The journey ends the way ash settles over a landscape: a long, slow coming down, a few flickers of light that grow thick and fast. Misery’s awareness of her boundaries returns cumulatively. First the concept of physical matter, then the idea of time, then a realization that space and time are fixed. She first senses that she is a person, a discrete individual, and that individual has a body curled on its side against some cool, dark and flat thing. Blood pulses in that body, and she feels it coursing through her chest, worrying the hollows of her neck, twitching down the insides of her legs. Her lungs fill and empty themselves of air. She has a face, a mouth with parted lips, a pair of eyes that lie shut.

Someone moans, a sound somewhere below her. Misery registers the sensations against her left hip and her chest as pressure, weight. Not hers: another body, prone against her still form, cold and trembling strangely. The Lady Lee Alodia Lightning. The Imperial princess.

Something is deeply wrong. Alodia Lightning isn’t breathing right. Misery finds awareness of her own hand in the dark—a small useful thing of bone and tendon and knuckle—and forces it to move. The hand responds, remembering that it is part of a body. She needs to find her eyes, her limbs, the rest of her flesh and gristle, she needs to get up and do something. See what’s wrong. She’s fighting, swimming up a long tunnel of inertia toward consciousness, glimmering over the surface she just has to reach.

Misery breaks through. Her surroundings snap into focus: she’s in a huge, dim cavern full of chilled air. Her body is intact and free of pain, almost like it’s been numbed.

Beside her, crumpled into an inert comma, Alodia Lightning is dying.

Misery forces her body into action. She gets to her knees. Takes Alodia Lightning by the shoulder, tries to roll her over. Not good. The soft flesh of her has been irreparably broken in transit, whatever divine protection that kept Misery whole not extended to her. Breath sloshes through lungs full of liquid. Blood pools dark and sticky around her mouth, her face. “Hey,” she says. “Princess. Lady Alodia.”

Her eyelids flutter, vaguely, and her lips move. “Sorry, I—guess I wasn’t supposed to—”

“Hey.” Misery squeezes Alodia Lightning’s shoulder as she fades. “Don’t do this—you said.” But what did she say? Misery isn’t clear. The words simply tumble from her mouth.