Lightbringer

Corien, standing at Rielle’s side with his hands clasped behind his back, held the man fast, waiting.

With her eyes, Rielle traced the lines of Tamarkin’s body—every muscle, every sinew, every bone. She saw beneath his skin to his pulsing organs, his veins rich with blood. At his foundation, a sea of gold crashed and ebbed, forming everything that he was. Brightest in his mind and at his heart, illuminating the twin webs of his lungs.

She could have looked at him for hours, watching in fascination the pulses of light and energy that were his frantic thoughts, his rapid heartbeat. Only she could see these things, these deep inner workings of body and blood; not even the angels were witness to them.

“Are you ready, my love?” asked Corien gently.

Dreamily, she said, “Almost.” She knelt at Tamarkin’s side, ran her fingers along the dips of his pelvis, the ridges of his ribs. His skin twitched at her touch. In Corien’s grip, mute and terrified, his eyes were wild. He watched her fingers as if fearing claws.

Around them, the chamber pulsed. Tricks of light teemed in the air, but there was a heft to them, and their intelligence pricked at Rielle’s mind, deferent but greedy. The air bent to make room for them.

Angels, waiting in throngs. Their energy was that of a herd of beasts in their pen, muscles trembling, flanks sweating.

One of them hovered over Rielle’s head. His name was Sarakael, selected on a whim by Corien as the first to be resurrected. Rielle could sense Sarakael’s fervor, how he longed to fall before her in ardent worship.

But she hardly noticed him. Though she could sense every watching angel—how their minds slipped through the air, how their whispers rustled and hissed—her attention was entirely on the man lying before her.

She wondered if she should be nervous, but she was not. The chills traveling along her spine were like fingers tapping her awake.

Corien stepped closer. Now, Rielle?

She nodded. Now.

At once, Corien killed the man. An easy shattering of his mind, and without the mind, all else would fade. There would be agony, he had told her, for an instant, and then a nothingness, a slip into the long dark of death. Rielle watched the light leave Tamarkin’s lovely blue eyes.

His empty body waited for her to begin.

The how of it was easy, but she suspected the doing would not be. She had thought it all out. As Corien slept, she had sat in the fur-draped chair by the windows and stared out over the vast ice, designing her method.

And now, she followed her own instructions. Her breath trembled, her body alive with a surging heat that knocked like fists at a door. She reached out with her power and commanded the angel Sarakael to enter the body, then waited while his faint shadow-self sank through every orifice—the slightly open mouth, the nostrils, the ears. She placed her hands around the skull, for this was the most important anchor. Living mind to dead brain. Bright eyes to dull ones.

The trick, she thought, was to work while the empirium was still bright inside the corpse. Tamarkin’s body was warm, and seas of gold still pulsed inside him, but soon they would thin. The more vital the empirium, the stronger the binding would be.

So she began to knit.

She used her hands, because she found the physicality a useful focus and because she wanted to look impressive and unknowable. As she knelt on the ground beside this dead man, rebuilding him into something new and glorious with her deft fingers alone, the angels would look upon her and marvel. The bond would be stronger than if Sarakael had simply possessed the living body. She would stitch them, mind to body, fusing the two together so completely that they would become a single being, stronger than either human or angel. A new kind of life of her own creation.

Rielle moved over every inch of the skull, and beyond her fingers, her power searched and explored. She felt the cool, supple texture of Sarakael’s presence, waiting breathlessly. The empirium shone brilliantly in the minds of angels, and Sarakael, young and weak as he was, unable to take true hold of a human body without assistance, was no exception.

Once, it might have hurt her eyes to look at him. Now, she stared right into the blazing inferno.

She worked her power like a seamstress with her needle and stitched the angel to its new body. Incandescent light to fading, dull light. Inch by inch, speck of gold by speck of gold. Millions of stitches, each miniscule and infinite.

Sweat poured down her back and arms. She felt a distant coolness—Corien placing a wet rag against her neck and brow. She had warned him not to interfere with her mind, as it could disrupt her concentration, the flow of power from fingers to angel to body.

But as she worked, she began to long for his familiar touch. Resurrection was an immensity for which she was not truly prepared. With each stitch, she lost a bit of herself and then regained it. Her muscles were torn and rebuilt a thousand times over. Her breath came fast and sharp.

“My love, should you stop?” Corien’s voice was tight with concern. “Is it too soon after the Gate?”

“Leave me be,” Rielle commanded. She formed the words through a dreamlike fog. “I am both the Maker and the Unmaker. The thing that destroys and the thing that creates.”

Her vision blurred and expanded until she could see everything in the vast underground chambers at once, and then everything in the Northern Reach, shrunken to the size of an artist’s canvas. Or was it she who had grown, surpassing the constraints of her own body? She saw the mountains encircling them, the vast frozen sea, the White Wastes. She saw the stars in the sky and the worlds that turned beyond them—and that was too much, too confusing. Frightened, full of wonder, she reined in her wandering vision, returned her focus to her furiously knitting hands.

At last, she finished.

Her vision was still consumed by the empirium, and she watched, elated and exhausted, as the body before her, this new creature with his ancient powerful mind and his supple human limbs, rose before her. He tried out his legs, stretched his arms to the high ceiling, and crowed in triumph.

He coruscated, glinting. He experimented with running, jumped and darted. He was faster than Tamarkin had ever been, beautifully limber, breathlessly strong. He gripped a torch bracket affixed to a nearby pillar and swung himself up into the stone rafters. Naked and glorious, he shone faintly, as if he had been dipped in gold.

Rielle watched him from her spot on the floor, holding her body still. She felt Corien standing tensely behind her but could not possibly turn to look at him; she would crumple with exhaustion, and she refused to do that where they could see—this swarm of angels, all chasing after Sarakael. Their jubilant howls were a clamor in her mind.

Sarakael jumped to the ground, then hurried to Rielle and prostrated himself before her. He kissed her fingers, the hem of her gown.

“Thank you, my queen,” Sarakael murmured at her feet. “My glorious queen. I do not know how to express my gratitude. To move again, to run and jump. To feel the cold of this stone and the damp of the air, the weight of the mountain above me and the soft glide of my perfect skin. My queen,” he choked out, “you cannot know what this means to us all.”