Chapter Text
Alina glances behind her, hands still held up to maintain the shield of light around the skiff. The people here- her would-be kidnappers, Zoya, and Mal are solemn-faced. The Suli girl in particular does not meet her eyes.
“We’re nearly there,” she says in a whisper, almost to herself. It’s a bit exhausting, frankly. This whole week had been an ordeal from the demonstration to being forced to wear the amplifier he controlled to this moment right here, leaving a destroyed city behind in the Fold. Yet, her power comes to her easily, even after awakening from unconsciousness. The warm heat coursing through her veins sustains her, enables her to stand without assistance. She has to carry on. She is the only one who can get them out of here.
Alina could sense the end of the Fold, where darkness bleeds into daylight. She doesn’t know how but suspects the reason. Volcra screeches fade into the distance. They sound tormented to her. She wonders if she would ever have the power to free them from this twisted form.
The skiff rocks a little. She sighs, bracing herself for the sunlight to envelope the skiff.
“Alina,” The urgency in Mal’s voice is the first sign that something isn’t right.
She immediately glances back and is startled at the sight of shadows slithering onto the skiff, eating up the light. Her light.
Alina lowers her hands and turns on her heel. The inky tendrils crawl slowly at first, and then all at once, they come for her.
Panicked, she directs her sunlight, but these shadows are so strong that she cannot see beyond her hands. She is completely covered by them, even as she tries to fight her way out of the sphere she is trapped in. The shadows batter her and push against the shield as she tries to expand it. This is impossible. The darkness can’t move on its own. And yet?
She grits her teeth, drawing on the amplifier to enhance her power. It banishes the fear from her heart. She clenches her hands into fists.
With a cry, she succeeds in blasting the shadows away. Light surrounds the skiff once more. Alina locks eyes with Mal.
His mouth opens, his lips form a word, and she thinks he is about to call her name again.
“Mal-” she shouts, one hand reaching for him and the other holding up the shield.
Then, the ground becomes unsteady beneath her feet and she stumbles. Alina feels like she is standing on the edge of an abyss. Wind from nowhere ruffles her hair.
She looks down.
What used to be solid wood has turned into a large circle of pure darkness. Smoke-like shadows rise from the edges of the circle. The sunlight she summons has no effect on it. Is this pure merzost ?
She doesn’t know how she is still standing upright. Alina feels like she is standing on the thinnest of ice, like she is standing on nothing but air. Cold fear sends a shiver down her spine. Her instinct tells her if she loses focus on her summoning now, she might never come back.
Alina takes a deep breath. In the back of her head, she could feel them so close to the light. She has to hold on a little longer for Zoya to get them out of this wretched place. Everyone was depending on her. “We’re nearly there!”
The tip of the skiff emerges into natural sunlight. Alina hears a cry of relief from the Suli girl.
All of a sudden, something tugs on the end of the skiff. It moves a few feet backwards, and they are shoved into the Fold again. Zoya grunts, trying to push it forward. This causes the entire ship to jolt. Everyone else grabs hold of something stable, immovable. Alina, in the center-
Alina loses her balance.
She falls backwards, hair whipping forward in her face. Her stomach sinks. Instead of her back hitting the ground, she falls past it. Alina doesn’t have time to scream.
The darkness swallows her.
The battered skiff exits the Fold.
The shocked passengers stare at the spot where the Sun Summoner was not long ago. She had vanished into the black hole.
“Oh, Saints,” Mal says, walking towards the spot on unsteady feet. There was not even a trace of Alina left.
“Where did she go?” Jesper asked, following him. He taps the wood with the toe of his shoe. “Perhaps she’s below deck.”
Mal shakes his head at him. He couldn’t feel Alina’s presence at all.
“How are we going to get her back?” Inej asks, a small tremble in her voice giving her away. Kaz looks at her sharply.
Mal lowers himself onto his knees, placing a palm on the floor. “Don’t leave me again.”
Alina doesn’t know how long she fell for. Miles and miles, hours and hours. All she could see was impenetrable darkness. Her fingers brush nothing but wind. She is so cold, even in the wool-lined dress. When she opens her mouth to try to speak, no sound comes out.
As a child, she used to dream of falling from a great height and woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. Now, she is stuck in a neverending nightmare and awake for the entire time. Maybe this torture is death for her.
She feels paralyzed- powerless to stop herself from falling even further from the skiff. Or was the skiff no longer above her? When is this going to end?
Trying to concentrate, Alina ignores the sick feeling of falling and the racing of her heart. Baghra would tell her to toughen up, regain awareness, and maybe hit her with a stick. I am the Sun Summoner. I am never in the dark.
She draws on her surroundings experimentally. No sunlight comes to her aid. Her eyes close, tears gathering behind them. Is this another one of his games, a bid to suppress my power, to make me afraid of his darkness?
