how Tanzi had lived. While I’d been hiding behind my walls and rules, she had tasted freedom.
I walked and walked, the bridge ever descending while starry spirit swifts glimmered closer with each step.
The doorway that Captain had taken hazed into focus. First a glowing wave of blue. Then the archway. Rubble. Jungle vines.
And finally the Rook, waiting for me on the floor.
When at last my feet stepped onto visible stone once more, my lungs whooshed an exhale of such force that I doubled over. Then I laughed again, the same delight singing through me that I had felt above the invisible bridge.
My jubilance was short-lived, though, for as I drew myself up, I found the Rook chittering his beak. He skipped forward, backward, side to side.
He wanted me to go through the door.
I wiped at my face and fixed my gaze on the jungle fanning ahead. Sweat, blood, a salty line of tears—all of it smeared onto my sleeve, but I hardly noticed. My thoughts were on the Rook.
He had guided me and saved me every inch of the way. He’d saved Captain too.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” I asked, trudging a step closer to the door. “He’s a Paladin?”
The Rook’s head bobbed. He clacked his beak.
“And he’s important.”
Another clack, and this time the Rook ruffled his feathers. “Hurry,” he was saying. “No time.”
I wanted to ask why. I wanted answers to everything—why Captain mattered, what waited beyond that door, and above all, how to heal Sirmaya. But the Rook couldn’t speak, and my only chance for real answers lay beyond that rubble.
My gaze flicked down to Eridysi’s diary, still clenched in one hand. Perhaps it held answers too. After all, I had found this for a reason, and there were no coincidences, right?
“Will I be able to get back in?” I asked the Rook, lifting my gaze once more.
Another bird nod, and a tension unwound in my chest. I could return. I could fetch Captain, and we could return.
“And … will you go with me through the door?”
His head shuddered with a no.
“All right, then,” I murmured. I hadn’t really thought he would, and now he was clucking at me to hurry. So after easing the diary and pouch onto the rubble, I clambered over the fallen bricks and swept aside the vines.
Then, for the first time in my living memory, I left the grounds of the Convent.