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August 12 - August 12, 2022
Though the wound Malik had given her had never brought physical pain, pulsing anger burned through her whenever she remembered how he had lured her onto the roof of the Sun Temple with an illusion of her dead sister all so he could kiss her with one breath and kill her with the next.
if a person rose from the dead, they should have some kind of mark to show for it, but all Malik saw was a girl who wore her royalty like a second skin.
“I’m so sorry to impose,” she asked breathlessly, “but would you mind pretending you’ve been completely and irrevocably charmed by me?” Surprised, Malik nodded. An older woman appeared in the doorway, and the girl’s grimace deepened. “Gods above, she’s here! Quick, laugh like I just said something funny.”
Where there was once goodness, now only storms and monsters. Thus is the price of resurrection without renewal.
Where mercy once reigned, now come pestilence. Thus is the price of resurrection without renewal. A ruler to resurrect, a ruler to renew.
But he was sick of being tossed around like some kind of plaything. Now all Malik wanted was to make the obosom feel the same helplessness that he felt every day.
“Three times I’ve saved your ass now, princess!” Dedele barked as they hauled themselves over the sand barge’s railing. “Luckily for you, it’s quite the ass to save!” Karina screamed back.
But when that life was her life . . . perhaps Karina truly was the selfish monster everyone seemed to think she was, because she knew then, with a gut-wrenching certainty that she did not want to die, even if it meant every other person in Sonande could live.
Karina did not believe in destiny. She detested chance. But she knew opportunity when she saw it, and one stretched before her now, tinged with blades and battle scars.
Karina could work with ruthlessness. You couldn’t be betrayed by someone you didn’t trust.
of all the petty jokes the universe had played on her, the way she felt his presence on her skin from even several feet away had to be the cruelest of all.
“A baby gazelle with a knife tied to its head could best me in combat. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Every myth is real if you know where to look.”
“We can’t steal from a baby!” “Not with that attitude we can’t!”
Malik did not have it in him to explain voyeurism to an ancient spirit.
But who was she kidding? She couldn’t imagine being saved because she was not the kind of girl people saved. Sweet, kind girls—girls like Aminata, girls like Hanane—those were the kinds of girls people saved. No one risked their lives for broken girls with venom on their tongues. No one mourned the girls who stomped lion-footed through the world, who projected strength to hide hearts more shattered than whole. No one saved girls like her.
“If you die here, you’ll never be able to take your revenge on me. So stand, Karina. You don’t have to run. You don’t have to fight. All you have to do is stand.”
Yet even when the gods had abandoned her, Malik hadn’t.
“I was so worried about you!” Farid cried. “Farid . . . you’re hurting me . . .” Hanane choked out, and Farid took a step back, though he did not release her.
“Are you safe? Are you hurt anywhere? Why didn’t you come straight here?” he demanded. Hanane seemed to shrink into herself.
excuse. In that moment he had been faced with the reality of a world without Karina in it, and his heart had shattered at the thought. And somehow, Karina had risen to her feet. She had won.
No, there was no somehow about it. That was one of the things Malik admired most about her—the way she forged a path forward where others claimed there was none.
Malik’s eyes fell from Khenu’s corpse to the wraith, and then from the wraith to the glyphs on the side of the slab, which spelled out a single word: Beloved.
“Sometimes I doubt the gods even exist. Everyone talks of them so easily—Afua herself can commune with them—but I pray and I pray and I pray and I feel . . . nothing. What if that’s why all these bad things keep happening to me and everyone I love, because they know deep in my heart I don’t believe?” “Then you are either far more powerful than we realized, or the gods are far weaker than we think, that a single girl’s crisis of faith could wreak this much havoc on us all.”
If you ever find someone who feels as natural to you as breathing, don’t leave them. Because if you do, you’ll feel as if you’re gasping for air every moment after.”
His declaration had been so simple, so . . . easy. Karina wondered what it was like to love someone so wholly and completely, no doubt, no hesitation. She’d never felt that way about anyone. She didn’t even know if she could.
that, I just . . . I refuse to continue this cycle of revenge and retribution just because that’s what we’re told to do. So no, I haven’t forgiven you. But I don’t hate you.”