Suddenly, a sharp surge of anger courses through her body, startling her. She lets a few tears fall and calms herself. Alina is not going to die here, Saints forbid. Who will destroy the Fold in my place? I have to leave this place. I will meet my friends again.
She tries again, pushing and pushing with all her might. Alina moves her hands against the pressure. Anything to make a crack for the light to come in. It is painful to summon in this dark place, with shadows pressing at her from all angles. It is pure misery, to be unable to do what always comes naturally to her.
Alina folds her hands across her chest. The light always came from her heart, her emotions. She thinks of home- the sunlit fields of Keramzin, porridge with honey for breakfast and most of all, her best friend. She draws on those warm emotions to fuel her.
And the sun responds to her call.
She sees nothing but golden light, the darkness all but banished from her. Alina smiles slightly, flexing her fingers. Surrounded by this halo of protection, she could breathe again.
In one triumphant moment, she stops falling. Alina lands on her feet, still in this sanctuary of light she created, but not on real soil. Now, she has to find a way home.
Miss Starkov.
A voice behind her, hauntingly familiar.
Before she could turn to see the source, something pulls Alina downwards at a great speed. Her world becomes a rush of bright, multi-coloured lights. It reminds her of fireworks, sped up a thousand times. She hears a growing sizzling sound that ends with a loud bang, like a door slamming shut.
And then, nothing.
As she falls for the second time, wind whistling in her ears, Alina thinks today isn’t really her day.
Of course, she and her friends (unlikely allies?) managed to defeat the Black Heretic, but Novosibirsk and its citizens were lost to the Fold and at the mercy of the creatures that lurked within it. There were probably no survivors left. Her fault. She had been mutilated by someone she thought she could trust, someone who was so like her, but not. Her fault again, for being so naive.
While the Ravkan military had not harnessed the power of flight, she doesn’t think she would like it even if they did. But at least, she could see the sky above her. She hopes this means she was out of the dark place at last. It is already night, yet dark clouds are visible, lit by something stronger than fire light.
This is not my night sky. I cannot see the stars.
She looks to her left and sees tall buildings, taller than she has ever seen in her life. The windows gleam with unnatural light. If she looks below, there are lines that look like luminous rivers. Strange and otherworldly, yet beautiful.
Alina doesn’t have time to admire her surroundings in full, because the ground is getting closer. She curses under her breath. If the impact of this kills her, she was going straight to whatever life there was after death to find the General and make him answer to her.
She lands on her back, in a way that should have broken her spine but didn’t, with an oomph.
Light blazes around her and as quickly as the night turns into day, there is an ear-splitting cracking noise. Alina is plunged into darkness once more.
“What?” She says to herself in disbelief as she gets to her feet. Her body does not feel like her own. She is still cold, so she rubs her hands together to warm them. There weren’t any pockets to put her hands into on this dress.
Alina can see the faint outlines of buildings, shorter this time than the ones she saw just now on her way down. “ What? ”
Logically, she knows she couldn’t have survived that long fall. Logic means nothing to her at the moment. As a cartographer, she studied a map of her world, saw sketches of towns and cities beyond Ravkan borders. She had never come across a place with buildings that stretched towards the sky. And the ground beneath her feet was paved in a material that isn’t stone.
Someone yells something, causing her to jump.
Someone else responds in an angry tone.
Alina steps forward, to the source of the conversation. Where she landed appears to be an alley of some sorts, and at the end, the ground is much smoother. There is a step for her to get onto a more uneven path. She finds herself in the middle of a long street.
Her hands touch the antlers poking out of her flesh of their own accord. They felt real, the power in them causing her fingers to tingle. Then, she presses them to her wrist, taking her pulse. Her heart beats, faster than normal, but it is beating. A sign that she is alive.
It is dark, so she holds out her palm and summons a small ball of light to guide her. She walks down the empty street, not sure where it would lead her. Hopefully somewhere with light.
Looking up, she is shocked to see something come towards her with two white lights on the tip, emitting a honking noise. A carriage? Without horses?
The person in the contraption- she could see him through a glass pane- shouts something. At her, she realises. And then she knows the man won’t slow down. Quickly, she runs out of the way. More of those metal contraptions move down the path in both directions.
She sticks to the side of the path after that. She wants to take a nap somewhere, drink a cup of warm tea to calm herself, but it probably won’t be safe on the streets and there doesn’t seem to be a tea-shop in sight.
A couple people walk on the path opposite to her, across the main road, but they pay her no attention.
Alina sees two people sitting on the steps to an entrance of one of the buildings. They look at the light she is floating above her palm, her embroidered dress, before focusing on her face.
One of them, a young man with a black ring through his nose, says something to her in a language she can’t understand.
“I’m sorry,” she replies. “But I don’t understand you.”
Her companion, a dark-skinned woman, frowns and nudges the man. She says something to Alina in the same harsh-sounding language.
