Content warning for language and sexual content, as per usual. And just general angst and lunacy. Thanks for reading, as always. This story is kind of a mess right now, but hopefully an entertaining mess.

-S.

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I expect a scream, but all I hear is the huff of his laughter.

"Throwing a tantrum, are we?"

"You have a knife in you, motherfucker!"

"And you have my cock in you, my queen," he returns with an easy smile. I reach forward, withdraw the knife, and stab him a second time right next to the first. Fuck him. My thighs are going to be sore, so why not his?

He groans, and I smile in triumph, elated I've finally smashed through his façade of genteel carelessness. It makes him seem less invincible. That is, until I realize that it isn't a groan of pain he offers as cold metal breaches skin a second time, only inches from the first wound.

He's moaning in pleasure; I can feel his cock hardening inside of me as proof positive. I pull away with a sudden jerk and he slips from my body, leaving behind a twinge of emptiness that I carefully ignore.

"You're fucking sick, you know that? This is supposed to hurt, but you moan. You drink the pain like wine."

"With you, it always hurts," he muses, reaching forward and tracing the lines of tension marring my face with his fingertips. "Why shouldn't I find pleasure in that pain if I can?"

"Because it's perverse," I sneer.

He chuckles. "Says the woman who described the meticulous way she would torture and kill me like it was foreplay."

"It's pleasurable to imagine the reduction in pain your death would bring. You, though, you take pleasure in the pain itself. It's unnatural."

"I take pleasure in pure, raw emotion. In the honesty of violence and grappling for power. What use do I have for gentle caresses on clean sheets, soft sighs and subtle surrender? I'm not that man."

"Liar," I mutter. "You get off on the chaos and the control. You play both sides, causing pain so you can alleviate it, pushing me farther away just so you can pull me back in. You like being both my nightmare and my knight in shining armor. You slay dragons of your own design. And then at the very last moment, just when I think I'm safe, you eat me alive."

"So eat me right back, Amiidizsa," he growls, striking with the speed of a viper to capture my lips in an unwelcome kiss. He bites at my lip before pulling away, and I taste blood.

"There," he murmurs, satisfied, his finger rubbing the small droplets of crimson across my lips like they're rouge. "The tiger might be on her back, but she hasn't lost her claws. Neither have I, though. You escalate; I merely reciprocate."

"Bullshit," I challenge, "You desecrate." The boldness of my declaration is undermined by the fact that I can't bear to look at him as I say it. The heat in his eyes is too much, too real, and there's already a quaver in my voice. I don't want that stormy gaze to see that I'm barely a breath away from sobbing. Or screaming. Or both.

I am a child lost in the woods, trying and failing to be brave, all brash violence because, yes, I'm throwing a tantrum. Anything to distract from my own powerlessness, or worse, from the traitorous wanting I'm running out of places to hide from. Not wanting for the man who was just inside of me, but for his warmth, his weight on top of me, for the dizzying freedom of not being alone.

Maybe even the freedom to vent my rage without retribution. I've hidden my madness away my entire life, but he seeks it out, coaxes it from its dark corner and into his waiting hands. Never mind that I bite those hands; he merely laughs, letting me feed. I've flayed him, hit him, even stabbed him, and lived to tell the tale when anyone else would've been gutted before they left another mark on his scarred skin.

But none of that is him. I don't want him, I swear to myself. I could never really want him.

"You're trying to make this living body into a monument to what is forever lost, O'otani," he tells me with easy authority. "You're trying to turn this body into a grave so you can bury yourself beside them and never have to deal with the uncertainty and mess of rebuilding. I won't be made to feel guilty for desecrating that fucked-up, self-imposed, self-indulgent tomb by forcing you to admit that you're still fucking alive, still real and vital and full of fire beneath my hands. Still capable of yielding so perfectly," he murmurs softly into my waiting ear before twisting it between his teeth.

"You didn't fight fair," I accuse. I don't know if I'm talking about the night of the Founder's Feast, tonight, or both. "You never fucking fight fair!"

