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August 31 - September 6, 2025
As autumn deepens across the peninsula, the days will grow shorter and shorter until the onset of winter, when the sun won’t rise at all for three months. The Iljaria call this long period of darkness Soul’s Rest, we Skaandans Gods’ Fall, and the Daerosians the rather-unimaginative-if-you-ask-me Winter Dark.
I study the apparatuses, ice in my belly, trying to map out a routine in my mind before I force my body to do it. I am not sure I can—maybe the king wants me to fall. But I picture the arena at home, where I spent 20hour upon hour practicing. I remember that I am remarkable and that I must not fail.
We can’t risk getting caught up in any skirmishes, and it’s the season for war: light to see by, blood running hot.
There was a time when I wasn’t made up of anger, every cell in my body stitched together with rage. I was happy, once.
“My parents aren’t here to slay my demons, Vil. So I’m going to. Maybe when Kallias is dead, I can sleep at night. Maybe when he’s gone, I can finally prove to my family that I am every bit as remarkable as my siblings. Every bit as worthy of their regard.”
I have often thought it strange that the three peoples who share this peninsula have such wildly different beliefs about the First Ones, the original twelve beings to inhabit the world. The Iljaria, indeed, claim them as their ancestors, the beginnings of their power, and refer to them as Lords instead of gods. They believe that if they are faithful to their traditions and their people, that if they nourish and grow their power, they themselves will become immortal after death and join the ranks of the First Ones. If they are not, they will be reborn powerless. Damned. Skaandan. The Daerosians
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I sag. “I don’t—I don’t know how I feel, Saga. How am I supposed to feel about anything? How am I supposed to feel, at all?” “That didn’t keep you from kissing that bastard son of Kallias in the tunnels,” she says viciously. I grind my jaw, tears pricking hot. “That was different.” “Why?” I blink and see sparks of blue and silver; I taste magic, enough to light the dark. I don’t want to parcel out my feelings, lay them on a tray like Saga’s earrings, pick out the ones I want to keep. I don’t even know how.
“Do you think a person should be more loyal to their country or their faith, Brynja?” I shake my head. “I don’t know.” “Your country sustains your body,” she says. “Your faith sustains your soul.”
Kallias watches me, bemused, his white fur cloak heavy with diamonds. “I did not mean to startle you.” I look at him, and I don’t understand how he is so . . . so very human. So very mortal. A monster cannot become a man, but a man can become a monster, and perhaps that’s what makes humanity so frightening: You cannot tell, just by looking, who is monstrous, and who is not.
Attendants quietly pass out more glasses of wine, and Kallias stands, lifting his glass high as he leads us all in the traditional Daerosian benediction. I have heard these words many times, but never said them before: “Sleep well with the night, come again with the morning, leave us not forever in the Winter Dark.”
If you confront your ghosts, maybe they won’t haunt you anymore.”
He’s a problem, says Vil in my mind, tangling with Saga’s voice: What happened in the caves, what you thought he was to you there—it was nothing. It meant nothing. Gulla’s words are there, too, the memory of her fingers spelling them out in the great hall: He has become too much like his father, desiring only power. But I think of colorful cards laid out on his bed and his childhood gifts of food and quiet company. I think of his back to mine, battling monsters in the dark, of his fingers tangled in my newly grown hair and his magic sparking inside me, hot enough to burn. I think of his
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We hold each other for a while in the dark, my head tucked under his chin, his hands tracing slow circles on my back. His heartbeat calms me, pulsing under my ear, but it breaks me, too. My tears soak through his shirt.
“He was my friend,” I tell her softly, longing for her to understand. “Before the tunnels, and—and Hilf—before all that, when we were children, he was my friend. I was a girl alone in a cage, and he was kind to me.”
I am glad I’m transforming into a wholly new creature, one who cannot be caged. One who tells herself she is not afraid of the dark, and almost believes it.
Ballast stands beside his father, dressed in blue and gray, a gold circlet pressed onto his white-and-black hair. My heart stutters at the sight of him, and I hate that I have not yet taught it to be quiet.