“You alone are more than you realize, and I’d hate to be anyone too stupid to know otherwise.”
And I think she was lonely before—” “She’s not lonely. She has me.”
fuck this guy
“When I am through with you, your power will be second to none. I can build you into a god.” Malik let out a whimper as Farid tilted his chin upward, forcing him to meet his gaze. “But first I must break you.”
She had thought she had known the story of Bahia Alahari, but this was no triumphant tale of good conquering evil. It was a tragedy of two girls ripped apart by betrayal and violence so inhumane that even a thousand years later, the ghosts of it haunted their descendants’ every step.
And then she fell to her hands and knees, pounded her fists against the ground, and screamed, with no one but the gods to hear.
Are all human boys unable to differentiate lust from bloodlust, or is it just you?
them. The two men fought with an intimacy only lovers could possess, dancing around each other’s blows with both familiarity and speed. Fire battled wind, the two of them perfectly in tune with the other’s movements.
He was a monster, and he’d enjoyed being a monster, and now he was all alone.
Life isn’t given to be deserved. It’s given to be lived. If you can find one thing that makes it worth seeing another day, then you’ve done all you’re meant to do.”
So that was the story Bahia spread, instead of the truth that the course of history was changed by two girls who each chose the sin she could bear the most.”
How was it that everyone gave Farid chance after chance, no matter how many evils he committed, yet she was still atoning for mistakes she’d made when she hadn’t even been old enough to realize what she was doing?
It was a far-fetched idea, but Malik could not stomach the thought of leaving Hanane behind. “You’re allowed to choose yourself. You’re allowed to leave.” No one must have ever said those words to Hanane before, for something in her face cleared, and she nodded.
Their list of wrongs against one another was written in blood that would haunt them both for the rest of their days. But equally as long was the list of ways they’d each saved the other. He and Karina had been fighting for one another before either of them had fully realized it.
he realized love was more like a pebble sinking into a pond, soft as the turn of one page in a story to the next, yet the ripples of it extending outward into everything about the way he saw the world and himself.
Let them think he and Karina were lovers. They didn’t need to know just how badly he wished that rumor were true.
Over and over again, only those two words. Malik choked back his own tears. How could she forgive him, how could she still love him after all he’d done wrong? He must have said those last words out loud, for Mama cupped his face in her hands. “Because you’re still here. And if you’re here, you can still make things right.”
As a child, Malik had wanted to be like a hero in a folktale, going on adventures and battling monsters. But now all he wanted was to share a bowl of lemon juice and orange slices with his sisters. He wanted more laughs with Karina, more kisses, more nights spent sitting side by side doing nothing at all. He wanted to live, and he wished he’d realized it before they reached the point where that was no longer possible.
“I give this psalm to my sister, so that she may see the strength untold within her, and that she may cast away all who mean to dim her light.”
All wars are impossible until they are won,
Tunde had once told her that he looked forward to the day she decided she was ready to fight for something instead of against everyone. This was it. This wasn’t about her dying. It was about the people she loved getting to live.
“Who asked you to do that? Because I certainly did not!” screamed Hanane. “You didn’t resurrect me for my own sake, but for yours! You claim you love me, but someone who loves me wouldn’t threaten my sister! He wouldn’t push his own apprentice to the brink of suicide! And he certainly wouldn’t lie to me about killing my mother!”
The truth was that he loved her, in any and all ways she wanted to be loved, and that it wasn’t much, yet it was everything he had to give. He loved her anger and he loved her fierceness and he loved the way she called his name as she ran to him as if no one else in the world existed.
They fell together, sinking deeper and deeper into a place few had seen and fewer would ever know. For Malik, who believed in the Great Mother and the gods, it felt not unlike the divinity he had prayed to his entire life. For Karina, who believed in none of these things, it felt like slipping under a blanket after a long day, warm and exhausted and content.
