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by
Sabaa Tahir
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February 27 - March 22, 2025
Then I windwalk far enough away to collect myself, before she makes me feel any more.
“When I look at you now, I see Dil-Ewal,” he says. “She who heals. When I look at your future, I see—” He pauses and shrugs. “Something else.”
He is the child of a Plebeian and an Illustrian, brought into this world by a Scholar. He is a symbol of hope and unity, Empress Regent. A reminder of what the Empire could be.”
“I saw something, Soul Catcher,” I say. “An ocean filled with—skies, I do not know. And faces. Trapped faces within the River Dusk. I saw that—that maelstrom, and it wanted to devour me and you and—”
“And everything else.”
Stay with me, I think. Stay with me so I can remind you of who you used to be.
“When the Nightbringer came for me. He lifted his scythe. Our Kehanni said if you look into a jinn’s eyes, you see your future, so I tried not to look. But I couldn’t help it. Is that what will happen to me when I cross over? I will be devoured?”
“Something took the other spirits,” the ghost says. “But I escaped. I don’t know where they went. I don’t know why.”
Tribal ghosts have always been rare in the Waiting Place. Their Fakirs usually pass them on without any intervention from the Soul Catcher.
It smells worse than before, like the aftermath of a battle. The trunks of dozens of trees are crumbly with decay. The earth is raw and smoking, as if scorched, and dead fish lay stinking along the river’s banks. I taste the river water and spit it out almost in that same instant. It savors strongly of death.
I need you to disappear. To never leave. I need to have never met you or felt you. You. You. You. I need you.
Or perhaps I’ve finally driven him away for good. I know which one I’d prefer. And I hate myself for it.
We do not fear summer rain, and no blade forged by human or efrit, wight or ghul or wraith, nor any object of this world may kill us, rat. We are old creatures now, not soft and open as we were before. No matter how badly you want us to die, we cannot.”
“Please, Banu al-Mauth. You are destined for more than this—”
“And though the Sea of Suffering churns, ever restless, verily does Mauth preside, a bulwark against its hunger.” Laia’s voice whispers in my mind. I saw something, Soul Catcher. An ocean filled with—skies, I do not know.
“It is the repository of human suffering,”
“All the sorrow and pain you take from the spirits and give to Mauth—it goes into the Sea. As you stand guardian between the ghosts and the world of the living, Mauth is the sent...
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“I’m done,” he says. “I’ve got one good battle left in me. Let me fight it. The Empire needs its Shrike. It doesn’t need me.”
No. No. I’ve known Faris since we were six, starving in Blackcliff’s culling pen. It’s Faris who could make Elias laugh in his darkest moods, who helped keep me sane when Marcus ordered us to hunt him. Faris who took me to Madam Heera’s for the first time and who protected my sister. Not Faris. Please, not Faris.
“It was an honor to serve by your side, Helene Aquilla,” he says. “Give my best to Elias, if you see him. And for skies’ sake, put Harper out of his misery. Poor bastard deserves a roll in the hay after all you’ve put him through.”
I stumble toward a torch flickering just ahead. Where did it come from? Who bleeding cares. Get to it.
I do not deserve to live when they all died.
No blade forged by human or efrit, wight or ghul or wraith, nor any object of this world may kill us. No matter how badly you want us to die, we cannot.
Yet somehow, she knows it’s me. I feel it in my bones. We gaze at each other, connected by blood and violence and all our sins.
The spirit disappears. It does not go to the Waiting Place. Or the other side. I would feel it, if that were the case—I would know in my bones. So what in the ten hells am I seeing?
The only logical conclusion is that the jinn cannot fight humans head-on.
his power is unaffected. If anything, he appears stronger.
for there is a whiff of ghost about him, a sense of the dead nearby.
Or maybe I will reap her soul too.
Would you let her die, knowing her spirit will never cross the river?”
A memory surfaces—a day long ago at Blackcliff, the first time we saw each other. Skies, the determination in her, the life. Even then, she was an ember ever burning, no matter how much the world tried to quench her fire.
But for a moment, just a moment, the wrathful, imprisoned part of me, the old me, breaks free. And I cannot walk away.
When the blood has all drained out of me, when I know that my healing power will not save me, I stop. My torch has burned down to almost nothing. You are a torch against the night—if you dare to let yourself burn. Cain said that to me.
Skies, I hurt so many. And I only realize it now, at the end, when I am a torch no more, but an ember with no air, the great dark closing in forever. Too late to say sorry, Helene. I think my own name for the first time in months. Too late to fix anything.
“Father and mother. Sister and brother and friend. Rise.”
a helmet that glows with a strange, silvery light.
“I’m Spiro Teluman. I have been waiting for you.”
and the blade cuts through her like she’s flesh and blood instead of fire and vengeance.
The son of shadow and heir of death Will fight and fail with his final breath. Sorrow will ride the rays of the day, The earth her arena and man her prey. In flowerfall, the orphan will bow to the scythe.
In flowerfall, the daughter will pay a blood tithe.
And though she was my enemy, I can take no joy in her passing. For as she dies, the Nightbringer screams.
“Khuri!” The sorrow in his keen turns my blood to ice, for I have heard such pain before. His cry is my father moaning in his jail cell and my sister’s neck snapping. It is Nan stifling her wails in her fist as she mourned her only child and Izzi telling me she was scared as she breathed her last. It is every death I’ve ever suffered, but so much worse, for he had only just gotten Khuri back. He had fought a thousand years to get her back.
“Flee, Laia of Serra,” Rehmat whispers, its sadness palpable. “Flee, lest he burn you to ash.”
You have a soul. It’s damaged, but it’s there. Don’t let them take it from you.
Home, I tell myself. I am home. But it doesn’t feel like home anymore. It feels like a prison.
“One day, sister,” Livia says, “you’ll have to reckon with all the things you try to hide from yourself. And the longer you wait, the more it will hurt.”
The people love you, Livia said. But it is the Emperor who they must love. The Emperor who they must fight for.
“Laughing hurts less than facing what happened. I am sorry about Faris. I liked him.”
“Do you know how many blades I made for them before Isa died, Shrike?” he says. “Do you know how many were used to kill innocents? But it wasn’t until it affected my family that I finally did something. That fact will haunt me until I die.”
“I waited for you because the Augurs said you’d set things right. That you’d help to forge a new world. I will hold you to that, Shrike. I’m done siding with tyrants.”