"I know, I know" he says soothingly, almost crooning it to me, his hand reaching down to trace the curve of my jaw in a way that's simultaneously gentle and proprietary. "But I don't want to fight you anymore, O'otani. I want to feel you writhing beneath me, I want to hear your screams, I want to push you past the edge of oblivion, where pleasure borders on pain, I want you to curse my name as you ultimately yield to me- that is what I want. A different kind of war entirely, one where we both win. And you, what do you want? Tell me, O'otani, what do you want?"

"Your blood cooling on the floor," I hiss, but my voice sounds reedy and small. "Your heart, your breath, your very life. That is what I want, Sholu."

"My heart, my breath, my very life, all of them are yours already," he murmurs, dipping down and kissing the hollow of my throat with something dangerously close to reverence. "But I don't think that's what you really want."

"Tell me what I want, then, oh wise king!" I throw back with a mocking laugh, pushing anger to the fore to cover the uncertainty, the sadness, the faltering in my metaphorical steps. "I bet you'll announce it with all the ceremony of prophecy. A royal decree!"

"I think you want someone to stop you from fighting everything within arm's reach," he says simply, ignoring my taunts. "I think you're tired to the bone and you cling to it because it's all you know. I think you believe you have to give your future over to mourning them because of the part you played in their death, though in your head, you just call it loyalty. But at the core of it all, I think what you really want is someone to hold you down until the struggling stops, until the violence leaks from your limbs and you're relaxed enough to finally rest. Heal. I think you want to be here beneath me because it means, even if just for a moment, that you aren't alone anymore. And I think that you desperately hate the fact that you're starting not to hate me at all."

"I will always hate you."

"You will always hate what I have done to you," he allows, "but that is not all I am, O'otani, just as the grieving Izsaiki is not all you are. And I think you know as well as I do that the rest of us might come to love each other one day soon. Believe me, I wish you were someone else's daughter. I wish you hadn't been tasked with protecting the very dynasty I helped destroy. Because I think, if we had met as just a man and a woman beneath the desert sky, you would have wanted me, too."

"Liar," I breathe back, but suddenly I'm not at all certain he's wrong. In all my life, I've never wanted a man my family would deem suitable. The lords parading by in perfect silks, the silver-tongued foreign nobles, what were they to me? Dragonflies on the surface of a glassy pond, and all I ever wanted to do was shatter that placid surface by diving beneath it. Practiced flourishes with ceremonial swords held little appeal, but my blood ran hotly through my veins sometimes when I watched common soldiers or palace guards spar. They didn't stop when blood was drawn, nor were they pretty or poised. They were real. And sharp, and honest in a way I was not allowed to be.

What would I have thought of a man who had both the education and eloquence to charm others and the violence to cut them down where they stood, if they stood against him? I know I wouldn't have cared much for his face, his hair, his eyes; those seem trivial qualities somehow. But he's hard and sharp and bright, so fucking bright, and maybe I would've wanted to stand in that light with him like we were twin daggers.

If we had met, just a man and a woman beneath the desert sky, I would have fought him. I would have pushed him, tested him, and he would've risen to the challenge. Reveled in it. He would have fought hard, not holding back because of my sex, and somewhere along the way my awareness of his muscles moving beneath mine would have become less mechanical and more sensual. The grace of his violence would have sung its own love song, and I would have kissed his bloody mouth, and drank the iron like wine.

"You're not lying," I say softly as realization dawns, "If things had been different, I could have loved you." I don't even realize I'm saying it aloud until I register the shock on his face at my unexpected admission. Goddess damn me, why did I admit it aloud? Why give him any more ammunition to use against me, why let him gain any more ground? He is my enemy. I know he is. I know it.

He's also the only one who hasn't left me. I've insulted him, cursed him, punched him, scourged him, and now stabbed him twice, and he won't leave me be. He won't let me go. And for a split second, I'm not sure that I want him to.

"Must we always torture one another?" I ask breathlessly. "Goddess, what does it matter what might have been, what I might have felt? What does any of it fucking matter, it's not real, it's smoke! It's impossible! You and I are impossible. We- we are monsters, Sholu! We don't get to have a happy ending!"

"Let me show you how wrong you are, O'otani. Please," he almost begs, desperation and need both raw in his voice. There's hope there, too, as stubborn as it is fragile. "Let me show you a way out of this hell."

