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Adaine doesn’t get a crystal call from a family member like she did for Gorgug and Riz. Five newspapers (two from Solace, one from Fallinel, one from Highcourt, and one from the Baronies) are waiting for her on her desk, put there by her secretary Alissa just like every other morning. All of them except the Fallinel Times have the same front page.
DEATH OF A SAINT
FIRST SAINT OF CASSANDRA, KRISTEN APPLEBEES-O’SHAUGHNESSY, DEAD
SAINT APPLEBEES ASCENDS TO JOIN CELESTIAL WAR
SAINT BECOMES PRINCIPALITY
Adaine drops her jaw and her coffee. The plain corporate mug bounces off her foot and shatters on the floor, shooting bone-white shards off to lodge themselves in the carpet and spraying dark coffee across the wall.
“Is everything okay?” Alissa calls from the lobby.
“Yes!” Adaine says, the shudder in her voice giving her away. But it doesn’t matter because she can lock the door just by looking at it and fall, collapse, sink to the floor behind her desk. The last time she’d seen Kristen was… She’d seen her when she spoke at her youngest daughter’s graduation ceremony at Astral State University, and again Fabian’s wedding, and at Tracker’s funeral. That couldn’t have been too long ago. She did some math on her fingers and oh god, it had been twenty six years. Porcelain cracks under the thin soles of her shoes, trying to pierce through. She watches the stains on the wall run like blood from a nose. Her eyes unfocus and her heartbeats pick up speed and she bites her hand until it leaves a mark in an effort to exert some sort of control because what if Kristen hated her as she died what if she didn’t care at all what if she’s looking down at her now what if
Adaine forces her mind into the future on instinct, she balls it up and throws it as hard and as far as she can out of her body, no target in mind except for out. Adaine forces her mind into the future and she sees loving parents and desiccated gods, she sees angels falling and devils rising, she sees immense, immeasurable storms leaving a trail of reconstruction behind them. She sees, above all, a world that ends every day and is reborn unchanged every tomorrow.
The oracle takes a deep breath, and lets her third eye wink shut. She sits—arms wrapped around her knees, chest heaving, glasses crooked and smudged—and pulls out her crystal. Ignoring missed calls and unread texts from Fig, Fabian, and Ayda, Adaine opens up her To Do List app and thumbs through her entries for Today, Tomorrow, This Week, This Month, This Year, This Decade, This Century, until she reaches Eventually. She types: Fix It.
That’s a prayer, Adaine thinks, sure of this, and she looks up at the ceiling almost expecting to see Kristen, Riz, and Gorgug looking down at her, as if to whisper Yes, you’re doing so well, you’re so close, we’re proud of you, Adaine, but there’s nothing but clinical white plaster and the indifferent silence of arcana.
Garthy, with gray edging their temples and crows feet lining their eyes, sets the four of them up in Fabian’s private room at the Gold Gardens. Adaine falls into a plush velvet beanbag chair in the corner, arms crossed and making a show of looking more angry than sad. Ayda, terrifyingly old but carrying it as if she’s had practice, pushes a rocking chair next to the beanbag so she can sit next to Adaine. Fabian is busying himself making way too many of Kristen’s favorite complicated drinks. Fig smokes something with a name none of them can pronounce, filling the space between them with heavy, glittery, gray plumes. They think about watching the funeral, but when Fig pulls up the recorded live stream of it on her crystal and they see a thumbnail of a church packed with people they don’t know, they decide against it.
“It was so much longer for her than it was for us,” Fig says.
“I don’t think she was even capable of dying without first choosing to go,” Fabian says.
“I am almost positive principalities can manifest on the material plane,” Ayda says.
“She was only human,” a text from Aelwyn says.
There’s conversation surrounding these statements but Adaine isn’t trying to follow it. She lost track shortly after seeing Kristen’s empty coffin on Fig’s crystal screen.
“It’s going to be okay,” Ayda says, when she’s decided Adaine’s eyes have been unfocused long enough.
“It’s so fast,” Adaine whispers. Ayda makes a noise of agreement. She watches Fabian speak quietly to Garthy in the doorway and Fig scratch something into the surface of the table with a jagged hell-forged dagger. Gas lanterns flicker softly despite the good foot of smoke roiling across the creaky wooden floor. A radio is playing in a nearby room, the warbling of an incredibly famous and long dead pirate aasimar coming in muffled through the walls. She’d been like an older sister to Ayda.
“Will we still be best friends, next time?” Ayda asks. Her look of fear almost sends Adaine over the edge, but she wrangles control of her lungs and reaches out to holds Ayda’s hand as gently as she can.
“Of course, next time, and every time after that.”
“Thank you. When I can’t remember who you are, don’t let me forget that I love you,” Ayda says. “This goes for Fig as well. I would tell her myself but if she skateboards away right now she might fall into the sea.”
Adaine laughs, just a little, but enough.