I only smiled at her, leaning down to kiss her forehead—then pulled her lily from my hair and tucked it behind her ear. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “No matter how bleak the world gets, I’ll make sure there’s always a corner to plant flowers.”

Then Iranti knelt, allowing me to climb onto her vast leathery back, and carried me into the amethyst lake. When she set me down on the shrine’s small island, the abiku cackled with anticipation, sending bursts of pale green lightning across the sky.

The handsome, merciless face of Warlord Fire stared down at me. The metallic smell of the Unnamed Deaths filled my nostrils, turning my stomach. My gaze fell to the statue’s outstretched spear, its tip capped in chilling white ivory.

“For a world worth surviving in,” I whispered. Then I nodded at Iranti . . . and in one deft movement, she lowered her horn to press between my eyes, and I touched a finger to the spear of Warlord Fire.

I screamed, immediately seeing red.

Blinding, searing pain—shooting up my arm, enveloping my skin like a wave of crackling acid. I was dying. It was killing me—grasping at everything I was. Hungry to extract every memory, every day and hour, the marks on my soul that made me Tarisai. In only an instant more, it could have me. It would all be over. I would fall into a deep, dreamless sleep, my soul a slate wiped clean. My body a willing puppet for the abiku: their instrument for a new age of terror. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. Perhaps humanity would fight back. All I had to do was let them have me, just for an instant more and the pain would disappear.

I clenched my fists. Not all pain was worthless.

Sometimes, pain could write a story.

“Now,” I shrieked at Iranti. With a burst of heat, she magnified my Hallow as I thrust it into the statue, inverting the shrine’s power, taking its memories before it could steal mine.

Every nerve in my body begged for me to stop, alight with torture. But I pressed on, on, absorbing the complete and unabridged memory of one Redemptor’s life—then ten—then a hundred. My skin sweltered where it touched the spear, and I watched my finger pale as the life leached out of it—from dark brown to tan, and from tan to clammy white. I couldn’t feel it anymore. A small part of me knew that I would never feel it again. But I stood firm, sobbing with agony and triumph as my body blazed with stories.

I was a young Redemptor girl from Dhyrma, the daughter of beggars, thrust into the Breach before I even turned five years old. I was the son of Djbanti hunters who tried to hide my Redemptor marks with mud and clay, living in denial of my fate until monsters attacked my village, and guilt drove me into the Underworld. I was thousands and thousands of Songlander children, raised in the shadow of an empire that only valued their bodies once they were dead. I am generations. Three thousand lives. Four. Six. Seven.