"There is no way out! You sealed off the exits, don't you see that? We're damned, and no amount of wishful thinking will change that!"
"Fine, then," Sholu throws back, voice rising. "So we're damned? So what? I already told you that the still, placid eternity of the Citadel is not heaven to me, and you agreed. What does it matter if we've fallen from a place we don't care to get back to? If we can't leave, we'll stay, damnit, and we'll make it our home! We'll be king and queen of a realm that accepts us as we are, that demands nothing except that we rejoice in our nature and dance amongst the flames of the fires we lit. How glorious it will be, my love, and how they will whisper our names in fear and reverence, unsure if we're gods or demons or people just like them!"

"We will never be like them! Goddess damn it, Sholu, we'll never be like them again!"

"And do you really want to be?" he throws back with a wild grin, his blonde hair falling messily in front of his eyes, his cheeks flushed like he's just finished fighting or fucking. Or both; with us, it always seems to be both. "Do you want to undergo the forgetting and amputations it would take to make you an acceptable daughter of the dimaraste? Do you want to go home to their heaven and have them tell you with their looks that you aren't really one of them for all eternity? Do you want to submit to the will of a goddess who left you to die, or do you want to rule side by side with the man who stayed his blade before it could sever your pretty white throat?"

"No, okay?" I yell back at him. "I am in hell, Sholu, precisely because the answer to those questions is no! No, I do not want to go back to the way things were before, because I wasn't happy and I wasn't free and I- I- goddess damn it, why did you have to make me say it?" I ask, voice thick with rage and heavy with tears. "Why do you always have to push me? Why must you make me say things that should never be said or tell me truths I never wanted to hear?"

"Because you're strong enough to survive them," he growls back, a challenge in his bright eyes. "Go on and tell me you aren't. Tell me you're just another glassy-eyed doll, tell me you belong to your mother's political machinations, tell me you're nothing but Shira's sword arm. Tell me that you have nightmares about bashing that man's head in, that the blood staining your hands disgusts you. Tell me that every bit of violence you inflected upon me, every bite and scratch and lash, every fucking stab wound, was done against your will in a moment of madness!"

His voice drops several octaves, a dark whisper that brushes against my lips like the promise of black wings. The shadows cling to him now instead of the light, and he clings to me, molding his body over mine like a cage. Letting the weight of it press me down into the mattress until I feel like I'm sinking into the earth, into the very grave he accuses me of trying to turn myself into. Though maybe it's just the weight of his truth that I'm sinking under. Succumbing to, inch by unbearable inch.

"Tell me that my screams didn't make you wet," he murmurs against the white seashell of my ear, and I shudder violently against him, not sure if I'm trying to push him away or just fit my body closer to his. "Tell me there wasn't lust in your eyes when you carved your rage into my back. Tell me that you won't remember me on my knees, in pain and rapture, when your pretty white hands slip beneath your silk skirts when you think no one is watching. Tell me you'd rather be in some ascetic lordling's bed making gentle love than making war in mine."

"Please, just stop," I implore, my hands digging into his forearms as I try to push him away from me, to breathe, but I can't. It's not his weight that's crushing the air from my lungs, starving me; it's the weight of every lie I've ever told, every truth I've blatantly ignored, ever unspoken word and unwritten confession. His gaze is penetrating and dagger-sharp, and I feel so exposed, so bare before it. "Just stop it!"

"Fine," he whispers, his breath hot and wet against my cheek, "I'll stop. You know why? Because I don't need you to tell me a damn thing. I look in your eyes, and I already know. I already know you, even those dark and hollow places you like to pretend don't exist. I know that you're torn up by the truth that, as much as you don't want to go forward without them, you don't really want to go back."