“Do you speak Ravkan?” Alina tries again, making the ball of light grow bigger so she could see them more clearly. They were wearing strange clothes. She had never seen anything like it- jackets without buttons and blue pants with rips in them. “Are there other Grisha here?”
The man points at her summoned light, and then at the street. He makes a fist and unfurls his fingers, mimicking the sound of an explosion.
“The lights went out?” Alina says, and then extinguishes her ball of light.
After a moment, she summons it again.
The woman looks at her with a mixture of awe and fear that Alina is starting to get used to. She holds up a slim piece of metallic-looking material.
The man nods and says something, gesturing to the building behind him. There is no mistaking the concern in his eyes. But Alina doesn’t trust him- both of them- enough.
“Do you know where I can find an inn for the night?”
The woman tilts her head, frown deepening. There is nothing Alina can do to make them understand her, so she smiles helplessly at them. “It’s alright. Thank you.”
She moves on. Alina is getting more and more uncertain about this world. She has been walking for quite a while, alone. The artificial lights had gone out, but only in this area, as she could see more in the distance. Where am I, if not Ravka?
There are more people on this street and, feeling self-conscious, Alina drops her ball of light. All the little windows at the front of the buildings were dark. The only source of light are the spaced-out street lamps, not powered by Fabrikator-made flame but some unknown energy.
Her feet aching, she stops in her tracks. She once walked miles in her boots, travelled great distances on foot, but that was with her regiment, her friends giving her energy to carry on. She exhales deeply.
“I am going to be fine,” Alina reassures herself with confidence she wishes she had at the moment. She could use one of the diamond pins in her hair to pay for a night’s rest. She also needs a change of clothes. Her well-made dress was too eye-catching. If only she could find an inn that was open at this time of night. “If no one understands me, I’ll simply make them see my point.”
And then, perhaps by chance, her eyes catch on a door opening. The brief glimpse of the interior shows a lit space.
She marches towards that building with renewed energy and flings the door open.
The smell of alcohol and fried food hangs in the air. People talked to each other, and the snippets she hears are in the same foreign language. There are a lot of customers inside, and she wonders just what time it is. Some of them look at Alina with considering eyes- she is the one who sticks out here, in a formal gown of sorts- but she ignores them, intending to find the person in charge of this pub.
She spots a man serving drinks who might be the barkeep and walks over to him.
That is when she feels it. A tug in her gut. A burning gaze. The collar around her neck pulsates slightly, alerting her to- what danger?
Alina pauses and twists her head, looking for the thing that caused her power to suddenly react.
Her breath catches in her throat as raises her chin to meet a pair of striking dark eyes.
It can’t be.
A woman enters the bar in the dead of night.
Billy notices her immediately, as he always does, though he hasn’t caught sight of her face yet. But usually he assesses their threat level, finds them lacking, and goes back to his drink.
She is different. Not just in the way she is dressed- a fucking silk-looking gown with glittering things stitched onto it that contrast starkly with her mud-splattered boots, looking like she just time travelled out of the 18th Century or something- but how she holds herself. There is some hesitation in her step, as though she hasn’t been in a bar before, but she’s clearly looking for something in here. Maybe for help after the power outage. This young woman just became the most interesting individual in this bar.
She turns her head and Billy sees her. There is a trail of dried blood from her nose, which is cutely-shaped. And then his eyes fall onto the two horns protruding from her collarbone. It only adds to her alien beauty.
The woman looks- well, Billy has never seen her in his life, but his heart clenches when she gets closer. He wants her. It is such a visceral feeling for a stranger, which is completely out of character for him.
He stands up, ready to go and strike up a conversation, maybe flirt a little. He isn’t ready for her to turn as Billy came within a few steps from her, raising her head to look him directly in the eye.
She gasps, eyes widening in unexpected recognition as she takes him in.
Billy doesn’t understand and he hates it. Who the hell is she and why is she staring like me like she’s met me before?
He stares back, unflinchingly, not one to back down.
Something dark crosses her face and she raises her arms. The woman makes a flourish with both hands.
His world explodes with pure light, blinding him.
When his sight adjusts, he finds himself in a bubble of blazing light that blocks out sight of anything that wasn’t her.
And the brilliant light was coming from her, the mysterious woman in a beautiful dress. Her palms glowed with what has to be real magic. There was no other explanation available for what she was doing.
The heat is akin to standing in direct sunlight, but he suspects it could just as easily burn him at her command.
She settles into a fighting stance. Her eyes are filled with burning hatred. The light bathes her in liquid gold. She is a fairytale come to life.
Billy recalls a half-forgotten quote from somewhere. ‘Out of all the gin joints in the world, she had to walk into this one.’ It is strange to even think about it, but he could feel her power echoing in his bones. He wants to know everything about her- if she doesn’t kill him first.
So he makes the first move.
“What are you?”