He barely looks at her, his gaze fixed on Kallias. “Iljaria goes where Iljaria wishes. You all are so small, your lives so fleeting, like moths, like worms. You forget the whole of this peninsula belongs to the Iljaria. That our ancestors created the world. That your gods still walk among you.”
The scenes of my worst nightmares play out before my eyes, and when, when, will all this be over?
“Are you so confident you’ll be able to wield the Iljaria weapon?” I ask him. “I know you have no faith in me, Brynja, but I wish you’d believe me the slightest bit capable.”
“He told me he’s in love with me. He wants me to stay with him in Tenebris as his queen.” “And what did you tell him?” Her tone is carefully neutral. “Nothing.” “Brynja.” I turn from the window, a whorl of anger and grief. “I’m tired of being in the dark, Saga. I’m so tired of the dark. This mountain has taken half my life from me. I can’t stay here. I can’t. And I don’t—I don’t feel those things for Vil. I don’t think I ever will.” I realize it’s true, down to my very bones, and I can’t even quite regret it.
Saga’s eyes go soft and angry all at once. “But you feel those things for Ballast.” 302 I see him kneeling in a pile of dead moths, and my heart twists. “I am weary of kings and princes, Saga. I am weary of all this.”
His lips thin. “Why are you here? Why are you telling me this?” “Because—because I’m worried about you.” He laughs and folds his arms across his chest. “You’re such a liar.” “I’m not lying. Your father will be executed, Ballast. And Vil says that—” “That the same fate awaits me? No. I told you before that I will not allow the Skaandans to take Daeros. I will depose my father and rule in his stead. And the Skaandans will get the hell out of my country. Will you go with them, Brynja? Or will you lay all your cards on the table now, and join them with mine?”
What right does Skaanda have to Daeros?” “What loyalty do you have to Daeros?” I retort. “Do you think because I’m a half blood that I don’t belong anywhere? That I have no right to carve out a place for myself?”
“Fine,” says Brandr. “I will play your game, little king. When I tire of it, I will kill you.” “How very un-Iljaria of you,” Kallias drawls.
“Brynja,” says Vil slowly, careful around the point of my knife, “what are you doing?” My eyes flick once toward Brandr. “My brother already told you. The Iljaria are reclaiming our mountain.”
I take a deep breath. “Am I to live in a cage and perform tricks with my magic?” “No. For this to work, you must not let on that you have any magic, or even that you’re Iljaria at all.” I tilt my head. “What do you mean, Father?” He smiles. “We’re going to turn you into a Skaandan, and we’re going to make you remarkable for something other than magic.” Grief flashes across his face, raw sorrow stitched with rage. “We’re going to make you fly.”
I am utterly terrified I will meet the same fate. I have no magic to assist me anymore—I can’t call on the air or the wind to save me. My father has locked my power deep inside me so I won’t betray myself. I am as helpless as if I truly were Skaandan.
Nightmares haunt me. I dream of falling, my body fractured on the rocks.
My father’s last words to me echo forever in my mind, uttered on our hilltop as the sun sank west and the wind blew leaves in my hair. “You are of the Iljaria, Brynja,” he told me. “You could live three hundred years, perhaps more. Time does not bind us like it binds others. Our kind doesn’t even feel the passing of time—it will be nothing to you. Remember that. And be true to our cause. To our people.” My father was wrong. I do feel the passing of time, in my iron cage in the king’s mountain. I feel it acutely. Every second, every heartbeat—they pierce me through like swords, and leave me
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I have no illusions that he’ll be on my side. He offered his hand of cards, but I didn’t offer mine because I’m the one who had the Ghost God card. Now I’ve played it, and I can’t help but think that everyone has lost the game, even me. Especially me.
Is this really what the First Ones want? Annihilation of everything that has gone before, a wholly new beginning? Surely the magic wound into the stones of our most ancient cities will protect them, but in the fury of the Yellow Lord’s power—everything else will be reduced to ashes. I can’t understand why this seems to mean nothing to my kinsfolk. It’s like we are stones, changing little with time, not heeding the fates of the mayflies who live and die all around us. Maybe it’s my own fault, for pretending to be a mayfly. But I don’t want to be a stone.
