Someday she would be dead.

The relief that accompanied the thought was so sudden, so violent, that she almost audibly gasped. A confusion descended upon her, robbing her of memory and volition. She swayed, raised a hand to her blinking eyes. Then she found herself on the floor, sitting in a way that would have horrified her vestiaries it was so common, so undignified—no better than a whore hanging her legs from a window. She saw Kelmomas watching her, tried to smile reassurance. She leaned her head against the unyielding marble, the image of him lingering in her soul’s eye. Small. Defenceless. The very image of his dead twin.

She heard his voice.

“Mommy? Does he hear us?”

She simply could not stop seeing him, Samarmas, his blood clotting the grass, his body as small as a dog, slowly relaxing about the spear that pierced it, slowly drifting asleep. Every time she blinked.

Every time she looked upon this other son.

“I told you …”

“No … I mean when we think.” He was crying now, a desperate kind of hitching that made him bare his teeth. “D-does Sammy hear us when we think?”

She opened her knees and he fell into her arms, burned her neck with a muffled wail. And she saw—with grievous clarity, it seemed—that Samarmas’s death had sundered her soul in two, the one part numb and wondering, the other clinging to this child, this replica, as though trying to absorb his shudders.

How could she protect him? And if she could not, how could she love?

She laid her head across his scalp, blew at the hairs that stuck to the seal of her lips. Her cheeks were wet, but whether the tears were her own she could not tell. No matter. The mob would be appeased. Her Exalt-Ministers would be relieved, for the Yatwerian matter had become far more than a Cultic nuisance. Who would raise voice or hand against a bereaved mother? And Kellhus …

She was so tired. So weary.

“The dead hear everything, Kel.”

Iothiah …

A life lived, now forgotten.

And in its place …

A breeze as dry as hot ash. An airy room, clean with tile and paint, the floor canted to drain storm-waters. A woman in a simple linen shift, wedding young, her hair raven-dark, suckling an infant, smiling, asking something sweet and curious. Her head tipped, almond eyes flashing, poised to laugh at something soon to be said, a warm and gentle wit.

Peach-coloured walls trimmed in vining green.

A life forgotten …

Concern clouding her dark eyes. A quick glance at the infant against her breast, then again the question.

“Love? Are you okay?”

You look like you’re dreaming …

A doorway, open onto a vista of tan and blue—pale and soft and oceanic. A blue that does not hang close behind the nodding palms, but opens and opens to the white ribs of heaven. A blue like billowing cotton.