I try to prevent it, but the image rises in my mind unbidden. Of course it does; I've imagined it so many times. If it were a book, the pages would be tissue-soft and faded from holding, reading, rereading, sleeping with it pressed so close to my chest that the ink bled across my skin. It's both a goal and a security blanket; it's what's kept me moving in moments where the blackness inside of me blots out even the faintest sunlight, when the world collapses into one pinprick point and even the stars turn away their faces.

Blood, a brighter red under my nails than on my skin, where it's already begun to darken with drying. My hands almost look like claws. The dagger they grip is razor sharp, its hilt stuck to my skin by coagulated blood and ribbons of gore. Because I didn't just kill him. I eviscerated him, took what was on the inside and turned it out, made a mess of his body the way he's made a mess of my life- of me.

Blood on my tongue. I bit him at some point. The wolf that lives inside of me stalks beyond the neat edges of my humanity, unfurls in a tangle of claws and gnashing teeth. Feral. He's wilderness carved in the shape of a man, as unconvincing as it may be. But me, I'm wild, I'm wind and night and freezing rain and whispered supplications begging please, please please...

I'll give you anything you want...

I'll do anything. Say anything. Tell me, you must want something- there must be something-

My mouth curves into a cruel smile beneath eyes as hard and flat as stones. My breath falls like a mist over his wretched face, smeared with blood and soaked in fear. Both entirely his own.

My voice answering him is as hollow as the howling wind. There is nothing that I want more than this.

The light of hope flickers, then dies in his eyes. Deep eyes, unfathomable eyes, eyes peering over the edge of an abyss that is only ever crossed once. He's dying, and he knows it. He's dying slowly.

As he does, I bend down and press my lips against his ear, as soft as a kiss. And I whisper their names, so he knows why this was done.

Alya Morevni. Her mother, also called Alya. Haim. Valla. Damaros. Rivashi. Nather. Jinnra. Kyoro. Mirana. Elyet. Sarusha. Tenev. Vyan. Ushan. Thessa. Mayuun. Idriit. Amrith. Issara. Kalit. Oromi. Taal. Karunet. Kesastra. Zsidir. Kevved. Iloshu. Ines...

O'otani Koritzu Amarin, Izsaiki of Arzsa. Blessed of Aramizsa and beloved of Zsavina.

I think I resent her death most of all.

"See it so clearly, so vividly, you could paint it," he breathes, encouraging my murderous ideation. I smile coldly. As if I needed any encouragement.

I picture the look of the light fading from his eyes as the blood flows in rivers from his ruined chest. His trembling hands still. As he gives up his last breath, I lean forward and seal my lips to his, swallowing the exhale.

It's theatrical.

It's macabre.

It's perfect.

And then it's over, and his dead mouth is as placid as his glassy grey eyes. At this point, I usually stop imagining, the next moments cut off before I can consider their implication. Guards rushing in, weapons drawn, bullets unloaded into my body with reckless abandon. Because I killed their king, and that isn't something you can walk away from. That isn't even something you can crawl away from.

That's an ending. That's it. The story's long-awaited conclusion.

I inhale sharply, noticing for the first time how close my fantasy of murdering Sholu is to a fantasy of my own suicide. I've never imagined the repercussions of gutting him because I never needed to. I knew. It was the ending I was chasing as much as the gratification of revenge.

I just wanted an ending. Resolution, even if it stopped my heart. Maybe it was better if it stopped my heart, so I'd never have to try and put it back together again. Rather than healing what he broke, I'd break it irrevocably, and in that final breaking find a blackness akin to peace.

I just wanted some fucking peace. Is that truly so monstrous?

No, a voice deep inside my mind whispers. What's monstrous is what you'd do to get it. To him, to yourself. Leaving so much blood smeared on that marble floor. What point would it serve?

