“All of the woe the world has to offer, if need be. So long as we overcome the only one that is fatal.”

The Second Apocalypse.

She was beating his chest softly, pressing her forehead into the jasminescented silk. She could feel the reptilian imprint of the nimil-mail beneath. Looking up through tears, he seemed a towering glow and shadow both. “But it’s you they hunt! What? Do the Gods want a Second Apocalypse? Do they want the world shut against them?”

She had chosen Kellhus over Achamian. Kellhus! She had chosen her womb. She had chosen power and sumptuous ease. She had chosen to lay her hand upon the arm of a living god … Not this! Not this!

“Come, Esmi. I know Maithanet has explained this to you.”

“B-but it seems … it s-s-seems …”

“Most live on the edge of heartbeats, trusting their betters and the blind eyes of habit to see them further. A rare few can apprehend the span of entire lives. But you and I do not possess either luxury, Esmi. We must act according to the dictates of the ages, or there will be no ages for anyone to live. And this makes us appear cold, merciless, even monstrous, not only to others and ourselves, but to the Hundred as well. We walk the Shortest Path, the labyrinth of the Thousandfold Thought. This is the burden the God has laid upon us, and the burden that the Gods begrudge.”

She found herself on the surface of his voice, for once hearing it with a musician’s cold ear: the tunnelling harmonics, the resonance that forced it into unheard immediacy, the papery rasp that raised it outside the circle of the world.

The voice that had conquered the First Holy War, then all the Three Seas. The voice of the King of Kings, the mortal echo of the God of Gods … The voice that had conquered first her thighs and then her heart.

She thought of that final afternoon with Achamian, the day that Holy Shimeh fell.

“I haven’t the strength! I ca-can’t b-bear losing any-any-m-more …”

“You have the strength.”

“Let Maithanet rule! He’s your brother. He shares your gifts. He should rule …”

“He is Shriah. He cannot be more.”

“But why? Why?”

“Esmi, you have my love, my trust. I know that you have the strength to do this.”

A gust from over the dark sea. The violet sheers roiled and billowed, parted like gossamer lips.

“The White-Luck,” he whispered in a voice that was the sky, the curve of all horizons, “shall break against you.”

She gazed up at his face through sting and tears, and it seemed that in it she could see every face, the mien of all those who had bent upon her in Sumna, when she had kept a whore’s bed.

“How? How can you know?”