memory.
She looked across the copse at the mazelike tangle of tree limbs opposite. It seemed that as her body faded, her sight grew ever sharper, even in the darkness, until she could see every vein in every budding leaf, each tiny insect that crawled across the twigs, the very sap as it pulsed beneath the bark. She could see faces in the mosaic the brambles made, female and male both. Faces that watched her, witnessing what was happening. Faced with markings across them, none exactly like hers or like Lusk’s, but unmistakably similar-each a sigil the Astral Sea crafted upon its own children.
Faces that were hers in previous lives, each shed like a snake’s skin when it grew dull, revealing the new patterns of a new life beneath it.
Devas rarely remembered, except in extremity, the lives they shed. Lakini could remember the drifts and the currents of the Astral Sea that had birthed her, millennia ago, better than the life and body she inhabited before this one. But now, on the cusp of death, staring at her own past faces witnessing her passing, she remembered. Images flickered through her consciousness, as if someone showed her the illuminated pages of a book depicting animate scenes from history-her own history.
She watched, impassive, as fire and melted rock poured down a mountainside, and man-size, serpentine creatures frolicked joyously in the lava. One turned to her and stretched out its arms covered in scales, imploring and mocking her at the same time.
She remembered the taste of wine made from grapes that grew and froze on an ice-bound rock that floated over isolated reaches of ocean, and the onyx-carved cup she drank it from, and the cruel, beautiful smile of the creature that had poured it out for her.
She ran with another, an incarnation of the deva who in this time had become Lusk, ran full pelt at the edge of the cliff rimmed in pale green grass and tiny white flowers, the dirt and rocks beneath their feet crumbling and falling into the sea far below. They were at the point of falling themselves but ran too fast for gravity to catch them, and the sunlight winked diamond-bright on the waves for miles before them.
She stood on a beach, on golden sand lapped by silver water, and bowed her head as she kneeled to an immense winged beast. She bore no weapon, and her body was very new. The beast’s warm breath stirred the hair at the base of her neck. She raised her head and saw the beast’s clawed hand holding out a sheathed sword. The sheath was white leather with a repeating leaf pattern stitched in gold, and the hilt and pommel were silver and gold worked together to form waves like the liquid fire in the heart of a mountain. The beast spoke, and in her memory she couldn’t hear the word it uttered, but she knew what it meant.
It was both a naming and a benediction.
It was her first incarnation as a creature of the mortal plane, never remembered until now. Dawnbringer-her purpose to bring hope and justice, like the new sun spilling light at the edge of a darkened world.
Lakini could name her faces. Lakini. The one who had no name but was known as the Lady of the Sparrows. One of her rare male incarnations. Pashia the Golden.
A thick mist clouded the edge of her vision, bright and shot through with silver. She blinked, but the mist didn’t go away, spreading instead and obscuring the faces so that one by one they faded away.
There was a great weight on her chest-not on, not exactly, but inside it, pressing against her heart. Beat by beat the flow of blood through her veins slowed. The pressure would have been painful if not for the warmth and lassitude that served as a drug, numbing all sensation.
She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, knowing that as she exhaled, the mortal components of her body would dissolve, each tiny particle returning to the bosom of the land she’d wandered for so long. Like all things living and unliving beneath the sun and moon of Faerun, she was composed of star-stuff, and as a dying star she would scatter for a time before being remade as something, someone else.
Everything changes. Everything dies. She had been an instrument of that cycle of killing and dying often enough to know. Dying, she remembered Wolfhelm and the smith.
There was a smell like gangrene in the smith’s small neat hut behind the smithy. His eyes were yellow, and thick black hair had sprouted all over the arm that had been bitten.
She sat by him a long time as he tossed and cried out in his sleep. At one point his lips drew back, and she saw long yellow canines were sprouting from his gums, over his normal, human teeth.
He lunged at her and snapped. She drew back just in time.
Jonhan opened his eyes and looked up at her, startled. Lurid yellow eyes looked back into her gray ones.
Her voice was gentle. “How do you feel?”
“Terrible,” he said. “But I was dreaming, and that felt good.”
“What did you dream?”
He grinned wolfishly. “Killing. Eating.” He looked startled at his own words.
“Killing what?”
“Rosebud. You. Everybody. All meat. All rabbits to be eaten.” He drew a great, shuddering breath, then looked at her, stricken by what he said. “You’re going to have to kill me.”
“Yes,” she said, and then, “Are you ready?”
He swallowed. “Yes. Can you make it quick?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You’ve done this before.”
“Yes,” she said, drawing her dagger.
Outside, the donkey’s braying sounded like weeping.
Lakini was floating in the warm waters, each ripple moving her body as if she were composed of water herself. This is death, she thought. It’s not familiar to me, although I’ve done it before.
Something tugged at her right wrist. She ignored it, and it tugged again, insistent.
Blinking her eyes open, she looked down at it and frowned.
There was no sea, no feeling of peace and contentment. Pain lanced through her again. She sprawled against a tree in the middle of the dark woods, cold and alone. The bracelet around her wrist tightened again and, as she watched, one end of it uncoiled from the rest, reared snakelike, and jabbed the skin of her palm.
It wasn’t painful, but her body jerked against it. She no longer felt as if she were dissolving. She was all too corporeal.
A voice, clear and implacable, came from the center of her being.
Reborn, she would be whole again, an unblemished weapon ready to do the will of the gods. She would remember nothing of the sanctuary, of the Houses of Beguine and Jadaren, of Kestrel or the Rhythanko. She might remember Lusk, even if he took a new form. She knew that the beings that were Lusk and Lakini had found each other again and again over the centuries, bound together in a time mortals would consider ancient.
Lusk … He had tried to kill her, at the behest of something outside them both. She knew, with a wisdom older than her Lakini body, that Lusk had begun to walk apart from the path of his deva nature long ago.
Should Lusk die, he would not return as a deva, but as a rakshasa, a tiger-demon, his outer form betraying what his inner nature had become.
If she denied her rebirth, would she take the first fatal step off that path, condemning herself as well?
Outside her, the Astral Sea called on her to let all go, to dissolve. The voice inside her called on her to remain. Lakini herself was trapped between them.
I must decide.
Another vision came to her, this one not of her past lives or the dwelling places of the gods. This was a mortal face; Kestrel’s face, with nothing divine about it. It was a human face, touched with the hands of time.
The thing on her wrist moved again. If she had had the strength to pry it away and cast it aside, she would have.