For months, I've felt little pieces of myself being torn away, shredded by loss and circumstance and the cold metal of his eyes. I've been bleeding out since the night of the founder's feast, and I need it to end. I suppose I decided I'd give up all of my blood at once, knowing no matter how awful it was, it would be over quickly. And I wouldn't have to deal with the consequences or the questions. I'd just leave behind another body for them to bury, and wrap myself in the cold comfort of oblivion.

It's a morbid plan that I've been carrying inside of me this whole time without even knowing it. Somehow, I know that Sholu knew. Maybe he had a similar plan after he lost Lizsa. A desperate need to get home, then the jagged edge of realizing that home is a person, not a place, and that person is gone forever.

What home do I have but hating him? My rooms in the palace don't mean anything to me anymore. They're just gleaming white stone flecked with mica, cold at night and warm in the mornings. When Sholu dies, that sense of home dies, too. That purpose. And it may very well be the only thing holding me together.

The air is thick with the smell of blood and sweat and fear, but that fear belongs to both of us now. No one is coming. No end in sight. He's dead, and I- I am still perversely, unconscionably, unforgivably alive.

"Oh, goddess," I whisper, horrified. "Goddess help me."

"Gods and goddesses don't deign to help mere mortals, O'otani. As an Amarin, you should know that." He winces as the movement causes the torn skin on his back to pucker and pull. A low hiss escapes his full lips, followed closely by a muttered curse. "Damn you, woman, you've made a mess of me," he growls.

"You made a mess of yourself," I snap, only too eager to convert the horror in my voice to rage. Anger is easier to deal with. It's less nuanced, less messy. I grimace as I remember Sholu's earlier words. Rage is addicting. Cruelty screamed over all of those mournful, delicate feelings until I could pretend that they never existed.

"You put the whip in my hand and you forced me to use it. Don't insult me by saying it was my choice. If anything, it was your perversion."

"Really?" he asks, eyes glittering with amusement. "If I remember correctly, you were the one who suggested shoving the whip's handle up my-"

"I'll shove it down your fucking throat if you finish that sentence," I seethe, hating the vivid blush I know is painting my cheeks. A sign of weakness, proof that he affects me. Unnerves me. Makes a mess of me, too.

Maybe the world makes a mess of us all.

"Fine," he says with a shrug. "There are far more enjoyable perversions to talk about, anyways. Grander debauchery. More pleasurable sins."

"Spare me that, if nothing else."

He snorts. "It seems you've rather conveniently forgotten that night, and that day on the gallows. You kept your life."

"I did not say survive," I sneer back. My anger still sounds off, somehow. Performative. As if I've thrown it across the chasm of my disorientation and grief like a bridge and prayed it would hold my weight, the weight we carry between us. "I said spare. You did not spare me. You made me watch- and then you made me stand there and listen to a litany of imaginary crimes-" my voice rises, the anger suddenly more solid. Maybe this is the way to handle sorrow: let the intensity of rage turn it hazy and ethereal, until it's just another ghost to be shoved into a dark corner of your mind. You're still haunted, but at least the phantom is out of sight. "You have never spared me. If anything, you've snared me."

"Are you composing poetry?" he asks scornfully, mouth twisting into a cruel smile. Eyes hard edged and gleaming like diamonds.

"I am composing your dying dirge, Mesviraste. And the silence that comes after." It's the same kind of comment I've been making for months, the near-scripted strike and parry that plays out between us like clockwork. But this time, it's all wrong. At the heart of the threat, a kernel of truth gouges me like a rock in my shoe: destroying him won't give me closure. The wound is too festered, too deep.

A laugh pulls itself free from my pale lips before I can swallow it down. He's taken something else from me- the comfort of believing that ending his life will fix the fractures in my own. I know now, know to my marrow, that taking him out of this world won't put me back into it. Childish hopes, brittle threats, ugly truths. Uglier even than his raw, bloody back.

I laugh and laugh. Sholu doesn't say anything, just watches me with an inscrutable expression. When I finish, sucking in air the way someone famished sucks down food, he simply says, "I suppose I've made a mess of you, too."

