Prologue
Ash does not remember what it was before the fire took it.
I have thought about that more than once, lying here with the stone cold beneath my back and the sky burning violet above me. Whether the ash remembers the tree, the letter, the wedding gown. Whether it screams, somewhere far beneath its own silence, for what it used to be.
I think I am becoming ash.
There was a scream before this. Mine, I think, though it no longer felt like it belonged to me by the end. Now there is only the after—the strange, suspended hush that follows something breaking beyond repair. Smoke curls from the blackened grass in slow, lazy spirals, and somewhere above me, impossibly steady against a sky that should not exist, Inyx watches from above, without blinking, but I swear I could see tears in her eyes. I don’t know if they were for me or for him. Probably him.
Don’t, I tried to say. Or perhaps I only thought it. Don’t do this. Not for me.
He didn’t listen. He never listens when it matters most—that has always been his particular, infuriating flaw, one I loved before I had the sense to be afraid of it.
His hands were shaking when he pressed them to the wound the world had made in me. I remember that most of all. Not the pain—the pain was already leaving, already going somewhere I couldn’t follow—but the shaking. As if the earth itself trembled beneath his palms.
“Stay,” he said. Just that. As though it were a command the universe was obligated to obey.
Light bled from him then, and it was not warm like fire, nor cool like water, nor sharp like wind, nor patient like earth. It was all of them and none of them, a colour with no true name, and it poured out of him like something being torn loose rather than given freely. I felt it drag through my chest, through my bones, through the marrow itself, unraveling something that was never meant to be touched by mortal hands.
You will destroy yourself, I thought, or tried to say, or only feared.
He smiled instead. A terrible, beautiful, breaking smile.
“Then let me.”
The last thing I heard was a woman’s voice, calling his name from somewhere far away, frightened in a way I had never heard her sound before. The last thing I felt was his forehead pressed to mine, his breath uneven against my skin, whispering something that might have been a promise or might have been a prayer—I could not tell the difference anymore, and perhaps there never had been one.
Then the violet light swallowed everything.