"You want the truth?" I growl, my voice lashing against him like the rain of a sudden storm. At least now we'll both be drowning. "I'll give you the fucking truth, Mesviraste. If I don't, you'll just take it from me anyways!" My voice is rough and ragged as old wood, my body tight, corded muscles straining against him, against myself, against the reality of what I'm about to say. "The truth is that I've spent everything I have to avoid admitting that part of me is relieved that they're gone, because it's the worst, most selfish kind of blasphemy! I'm already a monster; I don't want to be a devil as well!"
"You are a devil whether you wish it or no," he tells me softly, leaning down until our lips almost touch. I flinch away; he's too close, too insightful, too manipulative by far. His body is too warm and firm against my own, but his hands are tangled so messily in my hair I can't pull away. Not that there's anywhere to go; he's on top of me, he's surrounding me, he's everywhere all at once. "You are red and raw and hungry. And you are fucking breathtaking, O'otani."

And I know, looking into his too-bright eyes, that he means it. That the parts of me I've spent my entire life trying to cut away or soften or tamp down are the very reason he's staring at me with undisguised want. I'm something more than flawed; I'm shattered, my faults are fault lines, yet he's drawn to my cracks, tracing them with his fingers without fear even as they cut him. Perhaps even because he wants to be cut, to bleed for me, the sick fuck.

"The devil in you is heaven to me, woman, and that's the goddess-damned truth." And damn me to the eternal sands, but I believe him. For him, my magic walks in lockstep with my madness. They're synonyms.

If you are a devil, a wicked voice whispers, then do not fight it. Admit what is true: that part of you is more at home with Sholu than you ever were with your family because he understands your innate violence in a way they never could, never even tried to. And he's offering you a future where you aren't bowing and scraping to propriety, where you don't have to answer to anyone but yourself, where this monster looming above you could teach you to celebrate what you once believed unforgivable.

We'll be king and queen of a realm that accepts us as we are, that demands nothing except that we rejoice in our nature and dance amongst the flames of the fires we lit. It's treason. It's impossible. But there's something so fucking seductive about it. To simply... stop. Stop fighting myself, stop fighting him, stop trying to change what is inevitable. I could reach out and take the power offered, use it to make a world where I never again have to apologize for being exactly who I am.

For being the queen of Shikkah, as I was born to be.

It's all blasphemy, isn't it? And heresy and sin and maybe even truth, too.

"You don't know what you ask of me," I breathe up at him, half accusation and half lament. "To cherish these ashes... to blow them into embers with you, to warm myself by their light- by our light- how can I?" My voice breaks, but I'm beyond caring whether I appear strong or weak. We're pressed so close together there's no room for lies or pretense or posturing, and that's comforting, in its own way. Disconcerting, too, because this close his eyes look so much less human.

"Would you burn with me?" he whispers, lips grazing my cheek, and I shudder, both at his touch and at the sound of my words on his quicksilver tongue. "If I lit the pyre, and I stoked the flames, would you burn with me? That is what you asked me, O'otani. All I am asking is that you let that burning be something other than punishment. That if you're to be consumed, let it be by me, not by your own guilt and self-hatred."

"You are my guilt and my self-hatred," I tell him honestly, "and I deserve to be punished."

"Fine, then," he growls, gripping my hair and pulling so my chin juts towards the ceiling above us, exposing the white column of my throat. He kisses a trail down to the hollow at its base, then further, until his lips are pressed against my sternum. I wonder if he can taste the electricity in my blood, the mad beating of my heart beneath my too-thin skin. "You want to be punished? I'll punish you. I'll make you bleed. I'll make you burn."

"Don't touch me," I say in a voice suddenly thick with fear. I'm not frightened that he will hurt me; he's done that already, and I've survived it. I'm afraid that his words make me feel something more complicated than just disgust.

"If it makes it easier for you, my love, call it penance," he murmurs, a cruel smile overtaking his face, sharpening his already defined features into dagger-like points. I could impale myself on his eyes. Eviscerate myself with the hard angle of his cheekbones or fall endlessly into the dark chasm of his mouth. He scares me. There's something dangerously close to infinite in his gaze, something so much more and so much less than human. "Call it reincarnation. You have to die to be reborn."

"I'm already dead."

