“Dying?” Malachite offers cynically.

“Praying,” I correct softly.

“Do you believe in the gods now, all of a sudden?” Fione scoffs, the uncertainty getting to her, too. I feel for Lucien’s hand under the table, and he holds me.

“I believe in what people do and what people don’t do. I believe in our power to come together and to come apart. And that’s all. That’s all I know for sure.”

The words hang, nervous and young and small. They sound ridiculous in the face of so much importance. We’re talking about the final battle, the last stand, and all I can do is give platitudes. All I can do is stay awake, stay strong, stay ready. I have to be ready for the moment, because it will come in all the chaos, and I have to snatch it from between the fingers of my well-meaning friends.

because you did this, the hunger whispers. you freed the valkerax. all those cities, all those people—dead because of you, wolf.

That beach running red. All those valkerax dead because of me. Lucien’s grip tightens. He’s skinreading me, I know it. The horrible guilt is a more effective armor for my intentions than even the songpoem of the wolf who eats the world.

Not me. I didn’t do this. This horrible web was spun long before I was even born. The Old Vetrisians, the witches. Decisions were made by scared people, by power-hungry people, by people. I didn’t do this; we all did. All of us fed into it and out of it, like a constant polymath machine. A cycle. A cycle that feels too big and too ingrained to ever break. Breaking it would mean breaking the world apart, throwing every previous rule into chaos. The end of the world.

No—the end of this world.

And the beginning of a new one.

A new one for Lucien, for Fione and Mal and Yorl. For Varia. Varia was wrong. We can’t just carve the world into a shape we want. That’s not how things change. One person can’t hold the chisel. There’s no point in holding the chisel at all if what you’re trying to carve is the bare tip of the iceberg.

The whole iceberg has to break for the river to flow again.

I am not a chisel. I won’t use a chisel. Not like everyone else. Maybe it’s the valkerax blood promise in me, but even my littlest thoughts are clear and certain and like poetry, like songs—my mind moves like a song and I finally understand Muro. His words. Evlorasin, too. Everything the valkerax ever said that sounded like nonsense becomes so clear.