“Having a place in the world isn’t about what you get, it’s about what you serve.” Jean-Claude had said that to her once, words that had lain cold and forgotten until fear and need stirred them up. The world had stripped her down to the nub. The powers that be feared her, not for anything she had done, or even for her strange forgotten sorcery. They feared her because they looked at her and saw instead what they would do in her place, how they would reach for power and seek revenge.

Yet power and vengeance were not the principles Isabelle served. She followed her curiosity wherever it led. She served peace. She practiced mercy. She could not be empty while she still had strength to give.

If she let her ancestors in, she might lose her singularity, but as long as she stood by her purpose, she might at least salvage a functional human being from the wreckage. It would be a sin not to try, not while she possessed the strength to act.

But deciding to act was not the same as knowing how. When before she had chanced to touch the ghost shards, they latched onto her like ticks and tried to empty her to fill themselves. Always she tore them off before they could drain her. Always they carried bits of her away, leaving holes in her thoughts, like words she ought to know but could only almost remember.

If she could not remain separate from her past lives, her only option was to draw them in. Bitterlich said absorbing new soul skins was like taming the beasts and giving them a new home. Rebecca had described in detail what it felt like to absorb the ghostfire wyrm, how she drew it into a thread and wove it onto a loom, a structure that she had discovered and developed deep in her own mind.

Fenice sorcery was not the same as Seelenjäger sorcery, but both were gifts of the Builder. They were deliberate constructs of divine power, just like the great ruins of the Primus Mundi or any of the quondam artifacts that survived the Breaking of the World. Designed and bestowed by the same hand, might these sorceries work the same way?

Isabelle gathered herself for a great leap. Her body’s fever burned hotter with every second. There would never be a better moment than now.

Come, Isabelle commanded the circling fragments.

Like a cloud of many-colored insects they swarmed toward her. She reached for the smallest one. Her fingers brushed its edge.

It melted and flowed into her fingers and up into her awareness. She found herself male, and young, kneeling on a high plateau overlooking a burning city. In this life, his name was Galleni Sigsimondo. He cradled his dead son in his arms, and howled in anguish. “Mateo!”

He wept and moaned, stroking Mateo’s downy head. Grief like molten iron coursed through his veins.