Her guide did not speak at all as she led Alize deeper into the palace, up a twisting staircase. The narrow windows revealed that they ascended far above the city, and Alize realized they were within one of the jutting spires. Higher and higher they climbed with the rising sun. The shadows cast across the stairs became smaller, more focused. Below them, the city lay quiet and bright, the Soulless passing through the recesses between the buildings, slow, intent, compelled always by a single choice, a single person’s will.

At such a height, the wind pressed the stones of the spire, swaying it ever so slightly back and forth. Though each slab felt solid, irrevocably placed, the spire they constructed was vulnerable, so high it soared from its foundations.

Soon the stark darkness began to recede. The top of the spire was much more liberal with its windows. As Alize emerged to the round chamber, the light nearly blinded her.

Under her guide’s steady gaze, Alize circled the space. She brushed the rough stucco walls, carved into detailed patterns of twisting vines and splayed flowers. Dust clung to her fingertips, gray, coarse. The glass windows captured the heat of the sun and radiated it within the chamber to withstand the wind that howled all around them. Alize blinked away a gnawing thought. Something about this room felt familiar.

The sun did not shine on that morning, Hesna had said, and in the round chamber, the cold seeped through the stone walls.

Alize bent down to straighten a pillow. Some of the threads came away in her fingers.

As they waited, the family huddled together on the sofas that lined the walls.

Through the windows, Alize could see the whole city. The massive iron gates were now closed. The sand caught inside the walls piled up against them in the wind, as if to further fortify the city against the forces lurking outside.

The Deku did not enter the city through the gates. They infiltrated the sewage system, emerging like demons from the bowels of the earth.

Alize bent down to lift a wooden object. In her hands she recognized its true nature – a small toy for amusing children. It was broken.

The Karakuls did not have the power to stop the Deku. The Ginmae family fled up the staircase to the safest chamber in the city, lined with ancient magic and reinforced with newer, innovative protections.

As Alize touched the walls, she could feel the magic still, the ripped edges where it had burst, the protection utterly destroyed. Alize’s heart thud in her chest.

Hesna’s narrativ stopped there, since all the witnesses had been killed along with the family. Alize knew the death toll by heart. Forty-seven Ginmae family members soultrussed, and sixteen attendents murdered besides them.

It was Iedaja’s voice that continued the story. She spoke it as a lullaby, as though her disturbing words contained any capacity to sooth.

The Ginmae waited for the Deku in the tower, their hands uplifted. ‘Save us,’ they wailed down the spiral stairs, ‘the Karakuls have imprisoned us. Rescue our souls! Honor them within your citadel that we might all live forever, together, as Rehsan intended.’

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

The Karakuls had built great magical protections on the chamber, to fasten their victims within, but we obliterated their magic with our own. Inside, the Ginmae greeted us with great celebration.

Alize halted where she stood on the carpet. Her feet were centered on a faded brown stain.

We answered their pleas for salvation. We freed their souls from the Karakuls’ prison confines. Some we could only help with the sword, even as it grieved us greatly. We saved all the souls that we could and accepted their gratitude.

And it was Davram’s face that Alize saw in her mind, drenched with sweat as Iedaja soultrussed him, his eyes bulging, skin washed green with the pain. For centuries, the Deku had fed off the Ginmae souls. They did not consume them as the Karakuls did, they kept them writhing in torment for perpetuity. With their power, the Deku could make their own lives eternal. Built on the pain of others.

How the Ginmae love our family, Alize, that we bless them as we do. And we love them. There is no greater love than the gift we give them when we set their souls free. Come, let us go again to the portrait gallery so you may remember the ancestors and live our love.

Alize wanted to scream. The room throbbed with the sorrow, pain, and stagnant injustice, disturbing as scattered teeth at a crossroad. The Deku transgression was horrific enough, but the fact that they applauded themselves for it, used it as evidence of their virtue instead of their greatest incrimination, reduced Alize to her knees on the crusty carpet.

Alize clasped her head in her hands. “My parents died fighting, this night,” she murmured, unsure if Arouah would hear her. Or if he would care. “This is my legacy.”

“Hesna told you?” her guide responded sharply, the poor body’s mouth tripping over Arouah’s ire.

“No. A Deku named Iedaja told me. I was prisoner in their citadel all winter.” Alize replied.

Before her, the mirror on the wall had shattered into uneven shards of glass. The glass splinters reflected disjointed pieces of her face, the twist in her mouth that fought the settled grief in her muscles, in her bones. The tiny reflections all blinked with her, appealing to her own sense of mercy.

This is not your crime.

But Alize remembered the hunger of her soul when she had held her dagger. All the reflections before her furrowed their brows in weariness, in bitter understanding. “Iedaja told me everything,” she stammered, “about the Deku, about the Ginmae. About how my parents died fighting the Karakuls the night of the Deliverance.”

“Never call it that,” her guide answered. The woman’s voice almost bore passion, like it could overcome the body’s numbness. “Everyone else in the steppes sees it for what it was – a massacre. As for your parents,” her guide paused. When Alize turned to look, her face had slackened. By all appearances, Arouah had abandoned his thought midsentence.

But when she began speaking again, her face maintained the same expression, as if the woman’s soul had died yet another death.

“As for your parents,” the woman began again, “leave it to your grandmother to accord them a story of such simplistic fate. What is death, I wonder, to Iedaja?”

“Then they are not dead?” Alize demanded, rising to her feet. This development was utterly unexpected. Grandmother? Iedaja had never once mentioned her own relation to Alize.

“Surely they are, child,” Arouah answered. “It was a death that began even before the massacre. Much slower. So slow in fact, for a time they believed they might not die at all.”

Alize let the words wash over her, wishing desperately that she understood them.

“Fools,” her guide said, and the coldness of her voice made the pronouncement all the more cruel.

“Then you mean to say-?”

“No more questions,” the woman replied, “These stories are stale, to repeat them is petty.”

They are not petty to me, Alize wanted to scream. But she forced the instinct down. Perhaps Arouah was right. Perhaps, despite the puzzle of his words, her cursed heritage was still the only thing that mattered. Arouah, a fellow rebel Deku, he would know that lesson better than anyone.

Alize folded her arms and turned to stare out the window. Around her the new day grew cloudy, all the brightness fading. The raindrops started slowly, easing down the glass like tears until they blurred the view entirely, leaving Alize alone in an empty chamber in the sky, but for the dead woman standing beside her.

Alize hoped it was the last of the winter rains, but she knew that it was early yet.