The Harbinger was watching me.
I blinked. No, not the Harbinger herself. The image reflecting in the stain was not flesh and blood or spirit. It was Aren’s statue. I pushed myself away from it and then saw him.
Prostrate on the bloodleaf lay Zan.
Blood on the snow.
But of course, it wasn’t snow, I now knew. He was lying motionless on a bed of drifting white petals. His eyes were closed, one arm bent beneath his dark head.
I sobbed as I knelt beside him and tried to gather him into my arms, hating how chilly his skin was, how blue his lips were.
This was it—?Aren’s vision made real. Zan was gone. Dead and gone and cold, and here I was, surrounded by bloodleaf flower when it was already too late to use it.
Then a single petal floated down and landed on Zan’s lips, as fragile as a frond of frost at the break of day. I stared at it there and remembered: Had not bloodleaf flower overcome death before? Had I not gone to the other side and come back myself?
Ever so carefully, I brought my lips within an inch of Zan’s and let out a slow, soft breath into his mouth, sending the petal fluttering between his parted lips, where it dissolved and disappeared.
Nothing happened.
I rose and slammed my fist into the foot of Aren’s statue, violently resentful of her impervious, stony expression high above me. I hit and punched and kicked at it until my knuckles were torn and bloody.
“How dare you?” I screamed. “How dare you show me his death and not show me how to stop it! What was it for, Aren? What was it all for? Why was I saved? Why preserve my life and guide my path if you were only ever leading me to this?” I dragged my sleeve across my burning eyes and running nose. “Bring him back!” I screamed at Aren. At the wind. At the stars. I sank down beside him and buried my face into his chest. “Please,” I begged. “Please bring him back.”
And then I smelled it—?roses. Not the tainted, coppery smell of bloodleaf but the smell of fresh roses on a spring day. Light spilled all around me, and I lifted my heavy head to peer over my shoulder.
There she was. Not the haggard wraith I’d seen last, nor the slit-throat spirit that had haunted my periphery since childhood. Aren was the way she must have looked in life—?luminous and lovely, with violet eyes and straight, silken hair the color of cinnamon. She crossed the tower to me, reaching out to take my ruined hands into hers, her skin soft and unblemished. Her touch wasn’t cold.
She closed her eyes, and I was spun into a new vision. This was not a death of the future; it was one of the past.
She showed me her brothers. How handsome. How doting. How, even as a child, she’d felt the stirrings of a sacred healing power and had visions of the future—?the power to see death and circumvent it. She showed me how, under the Empyrea’s direction, she rose in the ranks of her order at the Assembly, married the Renaltan king, and bore a son, only to have the Empyrea whisper of another hallowed path: There was a rift between planes. An unwilling sacrifice would lay it open, but if she gave up her life willingly during the spell, she could close it forever.
She went into the spell having already consumed the poison that would take her life, content with her fate, until her brother Cael, enticed by the Malefica’s whispers, turned on her.
She showed me how dark and brooding Achlev, unknowing of the Empyrea’s designs, could not let her die. She showed me how he used the blade of her luneocite knife from the botched ritual to catch three drops of her blood and embedded them within it, preserving a tiny spark of her spirit as he tried unsuccessfully to save her life, too . . .
I saw him build the tower and the statue. I saw him place the luneocite knife in her marble hands. I saw him construct his wall and the arduous lengths he went to to spell it and strengthen it, spending every last ounce of his living breath making sure that his brother, now far away, could never come and finish the evil he had started.
Aren, bereft and bodiless, watched her family suffer and survive without her. She watched them go to war in her name. She spent the centuries feeling every death her poisoned blood wrought through the bloodleaf, her only solace the few lives that were spared from the bloodleaf petals. And she was connected to them all—?she felt every life that was saved, every life that was lost.
The last thing she showed me was a tiny newborn baby whose parents had given her a bloodleaf petal in hopes that she would live. Aren, watching her descendants mourn, was moved by their love and grief, reminded of her own son who grew up without her. The little girl needed a spark of life, so Aren gave her what was left of hers. The moment I took my first breath was the moment the last three drops of her blood were finally spent. She took her last steps into death and sent my spirit back into the world of the living.
She and I were tethered together after that, my spirit fueling hers, giving her enough energy to show me her visions. When I cast her away at the tower, I’d snapped our bond and she’d begun to waste away, just like the other spirits trapped in the borderlands between the material and spectral planes. Until now, in this place, when the portals to the spiritual, material, and spectral planes aligned for the first time in five hundred years, finally free of Achlev’s Wall.
She released my hands. “Do you understand?” she asked in a sweet, sad voice.
“Yes,” I breathed.
And then she was gone.
I had everything I needed. Three pieces of purest luneocite: Achlev’s knife, which had become my own, the knife Cael had left behind, and the one I climbed to retrieve from statue Aren’s hands. I placed them at each point of the triangle: Cael’s next to the black stain left by his disintegrated body, Aren’s at the feet of her statue, and Achlev’s next to the spill of Victor de Achlev’s blood from the vial. Then I pulled the brick from beneath Aren’s feet and retrieved the true vial of the Founder’s blood I had hidden there.
“The blood of Victor,” I said, tracing the three-point knot into the stain of his blood as bloodleaf blossoms—?tiny copies of the symbol—?fell and dissolved into it. “Descendant of Achlev.”
I moved to the next point in the triangle. I emptied the Founder’s blood vial onto the black smear left by his disintegrated body. Then I traced the knot into it as well. “The blood of Cael,” I said.
Last, I pressed my own bloodied hand beside Aren’s knife and repeated the process. “The blood of Aurelia, descendant of Aren.”
This was the original point of convergence between creation, growth, and death. Long ago, Aren, Achlev, and Cael began a ritual on this spot to close a tear between the planes. With their blood now back in place, it fell to me to give their spell a definitive end.