She took a breath. Then another. Only fools didn’t feel fear; that’s what Ora Dasai had always taught. But that wasn’t true. Heroes felt fear. Villains did not. She was always afraid to let it go, because if the fear went, so did everything else.

She remembered the burning legion.

She let go.

Opened her eyes.

The braids of Oma’s breath were suddenly clearer. It wasn’t mist but intricately bound symbols. They were trefoils with long, curled tails. The tails bound them together.

Lilia took a deep breath. Her lungs opened. Her skin burned. She focused her power on the delicate end of one of the trefoils and pushed.

Something pushed back.

Lilia gasped.

Great, clawing figures of trefoil-bound mist gathered her up. Pulled her from the ground. Yanked her forward.

Lilia rushed into the air. She dangled eight stories up, propelled to the top of the mirror. The body there had come alive. It was more a torso, really, with stumps for arms and sightless eyes. Weeping thyme sprouted from the eye sockets, covering the cheeks of the face.

Lilia recoiled. But she was bound tightly from head to foot in Oma’s breath. She looked down. A mistake. The height was dizzying. She had fallen from this height once already. Fear riddled her. Oma, she could not fall again. She was already so broken.

The body that was – or had once been – her mother lurched toward her as far as her buried torso would allow. Her mother opened her mouth and made strange garbling sounds. Her tongue was gone.

Tears streamed down Lilia’s cheeks. She knew then why her mother pushed her through the gate so many years ago. This is what the Kai meant to do to Lilia.

“I promised I’d find you,” Lilia said. “And I did. But you opened a gate for them. I have to close it.”

Her mother sank back toward the edge of the mirror. Lilia watched the ropy bands of power pulse and shimmer. Her mother cocked her head. She wasn’t sure how much of her mother was in there, or if the Kai had truly made her into something else.

“The trefoil,” Lilia said. “I can break it, but you have to let me.”

Lilia saw the bands of power begin to grow more sluggish. Her mother grunted. Spasmed.

“Let me go!” Lilia said. “Let me go so I can–”

The breath holding her aloft was suddenly gone.

Lilia fell.

She gasped – air and the breath of Oma, one breath. She envisioned the trefoil with the long tail. She had half a breath to choose – break her fall, or break the mirror? She chose. Lilia pushed her hands forward. She recited the Song of Unmaking and directed the surge at the apex of the mirror. At her mother.

Her mother screamed. The bloody red mist around the mirror’s edge evaporated.

Lilia braced for impact.