"Liar," he whispers, and before I realize what's happening his palm is encircling my throat. The pressure isn't a flirtation, a hint of violence to heighten pleasure; it's cruel, his nails digging into my skin as he forces my airway closed. I'm gasping for breath, clawing at him with a mad determination because for a moment I think he actually means to kill me. I push against him but he doesn't budge, his body so heavy on mine. In desperation I dig my fingers into the wound on his thigh as if I were removing shrapnel. Just as I feel darkness closing in, his hands release, and I draw in a ragged breath. It hurts to fill my lungs. It hurts to swallow.

"We both know you're still very much alive, O'otani. You're alive because you hurt, because you fight," his hand slides down my neck to roughly grip my breast, and my sharp inhale is more than just surprise, more than just pain, making him grin wider. "Because you want," he finishes, fingers digging into the sensitive flesh hard enough to leave bruises. Then his touch softens into a caress and I shiver, arching into him, because what's just a little more blasphemy? When I've fallen so far, what are a few more feet down?

But, I admit to myself, it doesn't feel like falling. It feels like rising. It feels like the reality of his touch pulling me out of my grave, even if those same hands are about to light my pyre. Suddenly I feel almost grateful that there's something left to burn. And I let myself consider, if only for a moment, that there might also be enough left to build.

"I don't want you," I tell him as his hands roam over my still-naked flesh, rough and greedy and intoxicating. Maybe I'm still just lightheaded from the strangulation, I console myself. But then why are my hands running down his back, scoring the scabs that will soon become scars, drawing that pained hiss from his mouth before it crashes against mine and steals my breath in another way? "You're nothing to me," I insist, like that will make it true.

But the truth is darker and infinitely more slippery, and it moves inside of me like a serpent, sliding its dark belly through my veins, coiling in my stomach, whispering with its forked tongue of both truth and sin. Telling me that sometimes, they're one and the same. So are consumption and destruction, the creature insists as it swallows its own tail, a metaphor for both eternity and oblivion. Part of me thinks those might just be synonyms, too.

Sholu breaks off the kiss long enough to whisper "liar. You tremble against me even now."

"Because I'm scared!" I insist vehemently.

"That's right," Sholu agrees, "you're scared of wanting me. Terrified, actually."

Maybe, but that's not all. I'm scared that he was inside of me and I'm scared of how good it felt. I'm scared that I can feel him moving inside of me even now, the gravity of him like a tide pushed and pulled through my blood by some alien moon.

I'm scared that, beneath the light of that moon, Sholu and I are less like a man and a woman and more like those snakes, limbless and slippery and secretive. We're pressed belly to belly, scale to overlapping scale, tied in knots so tight they cannot be undone, only severed.

I'm scared that I've been bitten, I'm scared I'll do the biting myself, and I'm scared my lips will close and let it become a kiss instead. I'm scared of how messy it all is, how little sense it makes, how easily desire and violence overlap. How wanting and hate can coexist, the strangest of bedfellows.

But how can I tell him any of that? What words would I even use?

Then his mouth closes over mine, harsh and wet and wanting, and I no longer need any. His hands fist in my hair, pushing and pulling all at once, and my aching throat pulses in time with my heart. The spike of adrenaline that races through me is intoxicating and analogous with desire of a different kind and then oh goddess, I'm kissing him back. We're dueling, forked tongue with forked tongue, pain with pain, poison with poison. It hurts. It helps. After a moment, I can't tell the difference anymore.

Are you the heir or are you his dog?

Are you a victim or are you a traitor?

Are you a warrior or are you at war?

Are you valiant or just violent?

Are you killing him or kissing him?

Fighting him or fucking him?

What does it even matter? I growl inside my own head. But it does matter. I know it does. I know that I've crossed a line, and I'm recrossing it, leaving footprints where there should be none. Or perhaps slither-marks, my cool belly pressed to the dirt. The gentle shush of scales on earth. Of skin on skin.

What are you doing?

Or, more accurately, what have you done?

