Shark had tunneled them all safely into the city, as Gren had suggested. Rhys would go to the Creed home to confront and subdue Iree and the council. Dorothea and Shark would go free Cerid while Gren, Wesley, Johanna, Pearlie and Ariana made their way through the city paving the way for the entire group to reunite at Rhys’ destination.

Dorothea and Shark met little resistance on their flight to the Catacombs. The guard on the top floor simply sighed and tossed the keys over when they walked in. “Screw this war. Not worth dying today,” they muttered, walking past but pausing to put a hand on Shark’s shoulder. “Good luck. To both of you.”

Shark smiled once they’d left. “That obvious I’m the one Cerid’s talking about in his letter to Sacer, huh…”

“Seems so.” Dorothea squeezed their hand before the two of them raced down the stairs.

Cerid scrambled to stand, clutching the bars of his cell with a wild look in his eyes as soon as he caught sight of them. “What’s happening?” he demanded. “Iree. Where is Iree?”

“It’s okay, love,” Shark reassured while fumbling with the lock.

“Listen!” Cerid nearly screamed. “Iree, is anyone confronting her at this moment?” He shook himself. “No, no, it’s of no matter… The two of you must leave, now! Leave me here and run, go outside and take shelter! Go outside the fort, now!

“Cerid, what’s…” Dorothea looked at something on the floor of the cell then, following his frantic gaze to it. One of Iree’s seeds, ready to send them to oblivion.

Shark hadn’t even noticed yet and was too busy with the keys. Cerid gazed into Dorothea’s eyes and only whispered, “Please.”

Protect Shark. Dorothea got the message.

A flash of color sparked from the seed, and Cerid dove over it to shield her and Shark from the blast as much as he could. But Dorothea had thrown her arms around Shark already, and in an instant they were standing at the fort’s entrance.

All was ablaze, smoke curling upwards with malicious glee to blot the blue sky. Dorothea and Shark were on their knees, clinging to each other while the ringing in their ears subsided.

Shark found their legs first, and, with the two sharing a wide-eyes, tearful nod, they left her side to go see what had inevitably become of Cerid.

Dorothea could hear the screaming but couldn’t understand it. Iree. Iree had done this to her own people, and for what? A last-ditch effort to kill the Ghurians in the hopes they’d randomly get caught in the flames?

She held her sleeve over her face and stumbled back into the city on quaking legs. There were people that needed help in there.

But everywhere she went there were just charred bodies. Ones she couldn’t even get to because of the power of the blaze—it truly did seem like Iree had aimed to kill as many people as possible. The smoke and the shattering silence were making her dizzy. All she could do was keep running through the city, checking everywhere.

A call scraped the edge of her awareness, and she stopped in the middle of the market street she had once walked with Rhys, coughing as she spun around.

The desperate voice reached her, then the fastest footsteps she’d ever heard, and then a pair of arms were around her, clutching her to a heaving body. “Dorothea!” The voice was rough and struggled to get even that word out.

“Gren,” she croaked, then started sobbing clutching back at him. They sank down, both trembling with fear and a sense of total shock.

He kissed her hair and then her forehead, and she felt the touch of his own wet cheeks. But he didn’t say anything. He clearly didn’t know how to start.

“The others…?” Dorothea rasped.

He hesitated. “Only Wes and I made it. Rhys putting out fires. He and Wes finding a few survivors while I came to find you.”

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“Cerid, Ariana, Pearlie, Johanna…. And so many other people…” Her emotions were turbulent. One second it felt like she might split apart and the next a consuming numbness was spreading through her. It was the same numbness she had felt in the Catacombs, the one that told her she would never, ever rise above the strength cruelty had in this world, so she shouldn’t even try.

“We’ll find a way. The best way to get through this.” He held her tighter, shuddering as he thought. He was just as scared as any of them, the person who had taught her to be so much stronger than she had been before.

“Gren,” she said. “This is already the way, don’t you see?”

He stared at her in shock. “No… We can…” He looked sickened as he realized. “But when I say we, we both know I mean you. And you…you can’t…”

The Atlin way of dying was whispering to her. Dorothea knew. She knew that Iree hadn’t just destroyed the city and her own people to catch her enemies off guard or in the hopes of killing them off by chance. She’d done it knowing Dorothea wouldn’t be able to ignore what had happened.

She’d done it to kill her no matter what, even if she didn’t get to do it personally.

But at the same time, she’d given the Ghurians exactly what they needed to end the war. The remainder of Sacer’s population still saw the Ghurians as enemies. They saw them as the aggressors and always had. This blind fear was part of what kept their history of tragedy going.

Iree was the aggressor now, her, Sharee and Cinder cemented in history as villains. The Ghurians could be the heroes. People needed to be swayed; they needed to care and see their enemies as people. They needed to be faced starkly and undeniably with the fact that their enemy was within, and now that fact was right in front of them.

Fine. Iree could destroy the city. She could take what she would and reveal herself as the monster she was. She could let the Ghurian side show mercy in their evacuation efforts and have the Sacerians be moved in the face of a brand-new kind of tragedy.

People cared when it hit them directly. They couldn’t be counted on to care for long, of course. They would forget and move on, perhaps holding some grudges, perhaps deliberately forgetting for their own peace, perhaps making it all about themselves or else finding the sort of comfort that let them shrug off the horror and others’ lives without a care.

Dorothea knew this from personal experience. She had been changed by facing the world’s brutality. Others would have to undergo the same now. Long before and long after she existed, hatred would be a driving force in the world, and there would be those who acted against it, those who enacted it and those indifferent to it.

“What else can we do?” she whispered, searching Gren’s face. “This combined with what Cerid’s been able to influence… It’s the only way I can think of to get us through.”

He nodded, unable to speak. He didn’t bother to wipe his tears.

She wanted to scream at the entire universe for how everything had turned out. At every turn, Iree had destroyed all of their plans and left them winded and weak before they could even begin to properly resist or fight back. “I never wanted to make anyone suffer. To, to let them, I just wanted… All we wanted was for people to be able to reach each other.” She let out a plaintive keen. “Why don’t I have more power?! Why am I so damn useless?! All these people, I just…!”

“We have to keep going,” Gren said softly, “and trust that we’re doing the right thing.”

Dorothea’s heart calmed. Yes. There was much to be done, and his strength was giving her the will to carry on just like it had before. “I love you,” she said because it was true and she didn’t have as much time as she’d like anymore to tell him so. “And I’m so sorry for —”

His kiss tasted like ash and lasted so long, placed on her with such desperate and urgent pressure, that she lost her breath and slowly gasped her way back into finding it against him.

He pulled away to gaze at her. “I love you too.” There was so much pain in his eyes.

She placed her hands on his cheeks. “We have to go end this, here and now. And I’m going to heal this city and its people, and then Ghuria’s land, and then I…”

He already knew. The time they thought they would have together had long since gone. “Even if it’s a single day, let me spend it with you.”

Despite everything, she smiled through her tears. “Please do.”

“Every moment."

"Thank you for everything. You saved me."

One more kiss to her hair. “Don't you know you saved me too?”

Being saved and saving each other. Her entire world had been changed by people having the will to do this despite what they had endured and been taught.

“I love you, Gren Fall.”

“I love you, Dorothea Atlin.”

“I love you so much. Thank you for everything you’ve given me.”

“I love you. I love you so, so… I wish…” His voice shook over tears, and they kept trading love and wishes as they sprinted through the city and helped who they could through the wreckage.

They said everything they could as they passed by each other through that long day of healing, organizing and fighting, of bringing back to life and trying to find understanding. They tried to say it all enough for the days they should have had together.