"Clearly," I say breathlessly. I can't explain the alchemy that made such a bleak truth so fucking funny. My emotions are raw and tangled, wrapped around the whip still in my hand. As I pace, it drags on the floor behind me like a tail.

"You've made a devil out of me, Angel of Arzsa," I tell him. "The darkness inside of me is more real than I am. What am I to do now that you've showed me the unreality at the heart of my bitter fantasies? If they are not real, but they're still more real than I am, what the fuck does that make me?"

"Tied in knots," he says simply. "And tripping over your own feet."

"Trip over your own blade," I snarl back at him, baring my teeth. All the while something inside of me whispers softly, it wouldn't matter if he did. It wouldn't give you your ending, or your life, or your freedom. All it might give you is death, and perhaps that's the best you can hope for, girl." I startle a little, realizing the voice I'm hearing is my bitter great aunt Jinnra. You're gonna carry this weight, girl, until the stars fall to earth and the heavens split down their center. You're gonna carry this weight a long, long time.

He must see the yawning of the abyss in my eyes, because he reaches over and lifts something off the low table to his left. "To us," he says mockingly, toasting the air above my head. The liquor in his hand sloshes against the sides of its gilt bottle. "Drakara, all the way from Macchon. A wedding present from Lord Ebran."

"Is he the one with the awful nose or the one who smells like curdled milk?" I ask, sorting through my memory of his courtiers in search of this lord Ebran.

"His nose is fine, so I suppose that leaves curdled milk."

"Unless he's the girlish one who fidgets when he talks and sips his soup loud enough to wake the dead..."

"No, no," Sholu tells me. "That's Lord Halohambra you're thinking of."

I shrug, reaching forward. "Well, give it to me, then."

His eyes glitter with amusement. "What would you call me, O'otani, if I were a lord? The one who sweats bullets? The one who's pigeon-toed? The one who doesn't know which fork is the salad fork? You've assigned them such strange epithets."

"I'd call you the one who needs to stop prattling on and give me the damn Drakara."

He laughs, pulling the stopper from it unceremoniously and offering it to me. "It's exceptionally strong, so it'll make a mess of us in a very different way. This- this is what humans turn to when the divine keeps its tight-lipped silence and the world feels like a fucking battlefield."

"Are you composing poetry?" I parrot, smiling darkly before taking a deep swig directly from the bottle. Anything to soothe the hole he's opened in my center, the knowledge that hurting him won't eradicate the hard-edged grief pressing down on my sternum until I can barely draw breath. I wonder what he sees, if my studied nonchalance as I take a second swig fools him. I sputter and cough, the strong spirits making both my nose and throat burn. Sholu just smiles at me and says with a twinkle in his eye

There was a day
When we did play
At breaking one another down

You broke my back
And I your heart
And we ended up drunk on the ground

I blink, then take another drink from the bottle in my hand to fulfill his last line's prophecy. "You're a psychopath, Sholu Verlaina," I pronounce, wiping my mouth on my sleeve and handing the bottle back to him. "Here. Drink. Maybe then you'll be less intolerable."

"I'll only drink if you compose a poem."

I blink again. "You can't be serious."

"As serious as the stripes on my back, darling," he coos mockingly. "Come on, it's only a few words. Just a few words, and I'll get so drunk that I won't be able to put a sentence together. Imagine the peace you'll have."

My eyes burn alongside my nose and throat as the words rattle around inside my head. Imagine the peace you'll have. I know now, I know with such certainty, that I will have no peace. I've never been one to back away from a challenge, though, so I open my mouth and recite in a bored monotone

Despite what you say
I will have no peace
There is no release
From this darkest day

To you it's a game
Living and dying
But I'm still trying
To stomach your name

"But it's such a nice name!" he protests. I roll my eyes when he claps, then takes a deep drink. Then another. My head is pleasantly fuzzy, the darker thoughts blanketed by a hazy calm. I need more, though. I need silence. I need a mind as still as standing water, so I grab the bottle back and take an even deeper drink. It burns my mouth, but I don't care. I don't fucking care anymore. I'm not real, I'm not free, and I'm never going home. This is my life now, if I even want it.