I've lain with a monster. I've wrapped my arms around him and held his flesh to mine, perverse in a way that should sicken me, but all I feel is the heat of his body and the weight of a blessed silence. When he touches me, everything else stops. The voices in my head, the pain in my heart, the tremors of my hand, the unendurable tick, tick, ticking of the clock. Everything falls away to pure sensation, and he's no longer Sholu my enemy, he's a pair of hands and soft lips and a teasing tongue and he matches my violence so perfectly- and he doesn't look at me like I'm a monster, or if he does, he smiles, too, like it pleases him- like I please him-

I want to bleed off this manic energy. I want to feel something other than cold, to touch something other than an open wound, to taste something beyond ashes in my mouth. And so I let my hands play across his scarred skin, tracing with my barest fingertips the memory of violence. I imagine it was me who inflicted each and every wound, picturing what it would be like to rend his flesh, to tear his sinew and muscle from his bone, and he's right. It fills me with a perverse wanting, though perhaps now I should merely call it having, because I'm pulling all of him to me and his mouth is everywhere and then he's inside of me again.

"I don't want you, Sholu," I hiss with the flicker of a forked tongue between my front teeth. The venom is acid in my voice. "At the very most, I want to fuck you."

"Liar," he challenges gleefully, teeth grazing my neck in a way that makes me shake a little harder against him. "Beautiful, terrible, unforgivable liar."

This is unforgivable, isn't it? Bowing to his whims to save Shira is bad enough, but now I'm alone and he's here and I'm hungry and he's filling me up like nothing else ever has. It's not love, I know it's not. But it is want, and that emotion feels both abject and perverse coming between us. Because he's my enemy. He's a monster. He's the reason I am alone in the first place, he's a threat to Shira's life... and yet.

And yet so many unforgivable things have happened before this. This wasn't the first step off the path, or even the third. This is the result of a drawn-out siege, of loss so large and looming it takes your breath away, of a future I did not choose and a past full of secrets I wish I didn't know. The world where my family is unequivocally holy and I am whole amongst them is gone. It never even existed. There is so much space between war and peace, so many sounds between screaming and silence. Now there's no space between us, just the sound of my throaty moans and his jagged inhalations. And it's terrible. And it's music.

And I wonder, is it truly unforgivable if there's no one left to forgive me? Who am I really fighting for, or against? Does any of it even matter anymore, or am I just a soldier waging a war that has long since been won? The thoughts are so unsettling I push them away, hard, losing myself in the feeling of his fingers sliding through my hair and gripping the back of my neck viciously as his tongue plunders my mouth, ever the conqueror.

"Goddess damn me, woman, but you feel like heaven."

"The Citadel Eternal is gleaming, clean, safe and calm. It is warm breezes kissing your face and soft earth beneath your feet, flowers blooming on the tips of your outstretched fingers. It is a canopy of stars and walls that tell the stories of a thousand civilizations that rose and fell before ours. Is that truly how you think of me, Sholu?"

"I meant my heaven, not theirs," he sneers. "But to answer your question, no, it isn't. I think of you like the fire that burns that other heaven down, the screams that shatter the careful silence, the hot sand burning my feet as I laugh at a world that is just as mad as we are."

Is that who I am? Am I the one that brings heaven to its knees? Am I the flames that send those eternal walls tumbling down, or is the fire he's stoking inside of me something else entirely?

I realize with a hollow sort of shock that I don't care. If I am an apocalypse, let it come. Let me come, as my body tightens around his, building to a crushing crescendo. I bite his shoulder to keep from screaming as wave after wave of pleasure tear through my small frame, as I thrash like a wildcat under his bruising ministrations, as he laughs and I taste blood where my teeth broke skin because when I bit him, I bit him hard. Everything we do to each other is hard, after all. Like he said, with you, it always hurts. Perhaps that's my penance.

I watch in fascination as he finds his own release above me. He loses his rhythm, hips slamming home without a thought for my comfort as I languish in the aftermath of my own release. His face contorts and he looks for all the world like he's received a mortal wound. Those gray eyes are squeezed tightly shut, his long, dark lashes brushing against his cheeks as he pants out my names. O'otani, Kyonaiki, Amiidizsa, my wife, my queen. Over and over again, until they become one slurred word that he repeats like a mantra. Then he throws his head back, and I'm watching the graceful arc of his exposed throat as he roars out my name one final time. It sounds like a battle cry, it sounds like a hymn, it sounds like both at the same time.

