“There are no godstars,” said Scarab, and with her words came a brief, bleak sending: just a sundered sky and the understanding that there was nothing out there in all the vastness to watch over them, and no help coming. For the many gods they had named and worshiped in three worlds and more, when had help ever come? Scarab said, in a voice to match her words for bleakness, “And there never were.”
It was the worst, the lowest moment of all, and Karou would always remember it as the blackest of shadows—the kind of black that shadows can only achieve when they lie alongside the brightest light.
Because another sending came to them then. It cut through the other, brilliant and blinding. It was light, reeling and abundant. A sensation of light. An army of light. There were figures limned in it, golden and many, and Karou knew who and what they were. They all knew, though the silhouettes didn’t match the myth. This was dream logic, and heart-deep knowing. These were the bright warriors.
The godstars.
Karou saw Scarab’s head snap up, and Nightingale’s, too, and she read their shock and knew that this sending was not theirs, nor the other Stelians’, either, who looked as staggered as they did.
So where did it come from?
“Yet.”
One word, from behind Karou, from within her own party, and the voice was familiar but too wholly unexpected for her to place it in that first instant. She had to turn and see with her eyes, and blink, and see again, before she could believe it.
“People with destinies shouldn’t make plans,” Eliza would say later, laughing, but right now what she said was, “There never were godstars yet.”
Because it was her. Eliza. She came forward, and she was beatific, practically glowing. She had been all but forgotten amid the mingled creatures of this world, and no surprise, because none knew what she was, not really. She had told Mik and Zuzana that she was a butterfly, but they had no context for what this meant—the ramifications of it—and anyway, she was more than that. She was an echo, and more than that, too. She was an answer. Mystery sang from her skin; she was suffused with it like a black pearl. There were no ebon seraphim in this the Second Age; those of Chavisaery had perished with Meliz, and so the Stelians gazed at her, amazed.
She was fixed on Scarab, and Scarab on her. “Who are you?” asked the queen, her severity already softening into wonder.
Eyes bright with invitation, Eliza gave a nod, calling to Scarab to know her—to touch the thread of her life—and Scarab did, with a single fingertip of her anima, a featherlight caress that ran the length of it. Eliza shivered. The sensation was new, and gave her goose bumps, and she was able to think that it was funny, that her body should respond in so ordinary a way as goose bumps to the touch of a golden seraph queen at the thread of her very life.
Whatever Scarab read there, they all saw fire dance in her eyes, and she grew beatific, too.
None of them understood it then, except for Eliza and Scarab. Not even Nightingale. But all present in the Kirin caves that night—seraph, chimaera, and human—would ever afterward say that they felt, in that instant, a dark age quietly give way, and a bright one bloom into being. It was an ending overlapped by a beginning, and it was thrilling and confounding, primal and terrifying, electric and delicious.
It felt like falling in love.
Scarab took a step forward. All her life she had been haunted by ananke, the relentless tug of fate. It had been oppressive, and it had been elusive. It had caused her uncertainty and dread. But never had she experienced the perfect, puzzle-piece fulfillment of it that she did now. Completion. More than that. Consummation.
Ananke went quiet. Her release from it was like the silence when a baby’s cries have become unendurable and then abruptly cease.
She stood before this woman—this seraph come from nowhere, of the lost line of Chavisaery whom all Meliz had revered as prophets—and all of Scarab’s uncertainty and dread… evanesced.
“How?” she asked. How was it possible? Where had Eliza come from? Where had her sending come from, and what did it mean?
How? Eliza’s gaze flickered to Karou and Akiva, and to Zuzana and Mik, and to Virko, who, she understood, had carried her on his back, away from the kasbah, away from government agents and who knows what else. The five of them had rescued her from infamy and madness, and from a life with no future. Because of them, she was here where she was supposed to be, and oh, she had a future now. They all did, and what a future it was. She took in the rest of the company too, and felt the same fulfillment that Scarab did. This was right. This was meant, and it was at once impossible and inevitable, like all miracles.
“I think it’s time,” was her answer. Spoken with wonder, her words weighed of fate, and even if the company didn’t understand, they were unnerved by the gravity of the moment, and held their tongues.
Well. Except for Zuzana. She and Mik clung together, drinking everything in with their eyes and ears, and making sense of it, too—the words, at least—because Zuzana had snuck wishes into her pocket earlier, wish police be damned, and they had no sooner come into the presence of the strangers than she vanished two lucknows, one for herself and one for Mik, gifting them both the language of the angels.
It proved little help in interpreting the moment, though, and so Zuzana ventured to ask, “Um, time for what?”
A ripple of mirth moved through them all—and relief, that someone had given voice to the question they all wanted answered. Indeed. Time for what?
“Time for liberation,” said Eliza. “For salvation. Time for the godstars.”
“They’re a myth,” spoke Scarab, uncertain and ready to be persuaded. Like the rest of them, she held the vision from Eliza’s sending in her mind, and didn’t know what to make of it. She only knew that she wanted to believe it.
“They are,” agreed Eliza, smiling. Everyone watched her. Everyone listened. How strange, that she should become the nucleus of this moment—this tremendous moment in the story of all their worlds.
“My people understood that time is an ocean, not a river,” she said to them all. “It doesn’t flow away and pour itself out, done and gone. It simply is—eternal and entire. Mortals might move through it in one direction, but that’s no reflection of its true nature—only of our limitations. Past and future are our own constructs.
“And as for myths, some are made up, nothing but fantasy. But some myths are true. Some have already been lived. And in the drift of time, eternal and entire, some haven’t.” She paused, gathering up the words that would make them understand.