I don't want it.

I wish I did.

I don't want to die, either.

I just want to be okay again.

"A far nicer name than Amarin, with that hard a. Better than Amshira, too, for the same reason."

I try not to wince when I hear that name on his lips. Somehow it feels like more of a violation than his lips on mine, than his tongue in my mouth, even. Shira is still innocent of all of this, untainted in a way I'll never be again. His name doesn't belong on this bastard's lips. Maybe this bastard's lips belong on mine, though, for all the help I unwittingly gave him. For the secrets I kept and the silence I failed to break.

"What are you thinking about, little tiger girl?" he whispers, brushing his knuckles against my parted lips. "There's such fire in your eyes..."

"I was thinking about your tongue in my mouth," I tell him, just to watch his eyebrows rise to his hairline in surprise. "And I was thinking about death."

"Some call pleasure a little death," he purrs, voice honeyed and low, sticking to me in its heavy sweetness.

"I was not thinking about a little death. I was thinking about so much death you can't hold it in your hands without it spilling over. I was thinking about death as wide and deep as a sea, and the people stranded like islands amongst its currents."

"I liked your other poem better," he says, lifting my hand to his mouth and brushing his lips against my soft palm. I shudder. Revulsion... and maybe something else.

"I prefer the poetry of your screaming, myself," I say sweetly, blinking up at him with wide, innocent eyes. My expression darkens as I remember that, once, it didn't take effort to make my eyes look innocent. It was as natural as breathing, and warmth that wasn't rage flowed through my veins, and thoughts that weren't homicidal or suicidal or both waited behind my innocent eyes. Pale green; like sea glass, my mother said. I've never been to the sea.

So why are there currents rushing against my skin? They caress me, curling around my limbs like fronds of seaweed. Whispering at first of sun-kissed islands and pearlized shells, then of impossibly deep trenches and bones picked clean by tiny white fish. Soon, they whisper, soon we'll drag you down to where the sun doesn't reach and let the pressure crack your skull like an egg.

That pressure presses in around me, goes to war with the alcohol in my veins and wins. The pleasant haziness retreats and I actually snarl, as if I could reach out and drag it back before it's gone. But it just sinks slowly, soundlessly, into the deep. The bottle is still in my hand. I lift it and suck down the liquor. It burns my throat and makes my eyes water, but maybe, maybe I can follow that lost peace down to oblivion...

Then the liquor is wrenched from my hands. My lips make a wet popping sound as the bottle is pulled away. The next sound out of my mouth is another snarl, this one louder than the first, wilder. Something flares to life in his eyes in response to my anger. He's watching my mouth, I realize, and I color thinking that maybe it's not my anger he's responding to.

Maybe it's just me.

"I don't know what I find the most unbearable," I say softly, "this- this sinking feeling, or the lust in your eyes." But that's a lie- I do know. The most unbearable thing by far is the feeling of warmth in my own blood, an answer to his. I notice how naked he is, how close. I exhale, panicking. I've come too close to a truth I don't yet want to face. That I'm so lonely that being wanted, even by him, isn't entirely unwelcome.

Let me go, I whisper without words. Let me go, rising in volume until it's a silent scream, a wall of sheer willpower within my mind cursing, demanding, and finally begging to be set free. The problem is, I don't even know what that would look like. I could get on a ship and sail to wherever Amshira is, and this weight would be cargo. It can't be put off forever, the debt of grief I've incurred. Some can be converted to anger, but the rest... the rest presses against my chest until I can barely fill my lungs. Sharp pain, and a slow, dull aching, all at once.

No one is coming. No end in sight. He's alive, but maybe I'm not. At least not in the way I used to be.

