Page 144 of Her Soul for a Crown
The Yakkas flew out of nothingness. Shadows turned to fissures, leaking soul and stardust. The clan spun anew, into darkness so black that the stars were swallowed whole.
No. Reeri’s heart ached as they twisted farther away, swirled and stretched, spun and snapped.Stay.
Ratti. Calu. Kama. Sohon.
Please.
A crack ruptured his chest.
Sank deep in his soul.
Silenced his heart.
***
There must always be balance.
56
Anula’s heart stuttered.
Where the red mehendhi marking had once flowed intricately across her arms, where it had once flayed and torn and streamed with her blood, it now receded. Fading to brown and amber, it disappeared into open wounds.
No sting, no pain. As though it were mere ink.
Her lip trembled.
The Great Sword clattered to the floor and blinked out of existence. Wind blew out of the black seam that had swallowed the Yakkas and their lord, kicking up Anula’s hair and sari, jangling her earrings and bangles. It drowned the cries of those waking from Wessamony’s curse, stifled the sound of stone walls shaking apart, and swallowed the screams that opened the mouths of guards and ministers.
A thin finger of darkness curled out of the seam, slithering through the room like a snake in the brush, and plucked Bithul up by his heels. It tipped him over, stripped him of leathers and weapons, picked at the wounds Hashini had etched on his ankles,and flayed them open until only blood and bone whirled on the wind.
“Keep going.” Fate’s voice boomed as they landed before her.
Anula startled. The finger of darkness stretched around the room, unmaking victim after victim. But she had already acted. What more could she do?
A simple bone blade—Prophet Ayaan’s voice surfaced—imbued with Fate’s power, able to cut off the Hand of Death.
Cursed blessings.
The stories of old told of a time when the people of Anuradhapura had turned on one another. A time when they’d protected themselves instead of their village, when the idea of immortality had become tangible. Anula had witnessed a version of it in the first blessed painting she had experienced. How could she have forgotten? The relic hadn’t been made to kill Heavenly beings. It had been forged for humanity. To cut the Hand of Death.
The Hand that held Bithul.
That had taken Reeri.
Kama. Calu. Sohon.
Anula gripped the relic tight and prayed, for the first time, with true faith. “Great Divinity of Fate, hear my prayer. Allow me to cut off the Hand of Death and save the lives stolen tonight!”
The blade warmed beneath her hand. Winds ceased. Sounds silenced. And the bodies left in the amphitheater paused, immobile.
Only Fate and Anula seemed able to move. Slowly stepping to Anula’s side, the cosmos sparkling in their eyes, Fate said, “Let us begin.”
The rocks stirred first, lifting into the air and fitting back into the walls and ceiling and stairs, like a peg to a hole. Dirt dissolved, the air cleared, and like stars winking alive in the falling night, they came—men, women, and children burst into the room the exact way they had left. Courtiers, Kattadiya, and, finally, Bithul.
Upside-down and motionless, flesh and blood knit themselves back together. Anula stared at the white specter standing at his side. A chill swept through her bones.
It was not a shadow, not the dark wisps of Reeri’s banished form, nor was it bright and shining, a star or a sun. Its form pulsed to no drumbeat. Its color everything and nothing and one. A smile broke on one side, with no teeth or fangs gleaming. There was only a hole where a mouth should be, black as night, and from it emerged a pristine bone from which fingers, long and thin and innumerable, grew. They stretched until they touched Bithul’s ankles.