"I love you," he pants brokenly as he fills me up like a chalice, his very own holy grail. He's looking at me so tenderly I can't stand it. The softness in his expression hurts worse than any violence he could inflict. He speaks those three words like they're the fundamental truth at the center of his universe, and from the look in his eyes, I can almost believe that they are.

I push him off me with a shudder, unable to bear the adoration in his eyes. I don't know where to put his love. I don't know when I started believing him when he says that he loves me instead of laughing at his delusions. He reaches for me, intent on drawing me back down beside him, but I slip from his grasp as his seed slips down my legs and oh goddess, what did I just do?

I grab a silk robe from the wardrobe by the bed and pull it around me, barely making sure it's cinched closed before I flee the room. The history between us is too large to fit into this space and it's suffocating me. Suddenly I'm choking on all the truths he's told me that changed everything, and I'm raging because nothing I do seems to change anything at all. And beneath that is one more truth to take my breath away: if I let myself, I could fall asleep in his arms. It would be comforting. That thought alone is like being submerged in icy water, and I run from it, not caring if he thinks I'm a coward.

The guard in the hall gives me a curious look and starts walking towards me, so I lift my left hand and flash him a rather eloquent gesture the palace guards taught me. If my mother ever saw me making such a vulgar sign, there'd be hell to pay, but I am alone now and there will be no retribution. I don't know how to feel about that. I don't know how to feel about any of it.

Before I know where I'm going, I'm standing in front of a certain fourth-floor window that opens onto a flat portion of the palace roof. Well, opens onto is a bit of an exaggeration. The roof can be reached if you walk to the edge of the windowsill and jump, making sure to avoid the litany of decorative statuettes below. I've always thought that they seemed vaguely disapproving. This time, as I swing myself out and down, landing with a soft sound on the brightly colored tiles, I don't blame them. I blame Sholu, and my mother, and Arzsa, and myself, and maybe Zsavina for good measure. But what does that get me? And where does it leave me?

Apparently, hiding on the roof in a thin silk robe, my gangly legs crossed at the ankle as I lie back and wait for the sun to rise. I know I'll have the perfect view long before the first rays of light breach the dark horizon, turning the purple-gray dunes a burning gold. There's a familiar ache in my chest as I remember how many times Shira and I snuck out here to watch the desert sunrise.

Somehow, sitting there holding hands high above the sleeping city, it felt like the first time we'd ever witnessed dawn. Twenty-two years of mornings faded to nothing before the vastness of uninterrupted sky, and as the swaths of sand and the river flowing through them blended together in the murky morning light, it was as if everything below us had fallen away. The only thing in all of existence either of us was sure of in that moment was each other, and that connection humming between us always reminded me of the rising sun. Something so beautiful it could punch the breath from your lungs, so miraculous it could bring prayers to your lips, somehow made mundane by constancy and repetition. We trusted that bond the way we trusted the sun to rise.

I wondered sometimes if we saw the same thing when we looked out on the newly lit world, or if his title shifted the vision before him slightly, changing it in myriad kaleidoscopic ways. Was it different for him because he was destined to rule it all one day? Maybe, I thought, the sunrise sat a little heavier on his shoulders than mine. Because to me, well, it was like a weight being lifted. I felt the warmth of the light, saw the landscape slowly reveal itself as the darkness fell away in shattered fragments, and I felt myself brushing up against the edges of something holy.

Maybe that's why I'm here now, lying against the hard roof tiles in the dark, waiting to feel that touch of something holy. Something that will take my breath away and then give it back to me, and then some. But as the first fingers of light appear in the distance, there's nothing. So perhaps it was never the sunrise itself that took my breath away. Maybe it was the boy beside me watching it while I watched him.

I can see it all so clearly. His white-gold hair almost glowing beneath the young light, the awe in his rich brown eyes, the way the retreating shadows clung to the hollows of his face, accentuating his delicate yet proud features. If he had asked me to jump off the roof, I think I would have. I still might.

I miss him.

It's such a simple thought. Such a simple truth. I reach for another as the sun begins to rise, but the harsh morning light just blinds me, and there is no magic here. There's just a girl in pieces, holding herself together with sheer audacity.