"Let me go," I say aloud at last, the sound mangled and pleading. Half-slurred by the liquor I've imbibed. "Please, Sholu. If you want me to beg, I'll do it. I'll fucking beg. Tell me the words to say and I'll say them, but please, please, let me go!"

He sighs sadly. "You know I can't do that."

"You won't!" I throw back. "You're a tyrant and you won't let me go, and- and-"

"And what if I did let you go?" he asks sharply. "Would you walk out of this palace into a happy life, O'otani? Would you know how to cope with the darkness at your center, or would it eat you down to embers? To the mere memory of heat and light?"

"Let me find out," I plead. I consider sinking to my knees. "Please," I say, tears stinging my eyes. I need an ending. He could end this...
"I don't know how to help you," he says softly, lifting my chin gently but insistently so I'm forced to meet his eyes. Concern, maybe even fear, swims in their shadowed depths. "At first, I thought breaking you would do it. You'd rebuild, better this time. You'd fall, and lean on me to get back up. Then I thought the fighting, the game, would at least keep your blood flowing. Finally, I wanted to believe that you'd see this title as a way forward, a road back to yourself," he tells me, "but O'otani... I'm not sure you know who you are. I'm not sure you've ever known."

I'm about to protest, but the words die on my lips. Because my answer, the first thing that popped into my head, was 'of course I know who I am. I am the Izsaiki, Amshira's bloodbound.'

He asked me who I was, and I defined myself by my relationship to Shira. His bloodbound. His protector. His confidante.

Sholu hasn't been the first man to own me, I realize. The first to write over me in script so heavy I can't be read, or read myself, through its dark ink.

Somitu wanted her son on the throne, so she blackmailed the aunts and uncles with the truth of Sorzsa's abuse.

I was passed over, unwritten.

I was collateral damage.

She didn't want there to be any competition, any lingering sympathies for my cause. So she bound me to her son as tightly as one can be bound in Shikkah, maybe anywhere, and she made sure we grew up hand in hand. So I'd love him. So I'd need him. So I'd never challenge him, because if I did, I might very well have won. I had the strength of a thousand year's precedent on my side.

I thought that bond was my redemption. It gave me back the pride and purpose I lost when they made him the Izsai over me. It legitimized my own impulsivity and violence as a weapon in his service. It tempered those qualities with his gentleness and self-control. But it was never my salvation.

It was his.

I was his.

I was happy to be his. I am still his, buying his life with my own. And I'd make the same choice a thousand times over, I know I would, but something inside of me aches when I think that the choices that defined who I was, in relation to both my family and myself, were political machinations instead of holy dispensations.

"I have no idea who I am," I say softly, looking anywhere but his eyes. If I saw mockery there, I would break. Sympathy would be even worse. "Because they never allowed me to find out. Instead of letting me be myself, they spent my childhood trying to tame me," I spit out the words, shocked by how vicious I sound.. "They hemmed me in. Pinned me into high-collared dresses. Soaked my nails in lemon to lighten the dirt stains, even if it burned. Maybe because it burned, so I'd stop. And when I didn't... when I couldn't... they rejected me. They took my title from me with no explanation, pried my birthright from my fingers, and then they rejected me." My voice is cracking. Maybe my skull is cracking, too.

"And I still clung to them so tightly I couldn't breathe. I'm still clinging to them- not just because I love them, but because I feel I need them to- to exist. Like letting the memories fade would unmake them, and thus unmake me. It's pitiful. Pathetic. But I don't know how to exist without them," I admit. "I've never had a self beyond my family, and now that I have no family, I worry that I have no self at all..."

"But who am I even clinging to?" I ask. "I thought I knew them, but I suppose I have no idea who they really were. So much of what I was certain of has proven flimsy or facile or both. Somitu wasn't chosen over my mother. Shira wasn't chosen over me. Sorzsa was the kind of monster they told me could only happen in other places to other people. He preyed on his sister Mirana and his own daughters, and the great aunts and uncles kept his secret. They protected his memory because it protected our divinity when they should have protected those girls," my voice rumbles through my chest like a growl. "The secret Somitu used to buy her way into power wasn't just what Sorzsa did to them. It was who stood by and let it happen."

