I am Shahar Arameri, and I am alone.

I issued an edict to the Consortium, summoning them to Echo, and to this I added a personal invitation for Usein Darr, and any allies that she chose to bring. To make my position clear, I phrased the note thus: To discuss the terms of the Arameri surrender.

Mother always said that if one must do something unpleasant, one should do it wholeheartedly and not waste effort on regret.

I invited representatives from the Litaria as well, and the Merchants’ Guild, and the Farmers’ Collective, and the Order of Itempas. I even summoned a few beggars from Ancestors’ Village, and artists from Shadow’s Promenade. As Lord Ahad was indisposed — he would not leave the bedside of Glee Shoth, who had been healed but slept in deep exhaustion — I included an invitation to several of the gods of Shadow, where they could be located. Most of them, not entirely to my surprise, had remained in the mortal realm as the disaster loomed. It was not the Gods’ War again; they cared about us this time. To wit, Ladies Nemmer and Kitr responded in the affirmative, saying that they would attend.

The Litaria’s involvement meant that all parties could gather quickly, as they sent scriveners forth to assist those mortals who could not hire their own. Within less than a day, Echo played host to several hundred of the world’s officials and influencers, decision makers and exploiters. Not everyone who mattered, of course, and not enough of those who didn’t. But it would do. I had them gather in the Temple, the only space large enough to hold them all. To address them, I stood where my brother and my best friend had shown me how to love. (I could not think of that and function, so I thought of other things and?"0e T.instead.)

And then I spoke.

I told everyone there that we, the Arameri, would give up our power. Not to be distributed among the nobles, however, which would only invite chaos and war. Instead, we would give the bulk of our treasury, and management of our armies, to a single new governing body that was to consist of everyone in the room or their designated representatives. The priests, the scriveners, the godlings, the merchants, the nobles, the common folk. All of them. This body — by vote, edict, or whatever method they chose — would rule the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms in our place.

To say that this caused consternation would be understating the case.

I left as soon as the shouting began. Unconscionable for an Arameri ruler, but I no longer ruled. And like most mortals who had been near the Maelstrom that day, my ears were sensitive, still ringing despite my scriveners’ healing scripts. The noise was bad for my health.

So I sought out one of the piers of Echo. A few hadn’t been damaged by the palace’s precipitous flight from ocean to lake. The view from here was of the lakeshore, with its ugly, sprawling survivors’ encampment — not the ocean I craved or the drifting clouds I would never stop missing. But perhaps those were things I should never have gotten used to in the first place.

A step behind me. “You actually did it.”

I turned to find Usein Darr standing there. A thick bandage covered her left eye and that side of her face; one of her hands had been splinted. There were probably other injuries hidden by her clothing and armor. For once I saw none of Wrath’s constantly hovering guards about, but Usein did not have a knife in her good hand, which I took as a positive sign.

“Yes,” I said, “I did it.”

“Why?”

I blinked in surprise. “Why are you asking?”

She shook her head. “Curiosity. A desire to know my enemy. Boredom.”

By my training, I should never have smiled. I did it anyway, because I no longer cared about my training. And because, I was certain, it was what Deka would have done. Sieh, I suspected, would have gone a step further, because he always went a step further. Perhaps he would have offered to babysit her children. Perhaps she would even have let him.

“I’m tired,” I said. “The whole world isn’t something one woman should bear on her shoulders — not even if she wants to. Not even if she has help.” And I no longer did.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

She fell silent, and I turned back to the railing as a light breeze, redolent of algae and rotting crops and human sorrow, wafted over the lake from the land beyond. The sky was heavily overcast as if threatening a thunderstorm, but it had been so for days without rain. The lords of the sky were in mourning for their lost child; we would not see the sun or the stars for soe i?me time.

Let Usein knife me in the back, if she wished. I truly did not care.

“I am sorry,” she said at length. “About your brother, and your mother, and …” She trailed off. We could both see the Tree’s corpse in the distance; it blocked the mountains that had once marked the horizon. From here, Sky was nothing more than tumbled white jewels around its broken crown.