I look at the First Root sticking out of the dirt, crystallize its sundered shape in my mind. The connection between Bone Tree Varia and the valkerax part of me twinges, a harp string plucked too fast and too hard. She’s seen it. She knows I’m looking at the First Root. So close to splitting it again. Too close.

The impact is instantaneous. I hear Malachite shouting outside, Fione wailing, the hiss of steam as Yorl’s matronic moves, the battle raging outside as my unheart splinters into a thousand shards. Lucien’s face looks ashen and fearful—scared of losing everyone. Of losing me.

But we can’t move. We can’t go out and help them. We have to be here, at the First Root, to fix it all. To end—and begin—it all.

I have to trust that they’re still alive. I can’t let the emotion of fear submerge me. Drown me. The ocean is so big, so full of life, but I won’t drown in it. I can swim. I’ve learned to swim now. Reginall taught me. Ev taught me. The fourteen men I killed taught me. Lucien taught me.

Everyone in my life taught me to swim in the ocean of myself.

I can swim now, and there’s an island I have to reach—that black-rock island of Rel’donas, that small, peaceful room where I found rest at last.

Fire starts to lick at the cave’s mouth, and the ground rocks us to our knees as two valkerax entwined in furious combat writhe over each other just outside, slamming into the cave and away from it, blood spattering over earth and our clothes and staining the First Root. Dirt and dust fall from the precarious ceiling, white feathers and fur flying.

Ev.

Ev, tearing into the stomach of its brethren, as its stomach is torn into, too.

And then Varia.

She appears out of nowhere—teleporting? I don’t know, but she feels like she’s gone, far away, and then she’s in front of us, sallow and hungry and mere rags, a skeleton of the princess I knew and the sister Lucien loves. It’s clear to read on his face—he doesn’t move. He can’t. She looks like a corpse. Dead. Worse—sucked clean of all life. The bone choker around her neck is nearly decapitating her now, the red flesh of her windpipe showing, the white tendons of her throat column exposed. She looks a waif, but the power around her is harder and heavier than lead.

And her milky, shriveled eyes are on me.

In a way, Lucien’s shock, that one moment of hesitation—his love for his sister sealed the world’s fate. He could’ve gone for the First Root the moment she appeared. But his love roots him to the spot for just this one second. And I take it.