She heard something heavy being dragged and looked up to see Corien kneeling a few paces in front of her. He’d found a body, still intact—one of the Obex, she assumed. She’d missed one.

Corien caught her wrists before she could destroy it.

“Wait,” he said, his voice coming through a churning sea of color. She blinked, and blinked again. Perhaps her vision wasn’t so clear after all. She could see the black and white of Corien’s familiar form, the faint sheen of red coating the ground, but beyond that, all was gold—gold behind her eyes, gold beneath her fingernails, gold at the corners of Corien’s mouth.

She lunged forward and kissed him, greedy and full of fire. She bit his lips, climbed into his lap. She was ravenous. In her right hand, she clutched Saint Ghovan’s arrow.

“Rielle, wait, listen to me.” Corien’s voice floated down from the clouds. Gently, he detached himself from her. “I need you to try something for me. Now, while you’re still hot and humming. My beautiful girl.” He pressed a kiss to her brow. His voice was urgent, thrumming with excitement. Or was she herself thrumming? The whole world was thrumming, and she had made it so.

Smiling, she touched his face. She’d been drunk before on wine and ale, but that was nothing compared to being drunk on the ecstasy of her own power. She sensed, distantly, that it had never been this good before, never this eager or quick—and never this disorienting. How suddenly it had erupted; how violently it had come over her.

She braced her palms against the ground. “What is it you want?” She laughed at the absurd shape of her hands in the dirt. “Anything. I can do anything.”

“I know you can.” Corien pushed the Obex’s body closer to her. “I have friends here. Many of them. Can you see them?”

He sent her a thought, and she sensed how tentative it was, how careful. He was being careful with her in a way he’d never been before.

He was afraid.

She would ask him about that later, but at the moment she was fascinated by the thoughts he was sending her. She became aware of a new presence—a dozen of them, dozens of them, all drifting nearby. Consciousnesses. Mighty ones.

“Angels,” she breathed, looking around in wonder. “There are angels here.”

The empirium granted her vision that her eyes would never possess. Faint shapes drifted through the air, dim and pale, shapeless and anguished. Their voices teemed, whispering. They did not have hands or arms, and yet she felt them reaching for her, imploring. They lacked cohesion. The empirium gold glinting inside them was pale, worn out.

“Those who have escaped the Deep,” Corien was saying quietly, “but who are not strong enough to be soldiers, I have sent here, to the City of the Skies, to hide and to wait. For you, my vicious marvel.” He paused, a tense, expectant beat. “Will you try? Now, for me? Your power is so vital right now, I can barely…Rielle, I can hardly look at you. You’re brilliant. You’re shining.”

“I am the Unmaker,” she said simply, kindly. An explanation. “And I am the Kingsbane. But you shouldn’t be afraid of me.” This she announced to the air. She felt settled in her own skin, blissfully calm. “Who among you is bold enough to be the first angel reborn? Come forward. Come to me.”

A mind approached her, curious and afraid, trying to mask its fear. A child, Rielle thought. A boy. A vision of truth came to her: As an angel, during the First Age, this child had been a creature of alabaster skin, hair that fell in auburn waves past his shoulders, amber eyes flecked with bright green. When the Deep took him, rent his body from him, he had been mere decades old, quite young for an angel.

“Malikel,” Rielle whispered. “Don’t be afraid. Be reborn.”

Her empirium-bright vision took her under. It showed her that the boy, Malikel, was at his core nothing more than stardust. Millions of spinning orbs, each more brilliant than the sun, each connected to all the others—and to the ground Rielle knelt upon, and to the darkening shape of the corpse at her feet. It was an abomination, that corpse. She hated the sight of it. Why would it lie gaping before her like this, so dead and dim, so lifeless, when it could easily be made whole again?

She worked quickly. Her power was endless, brewing like a storm. She followed its reach up to Malikel, tugged on the threads of his mind. Some nearby threads, slippery and elusive, she could not touch, not yet—the threads connecting this place to that place, the threads connecting the moments ahead of her to the moments behind.

Darkly, she thought of Obritsa. It wasn’t fair that the girl should enjoy privileges Rielle could not.

“Someday I will travel anywhere and everywhere,” she murmured as she knit together the threads she could touch—the physicality of the corpse, the eagerness of Malikel’s mind—and dreamt of the threads she couldn’t. “Someday, I will travel to the ends of everything and then back to the beginnings. Someday, marques will fall to their knees in envy of me, for I will surpass them.”

“Concentrate, Rielle,” Corien said urgently, his voice near and far at once. “You’re dimming fast.”

And he was right. Something was changing so rapidly that it made her falter. Malikel’s mind, all his ancient thoughts, were half knitted to this corpse, this body with its brightening light. A braided path brought them slowly together, a connection of the empirium itself—angel to corpse, vibrant mind to dead flesh. The beginning of a new life, crafted by her own will.

But then Rielle’s fingers caught on an empirial knot—a snag in the fabric of energy she had woven—and she stumbled in her work. The energy that had come over her as she killed the Venteran Obex bled swiftly from her. It was as if she’d been holding up a palace with her own two hands, lifting it high in the air, and then her muscles gave out without warning and the entire structure came tumbling down. The knots unraveled; the threads of mind-to-flesh and flesh-to-mind slipped from her grip.

She didn’t hear Malikel’s scream, for he had no mouth, no voice, but she felt his panic, his terror and pain. It wasn’t just that the stitches she had created were unraveling.

Malikel himself was unraveling.

She felt the essence of his mind unspool. Something at the core of his consciousness was rent open and flew apart, a detonation. The pieces of him went flying, his thoughts reduced to sheer terror, and then he was gone.

Rielle sat back hard on her heels.

The corpse steamed at her feet, now a puddle of blood, bone, and punctured organs. A constellation of sizzling gashes dotted what had once been its torso, and through the gashes blazed a golden light, rapidly fading.

Rielle looked up at Corien through a veil of weariness, and as her exhaustion returned, she began to understand what had happened. The thoughts of the other angels brushed up against her, all of them terrified, all of them astonished and cowed.