Is that strength, or merely habit? I don't really know. What I do know is that it's long since worn thin, and now that I'm alone and standing still, it buckles. Collapses like the house of cards my uncle Haim used to try, and fail, to build. I'm a queen as flimsy as the one etched onto the face of those red and black cards, stiff as the scepter she holds, lost when the hand is shuffled and dealt.

I let the sun scald my eyes until tears fall freely as his seed dries on the inside of my bruised thighs, and I am not okay. Not even a little bit. I'm a fucking apocalypse. I'm the end of my own world, and the uncertainty that comes after.

Soon the tears falling aren't because I'm staring straight at the sun. They're little diamonds of sorrow I tucked away, my very own royal jewels, and as they slip down my cheeks, I think about how many of them are heirlooms. An inheritance of sorrow far older than I am, but mine nonetheless.

So I cry for Amsol Kalth, whose great beauty was eclipsed only by her pain. I cry for bright-eyed Somitu, clasped like a talisman to Lusca's chest as the lady-in-waiting ran desperately for a ship they'd never board, a very different future slipping through their fingers like so much smoke. I cry for Mirana, who might have killed her own brother, and I cry that she didn't do it sooner. If she had, she might have saved my mother and aunt. I cry for the silence and inaction of the aunts and uncles who had to know what Sorzsa was doing to his own daughters, and for the ignorance of those who were truly blind to it.

I cry for sweet and bitter Kyoro, who loved me but did not understand me, who wanted my birthright restored so she could lap up my power like a cat laps up warm milk. I cry for the pain and jealousy and rage that bent her until she broke and sought out a vasayastisi hitman. I cry because she was a monster and a victim and because she died on her knees, pleading with the barrel of a gun. I'm his ally- he wants me alive-

He wants me. Even then, the night my world ended and this nightmare began, he wanted me. He saved me and he damned me in the same moment, with the same breath. No, that's a lie. I damned myself long before he ever could. And now I'm crying for the girl who betrayed her family because her mother told her she was protecting them. I sob bitterly for her misplaced faith and her arrogance and her youth, for her silence, and for the screaming that came after, until she was too hoarse and wrung out to make a single sound.

He wants me, and for a moment, I wanted him. I let him fill up some of the empty space inside of me, and it was... nice. Not to be so alone. To feel the burn of desire instead of rage and helplessness. To let him help take the pain away, even if it is pain he caused. He owes me that much... I owe myself that much...

I owe myself so much more, I realize as the young light gilds my face a hazy bronze. I owe myself life, despite my sins. And that makes me cry the hardest of all. I have hated myself so much for so long, and hate makes you brittle. Sholu just happened to be the blunt force that shattered me. Maybe the same is true for my family, like he says. Maybe he was inevitable. Because everything ends, doesn't it?

But after that, it begins again. Call it penance, he said. Call it reincarnation. You have to die to live again. And haven't I died? I've died over, and over, and over again. The last time, the best time, he held me in his arms and the pain I tasted was laced with pleasure as tainted and sweet as cyanide.

I cry because I am the only one left standing, and I'm not standing at all. I'm begging on my knees for forgiveness from fallen deities, false idols I was taught were saints whose sins I've only just begun to unearth. They were so fucking human, so flawed. Who are they to judge me?

I cry because I'm alive, and life is pain, but it's more than that, too, isn't it? It has to be. I have to let it be, I realize. I have to entertain the possibility of healing, of contentment, before I drive myself well and truly mad.

And then I laugh, because if everything ends, perhaps that applies to my grief. To my self-loathing and blame. Perhaps one day soon blood will run through my veins instead of regret and the ashes of a world I never, never meant to burn but did.

I laugh at the sun as it rises over the palace, and I laugh at the silly girl crying alone on the roof. I wipe her eyes, too, and offer her something as close as I dare get to sympathy. And then I sit there and I watch the clouds drifting across the sky until, despite the uncomfortable roof tiles biting into my back, I fall asleep.

The last thought I have before unconsciousness claims me is as long as I live, I will never tell Sholu Verlaina that he somehow succeeded in fucking some sense into me.

____

I couldn't kill him off that easily. The crazy fucker is resilient.