“You should leave this place.” She didn’t bother to imbue her voice with threat. She let the threat of the daiva act as her armor. When she took a step forward, the armed mystics flinched. “Irinah has no place for the Saltborn any longer.”

She knew her words were true. She’d felt the dreams of Gods. She’d been in the presence of a daiva so ancient it spoke her tongue. Returning the balance of the world, allowing the Gods to dream naturally, would return the world to order. But balance did not have to be kind. Balance wore the face of a nightmare as easily as it wore the guise of a daiva veiled in stars.

The mystics had praised the Maha. The mystics had loved him. The mystics had helped him chain the Gods and weaken the daiva, and now with the Maha’s death the world had slipped swiftly, brutally from their grasp.

Mehr looked at their feet, pressed to the sand. Beneath it, the Gods they had helped chain slept and dreamed their unleashed dreams. She thought of the shadow of the daiva and the way it had risen beneath her feet. She thought of the flat, silver eyes of nightmares too-long crushed beneath mortal heels. She thought, too, of Abhiman’s death. His blood hadn’t yet begun to cool.

They shouldn’t be surprised, Mehr thought, if the world shows them its teeth.

They would be wise to leave Irinah swiftly. She did not think they would find what passed for balance, here on the backs of sleeping Gods, anything akin to a kindness.

She held her courage, held the iron in her spine, and walked toward the temple. The mystics parted like a sea to let her pass. Their weapons hung useless at their sides. She knew she would never see them again.

Amun was still unconscious. Mehr leaned over him. Sand had come into the room through the open shutters. His face glittered with dust, the loose curls of his dark hair etched with gold. Mehr brushed the sand from his eyelids. He didn’t stir.

“Please wake up,” Mehr whispered. She whispered it against his forehead as she kissed him, just once, as if her mouth could pass on blessings just as Elder’s had. “I can feel you. I know you’re not gone. Come back and see the world we’ve saved.”

She took his hand. His skin was warm. “Please, Amun.”

She was too raw not to feel her own fears. They washed over her. She feared that fighting his vows to the Maha had broken him irreparably. She feared that the Maha controlled him still, those vows extending beyond death. She feared having to let him go. She feared that it had all been for nothing, that the world would go on but Amun would not, and Mehr would be left behind, alone with nothing but her grief to sustain her.