The infirmaries grew crowded with survivors, and soon all the cabins were taken over and made into sickrooms where people lay in the cool darkness, sipping coconut water as they clung to life.

Three died in there, and we consoled ourselves by saying at least they’d gone surrounded by friendly faces, not on the open ocean, alone but for the dead.

We burned their bodies, and those of the countless others we’d been too late to save, and no one talked about the gods looming taller and taller as we came within sight of Anahera’s red cliffs and the brightly lit city of Flamecrest. We just looked at them, felt the weight of the shadows falling over us, and wondered if it was too late for prayer.

Give me peace. Give me grace. Give me enough love in my heart.

I stared back at Damyan, who’d wrenched himself up from the ocean, separated from Darina until she, too, made ready to abandon us.

How could our gods, these beings who’d given us life and gifts and a place to live, desert us? How could they turn their backs on their own children?

My chest tightened with grief I’d never imagined possible, and the prolonged presence of the giant noorestones. If I’d pushed them again, we’d have been in Flamecrest hours ago. But the people floating on the open ocean . . .

None of us could have passed them by—or crashed atop them—and lived with ourselves.

Now, my friends and I stood at the bow of the Star-Touched, the bones of the first dragon coiled up behind us.

Gerel leaned her head on Chenda’s shoulder as they looked at their gods, not quite silhouetted as the sun edged lower in the sky. The chains hanging from Khulan’s body—the God Shackle, warriors called it—gleamed with rust and uprooted plant life as they swung through empty air. And Bopha—she was a dark, terrifying form who cast no shadow on the water. She was the shadow.

Aaru and Hristo stood together, both quiet as they faced Harta, and whatever complicated feelings my protector felt toward the island of his birth—they didn’t seem to matter right now. His god had risen and now he would never get to know what a life there would be like—not the way it was before.

And then there were Ilina, Zara, and me. LaLa and Crystal perched on the rail between us, chirping softly. We watched Damyan for a while, his arms open and waiting for Darina to join him. I wondered if it had hurt, that separation. They were two gods, two islands, but connected by an isthmus where his arms held her. Everyone spoke of them as one island, so much that we’d long ago combined their names, but now . . . now they were broken in two, torn apart by the Great Abandonment.

It had always been a choice, I thought. This sacrifice. This slow shift of my human soul into the dragon soul. Just because it was laid out in text didn’t mean it wasn’t my decision in the end.