Chapter 25

  One week later

  Anthea had once loved sunrises and sunsets. She knew them all by heart: the soft, subtle ones that came and went with no more fanfare than a slight pinkening of cloud; the frightening empty vastness of those that swallowed up the world when no clouds marked the sky; the glorious spectacles and the lovely paint-strokes of a wild windy morning; the smoky violet twilight evenings when the whole world was rinsed in indigo; the dawns both bold and gentle, the evenings both joyous and melancholy. She knew them all; she could see them coming from hours away. She had once loved them all. Now they terrified her, for sometimes in them she saw the Burning Books.

  She sat on the edge of the cliff, far above the valley that swept below her mountain. The view was spectacular, that had not changed, but now it gave her no pleasure.

  She did not brush her hair. It was matted and snarled, greasy and unwashed. It still had blue Praxian sand in it. It still had flecks of blood in it, white and green. She did not care.

  She did not play her flute. It sat beside her on the edge of the cliff. It was the nearly perfect flute that she had wanted to play for the dragons. She had brought it here in hopes that being in this place would enable her to play again, to feel again. It was no good. She could put the flute to her lips. She could even blow into it and make sounds. But she had no music. She had no Song. Something was missing from inside of her, more than she had ever thought anything could be missing. If her heart had been ripped from her chest and replaced with a ball of ice, it would have been more bearable. Even her broken arda, her severed connection to the wind and sky, was less of a loss. A scythe with no blade was more complete than she.

  She raised the flute, snapped it over a knee, and let the pieces fall down the cliff. She considered following them. One thing stopped her: the Burning Books. What if, when she died, she saw them again? And not just saw them, but came before them? Read them? The thought shriveled her with terror. She glanced left and right, fearful of glimpsing them.

  She could remember little about her possession by the mother stone, and almost nothing about being dead. There had been a great darkness, and then a great light. And then the books.

  She watched the mountains, the circling eagles, the clouds and the sky, trying to feel something. She sought desperately to perceive the beauty, the music that she was sure she had once seen and heard and known. She couldn’t even remember it now; she only knew that it must have been so.

  She thought of her departure from Jeronimy’s mountain, from Nonpareil Nescience. Rasmus had tried to stop her; Fiora had tried to embrace her. She had prevented them both.

  Rasmus: I found Acarnus; he is pretending not to know you.

  Anthea did not blame him.

  Rasmus, shaking his head in disappointment: I had thought better of him.

  Anthea did not find him at fault.

  Fiora: None of this was your fault, Anthea. No one blames you.

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  Anthea knew that. She did not blame herself.

  Rasmus: If you require anything, any aid at all, you have only to ask.

  Anthea did not intend to ask for help even if she was dying.

  Fiora: We love you, Anthea!

  And Anthea had once loved them. All of them, each of them, even Akkama, all in different ways. But she did not believe she could really love anything anymore.

  Leaving them pained her, yet it pained her still more to stay. Her heart cried out for solitude. She wanted to hide, to crawl into a small dark place where the books could not find her. To be away from those beautiful daimon with their beautiful songs, who had once been her friends.

  She had borrowed Catch, who was as eager to help as Fiora, and he took her back to her mountain. Anthea had loved Catch, and his beauty had made her tremble, but now it burned her. She had wept into his fur as he rode the winds, those winds now a stranger to her.

  That had been days ago; she neither knew nor cared how many. There were lots of things she had once cared a lot about. She had seen the notes back in her windy caves, her plans, her schemes, her questions and dreams. She had seen things Acarnus had given her and things she had meant to give him. She had seen the words written: we are all the stars in the sky. She had seen hope. But now…

  There was still Acarnus. She had felt something for him, and it had been something so strong that even death, even the loss of both her Song and her arda, had not swept it away entirely. Yet she had been afraid, so afraid. What would he think? What would he say?

  The words of Rasmus had cut her deeply somewhere in her heart. Acarnus had already forgotten her. That was wise of him. That was the intelligent thing to do, and therefore, the Acarnus thing to do. They had no future together, not with Anthea songless, as dead inside as the voidbound. Yet she had thought…she had secretly wished…

  She couldn’t finish the thought, not even in the privacy of her own mind. It hurt too much. She thought, for the hundredth time, of messaging him. But she could not.

  She sat cold and alone on the cliff, and the end of day crept up on her like a vengeful beast stalking its prey. The light of sunset illuminated the mountainside in brilliant gold.

  All became very quiet, very still. Very bright.

  Anthea looked up as though compelled, her eyes wide with fear and the fascination of horror. They were there, just as she had known they would be even before she looked: the Burning Books, set in the sky among the clouds themselves—the books whose awful contents she could not quite recall, huge and flaming. Their gleaming metal pages turned and turned without ever reaching the end. They cast no shadows, but their brightness made shadows of the world below. The turning pages slammed with a sound like immense blocks of lead and gold clapping together, and the force of their passage swirled the clouds.

  Anthea cried out in terror and fell back against the stone, but could not tear her gaze away. The thought of what was written in those pages overwhelmed her with icy dread, because she had seen these books before. She simply could not remember…and the thought of that memory, of catching even a single word written on those smoldering blood-flecked pages crusted with stars like frost…

  The vision faded with the light of sunset, though the turning pages never reached the end, and the books never closed. They would never close, not until The End, when all things had been done and every word had been written.

  Anthea wept.