A Day of Fallen Night (The Roots of Chaos #0.1)

by Samantha Shannon

Sabran had not grieved for her grandmother, and she doubted she would mourn her parents for too long. Still, she imagined the loss of a loved one would hurt like an arrowhead lodged in the body. Life would grow and twine around it, but it would remain, always hurting.

Tunuva envied such discernible wisdom – when every year could be read on the skin, laid out like the rings of growth in a tree.

Glorian strained her memory, finding impressions, pressed like a scent into fabric, like a seal into wax: the flower maze in bloom, the taste of plums, the cloying haze of the high summer.

A strange thing to forget. Glorian gazed at her cards, lost in a soft and sun-drenched memory of running.

The silence was a living thing, a thing that ached.

She would not drown in grief again. Instead, she swam in it, bathed in it. She drank it like a bitter wine, until only a sliver of her soul was left to gasp for breath.

Every word was a root, pulled from the deep hollow where she had crushed her grief.

‘Canthe,’ Tunuva said, ‘your pain is not my pain, but I know its shape. I am sorry for it.’

And Carmentum was just as it had been before the Yikalese had built it – a ruin at the end of the world, silent and alone.

The sky was black, studded with tiny cloves of star. It was customary to hold entombments just before dawn, so the dead could follow the sun as it climbed to the heavenly court.

It has been so hard, for so long, to be stone – to act as if the grief is gone, when I have only grown around the hole that day ripped through me.’

So they fought for their lives in their burning capital, hardly able to tell day from night. They fought, and they fell, and they died by the hundred.

She watched until dawn peeled open like a wound, to bleed its light across the sky.

Wulf glimpsed a sweet and unexpected future, far away. Then he turned around and walked towards his past.

I imagine you have these moments, too, when you trip on the spaces Kanifa filled.’

He opened his hand on the wall, committing its strength and coolness to memory. As he pressed his brow to the old stone, he yearned to drag his lost home into his soul, make it stay with him. He would carry this place through fire and ruin, across the remnants of the world.

She had no mirror, but she knew she must resemble a ghost. A woman drawn with a drying brush, the ink straining for the strength to complete her, leaving her faded at the edges.

She wept until her voice burned through, until her joints hurt and her eyes scorched, and her head was thick with pain. Curled beneath the orange tree, she sobbed her joy and sorrow to the night.

He was proud to be hers. He was proud. And gone. Gone into the forest again, out into the maw of the world. She would always carry the pain of his loss, even if its weight was lighter. It was hers to throw like clay on a wheel, to be turned and worked and smoothed into a shape she might one day be able to hold within herself.

On Cenning Moor, soldiers fought by wyrmfire. In the depths of Hollow Crag, thousands of survivors listened to the clash, knowing well that if it stopped, their lives would be snuffed out next.

The one duty she could never refuse. This had been her only purpose, from the cradle – to yield more life, even though she was alive. To give more than herself, because she alone was not enough. She saw the cruel truth of it now. The relentless, violent circle of monarchy.

‘Live, Wulfert Glenn, my dearest friend. I will see you in Halgalant.’ She wheeled her horse, and charged to war.

She drew, and with one mighty pull, Tunuva Melim lifted the lake.

She reached for Tunuva, and they wept beneath the bearded star – holding each other, holding the child they both loved.

‘I was born in a bonny valley in the South, to a kind warrior and a man the birds trusted –

Wulf shook with the sudden force of his tears. He pressed her to his heart, and he willed her, in some small and hidden chamber of her own, to remember how his love had wrapped her. How his voice had sounded, here in the strange womb of the barrow. And he prayed, not to the Saint, but to the Mother. He prayed no bees would haunt her dreams – that instead, she would whisper her secrets to them, tell them of the memory of him. He prayed her days rang with laughter and song.

Broken on the floor

Tunuva had not been able to face the body – once had been enough – but Esbar had told her later that the birds had come to mourn him, singing a sweet dirge over his grave.

She sang in love and worship. She sang of grief and fear and loss. She sang as if the Mother could hear every word – and perhaps she could, in her bed of stone. Perhaps she would smile in her sleep.

Nikeya knelt on one of the cushions. The exhaustion was catching up with her, making her thighs shake. Unora steeped a pinch of ginger as she told them everything. She had locked it all into a box in her mind. There were fingerprints on its lid, from the nights when she had woken alone, and the days she had spent trying not to look back.

Her throne overlooked the sea without end. By day, she was the iron leader, laughing and strong. At night, she wandered alone through her castle, listening to the waves, dreaming of what could have been. For the rest of her life, she would be wrapped around an emptiness. I will see you in the Palace of Many Pearls, she thought. Wait for me, Mai. I will not be long.