I have outlived my usefulness, I suppose. Fulfilled my duty. And what good am I now, an Iljaria with no magic? Not even worth the effort of conversation.
Was it really always going to end this way?
Whoever this new Brynja is, I think I hate her.
I stand eye to eye with him and am overwhelmed with the sudden sensations of loneliness and sorrow and anger. They taste bitter on my tongue, and I peer at the Yellow Lord with greater understanding. He’s been chained down here for centuries. My measly eight years in Kallias’s cage don’t even compare. 370 “One person’s pain does not negate another’s,” says the Yellow Lord quietly, reading my thoughts. “I have been down here longer, but that doesn’t make your experience meaningless. You have been hurt. Deeply. Haven’t you?” Another wave of loneliness hits me, and I gasp under the weight of it.
His eyes bore into mine, fearless and unflinching. “I knew you were my wayward acrobat the moment you paraded in here with those Skaandan 377fools. There’s too much pride in you—and too much fear. Why do you think I allowed you to get close to me? Why do you think I offered to make you queen? Certainly not because I desired you.”
He just smirks at me. He wants me to ask. “Why?” I grind out. He shows his teeth. “To mock you. To draw you closer and closer until I could strangle you alive, make you pay for escaping from my Collection and daring to come back. I’m not a fool. I knew the treaty was a ruse. But I like a good game, Brynja. It helps to pass the time. And what better game than toying with your Skaandan friends and you? All the sweeter when the long night is over, when I could throw your worthless corpses into the Sea of Bones.”
I didn’t count on you, of course, the little Iljaria girl grown so powerful in her rage that she nearly tumbled the mountain down around my ears.
“We are the same, you and I,” I say instead. “Yearning for light and yet trapped in the darkness. We’re bound by the same bloodline. The same fate.
“I wondered if it was you,” says Ballast quietly, into the setting sun. “No one could ever forget the girl who nearly brought the mountain crashing down around her with the strength of her anger and her grief.”
“I hate that he did that to you.” “I let him.” Ballast’s voice is thick with emotion. “He still shouldn’t have done it. Everything was a game to him.” “You let him play his games with you, too,” says Ballast softly. I take a breath. “I thought I could win.” He gives a little huff that could be a laugh or could be a sob. “So did I.”
“You would make a good king,” I tell him, and find that I mean it. His jaw goes tight. “I have it in me to be cruel. Like my father.” I see again the deadness creeping into Kallias’s eyes, the feeling of his lifeblood leaking warm onto my arm. My gut twists. “So do we all,” I say.
He turns to me, stricken. “Are you all right?” he says quietly. I stare at him, my power searing in every part of me. I have been rewritten, from the inside out, but he can’t see it. He doesn’t know. Then I’m sobbing in the snow and I can’t breathe and I think that my grief will rip me apart and I don’t know don’t know don’t know why I’m crying but I can’t stop.
I look at Ballast in the light of the stars, and he looks back. He smooths his thumbs across my cheeks, wiping away the remnants of my tears. I’m stricken again by his scarred eye socket. I lift one hand, touch his scars with gentle fingers. My gut wrenches, and it’s all I can do to keep from crying again. It hurts, that someone I care about so deeply has endured so much pain.
“No way in hell I’m letting you do that.” “Do you trust me, Ballast?” He blanches in the face of his own words turned back at him, and curses softly. “Promise me you’ll be careful.” “I’m always careful.” This pulls a smile out of him. “No, you’re not.” I have to laugh. “I will be this time.”
The owls catch us before we smash onto the ice. I could laugh. I had forgotten the owls.
My heart beats, beats. Ballast stands before his army, gilded in light, and his beauty robs me of breath. I think he will never again walk in darkness.
Thanks to the band the Oh Hellos for their song “Caesar,” the ending of which I have always envisioned playing in the scene where Ballast comes over the ridge with the sun rising and his animal army behind his back—that song was one of the main reasons I didn’t want to give up on this book, and it still gives me goose bumps. While the Dark Remains is essentially a love letter to Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief. Anyone who has read it will understand why. So thank you, Megan, for writing a book that has inspired me many times over.
Lastly, to the one who holds all things in his hands and who puts stories in my heart. Soli Deo Gloria. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
