“We’re stuck here.”

“We’re not. There has to be a way back.”

“A way back? Neither of us can swim!” Arjun yelled. “And even if we could, it’s miles and miles across the waters. There are no trains, do you hear me? There is nothing between us and Rishiya. We can’t go back. We’re trapped here and we’ll die here, just like Asees and the others.”

He threw the blankets off of himself and stood. Karam wasn’t sure what she could do but stand by his side. There wasn’t anything she could say to make it better.

“I don’t know what to do,” Arjun said, burying his face in his hands. “They’re all still on the beach. She’s still…”

He dropped off and shook his head, collapsing down beside the small fire they had lit before they drifted off to sleep.

The bodies of his Kin were still scattered across the Shores of the Dead. Karam and Arjun hadn’t had the time to give them a proper funeral, and apparently nobody was coming to Tisvgen anymore.

“That’s what we’ll do first, then,” Karam said. “We’ll send their spirits off well, so that they may join the Indescribable God. After that, we’ll figure out the rest.”

Arjun nodded. “Okay,” he said, and that was all he said.

Even as they gathered what little supplies they had left, rolling up their blankets into their bags and hooking knives to their belts and swords to their shoulder straps, Arjun stayed quiet.

It was only just before they left that he gathered the small barrel of rainwater and turned to her. “Swear that we’ll avenge them,” he said.

“I swear it,” she promised him.

And then Karam watched as Arjun threw water over the fire and the light turned to ash.

IN WRENYAL, when a person died, their body was turned to flame and thrown into sacred water, so that their spirit could be free to escape this world and travel on to the next to join the Indescribable God.

The Onnela Sea wasn’t divine water, but it was water nonetheless and it was the thing that circled this realm before joining on to the mighty ocean that led to Wrenyi. If Karam thought about it that way, then it seemed better, as though the ashes of their friends might just find their way back home to their own realm.

They had gathered the bodies of their fallen soldiers and placed them into a circle, where Karam and Arjun now stood in the center. Karam tried not to look at their faces, but she couldn’t help it. Asees looked calm, not like she was sleeping, but like she was taking in the beauty of the shores and the smell of the ocean salt.

“Let us pray,” Arjun said.