"And they had the fucking gall to tell me I wasn't who I was supposed to be," I seethe, "sitting on top of their pile of secrets like it was a throne. If it was anything, it was a grave, the final resting place of each and every skeleton in our closet. They had no room to judge, but they judged us, and I- I listened to them. I believed them, just like I believed my mother when she told me that going behind Shira's back was the only way to protect him. And the whole time she was planning his murder. How could she- her own nephew- her own sister!" I exclaim. "I hate her!" And in this moment, I really, truly mean it. She lied to me. She even lied about why we were lying. She was trying to take from me the one person I couldn't live without."

Shira. Part of me hates him, too. I've spent my life protecting his. When we left the palace, I took my knives and I took his hand. I watched the city like a hawk, daring it to try to hurt him. When Tizat called him a bastard under her breath, I broke her nose. My mother looked at me like I was some wild animal as I stood beneath the searing desert sun, my cousin's blood already drying on my fist, but I just met her gaze and dared her to say I'd overreacted.

But it wasn't the city that was hurting him. I knew it, even if I didn't know what to do about it. I recognized the weariness in his eyes because I'd seen it in the mirror, staring back at me from my own tired reflection. I watched him leave the gardens he loved so much to attend to matters of state. He put callouses on his hands and ice in his eyes and walked with an arrogant, easy grace. He put aside his rich jeweled tunics for simpler, more masculine styles.

Are you happy? I wanted to ask him. I could never bring myself to say it, though, because I didn't know what I'd do if the answer was no. I already knew I wasn't. I've buried that fact for so long, but I wasn't happy. I blamed myself, chalked it up to just another personal failing, but I see now that I wasn't the one who failed.

They failed us, not the other way around.

And... and maybe Shira failed me, when he heard gunfire and ran the other way.

It was smart. What could he have done but die beside me? What purpose would that have served? For all he knew, he was the last Amarin heir. But he- he left me there. In that room full of screaming. If it had been me... I'd have broken down the door. It wouldn't have mattered if it made sense, if I was the last one, if I could've survived it.

Because when we were eight and ten months old, the priestesses nicked the skin under our clavicles and dunked us in the river Imer until the eddying currents pulled our blood into a single crimson stream.

A promise.

Where you go, I go to. What you are, I am as well. We aren't whole unless we're together. When the world is ending, we'll meet it side by side, because I wouldn't want to survive if you didn't. I'd rather die by your side, holding your hand.

It wouldn't be smart, or sensible, but it would be brave. And as thankful as I am that he survived that night, a part of me blames him for running away. And doing a bad job of it, too, so Sholu knew where he was and came to me with that fatal bargain.

I've always painted the world in bold strokes of black and white, resented the places where they blended into a disorienting gray. Held certain things above reproach while condemning others without mercy. It was cleaner that way, but now... now that worldview has failed me, too. Everything is messy and by halves. All I thought inviolate is in chaos. It hurts that to achieve this, all he had to do was tell me the truth. Because my family has been lying to me for my entire life.

And I've been lying to myself for just as long, goddess help me.

I remember hearing similar entreaties on the lips of my more religious aunts, the ones who clutched the eye of the goddess pendants around their necks at every potential misfortune, as if Zsavina was a constant presence in their lives just waiting to be invoked. I always thought of her as holy but remote, shouting to us from the far side of a wide river, communicating her intent but not individual words. I wonder now if we were any better, wearing our divinity like armor, dictating right and wrong like we had some claim to moral authority while we lived in the shadows Sorzsa cast.

And for a moment, I wish Somitu had told them everything. Every stain and circumlocution. Because we've been lying to Shikkah, too.

We told them we were human gods, and only now do I hear the absurdity of those two words side by side. I see for the first time how our humanity was eroded by our absurd quest to remain holy. If we'd just let our wounds breathe, they would have healed over. But we hid our secrets in the dark and prayed that it would unmake them. And the price of maintaining that illusion... first, it was Amsol Kalth. My aunt Mirana. Sorzsa's daughters. Then it was making a third-born daughter Dizsa and her bastard son Izsai when a legitimate heir two months older slept beside him.

Our unravelling didn't begin with Sholu Verlaina, or even with disagreements over how to handle the Vasayaste when the droughts ended. It began when a woman sailed home with her son in her arms and demanded the kingdom be laid at her feet so she would keep her silence.

It began when Arjuuna sent assassins to his fifteen year old sister's door, afraid that she would inherit in his stead. I wonder if he was concerned because Sorzsa so clearly favored Somitu, or if he thought the man's guilt would drive him to make reparations.

It began when Luzca Korahaim wrapped Amsol's daughter in a blanket and stole away to the harbor, but was stopped before she boarded a ship.

It began when Sorzsa killed Isham Lukai because he coveted his wife.

It began when Blessed Aramizsa Ketoi rode her white stallion down from Suumaral and conquered the Harrowin nomads.

What was it that Sholu said?

"It's a lonely thing," I breathe softly, with no small amount of irony, "to rule the world. And the heaven of our piety became its own hell, didn't it?" I don't wait for him to answer. I wasn't speaking to him, but to myself, needing to hear the words out loud. Maybe then I'll be able to understand how- how all of this time, my reality has been a performance of virtue that doesn't actually exist. That I've been the protector of something flimsy and unreal. That none of it meant anything, because I was too stupid to realize that we weren't the heroes of every story.

But Shira- Shira wasn't a lie. He wasn't a construct. He was true, and good, and he- he left me here to rot. Maybe I deserved it. Maybe he learned I'd lied to him and abandoned me. Maybe he truly believed that I was in league with Sholu, seeking my lost birthright, consequences be damned.

At that thought, something inside of me breaks. Cracks like the earth over a fault line, jagged edges pulled in opposite directions by conflicting truths. Half of me clings to reality as I knew it, pushing the truth away, the other half grasps for it like it's the only water in the desert.

I just want to know what's real.

Am I?

I've asked myself so many times if I'm real without them, or if the end of their existence cut off my own as surely as an executioner's ax. As the noose cutting off my air supply that day on the gallows what feels like lifetimes ago.

But maybe I was never real at all. Maybe I'm as inconstant and fickle as their relationship with the truth.

Why didn't they protect my mother and Somitu?

Why didn't my mother protect me?

Why am I protecting Amshira with my lifeblood, my dignity, my pride, when none of them, not even him, protected me?

I start laughing. Not gently, either. Riotously, like I've gone wholly and completely mad. Laughter as loud and harsh as screams. I'm crying, too, not because of the laughing but because of what I've realized, what he's shown me.

Because of the truth.

Because the truth wasn't what I wanted, needed it to be.

Why did no one protect me?

Why is Sholu fucking Verlaina the only one who protected me, even if he also hurt me so badly?

No, I realize with a jolt. Not Sholu alone. Roze. This morning, what he did, it might have been to satisfy an old grudge, but he did protect me. And when he held a knife to my throat, he was protecting Shikkah. Not Sholu.

Who is that misguided devil Roze Marithan?

Can he tell me who I am, too?

Can I tell myself, and actually believe it?

"O'otani," Sholu says, sounding incredibly concerned. A hand on my arm, then my shoulder. "Tani, look at me." I do. "What's happening?"

"The apocalypse," I hiccup hoarsely. "And the truth. That's happening, too."

Instead of asking me to elaborate or explain, he just covers my hands with his own to still their shaking. All of me is shaking, not just my hands.

So he holds all of me. And I, goddess damn me... I let him.

___

I know their poetry sucks