Archive of Our Own

Have you ever cried so hard that your veins stung?

That your muscles tore?

That your bones bowed and cracked under the weight of your own grief?

I have.

I remember walking to the market with my mother and watching many a weepy-eyed maiden. They’d have liaised with any variety of travelling men: soldiers, merchants, scammers. And as men do, they would lie to the women. They would drop them off in my village, and they would say that they’d come back for them. After their work had been done, after things had cooled down with their family, after they’d managed to scrounge up an artifact that didn’t exist.

And they would never come back.

I had always been afraid to be a woman led astray by a man. I had always been afraid to give up so much of myself, of my power.

I vowed never to.

But of course, the words and wills of a seven-year-old aren’t solid.

Because fate’s a bitch and so’s hindsight and their perfect agonies are impossible to comprehend by the living and breathing, well, I found myself in the position I’d dreaded so many years ago.

It wasn’t precisely the same because I have to think that Caleb didn’t want to leave me alone. I think he loved me and meant it, and that got him killed. But it doesn’t mean that he didn’t abandon me, and it doesn’t mean that I’m not allowed to be angry about it.

But the outcome was the same.

I was red-rimmed and alone and choked with tears and empty for tears and wanted to scream for years but I couldn’t even croak out a word to my sister on the other side of the door so she knew that I was still alive.

And I was alone.

I had two choices: I could be sad in my bed until death remembered it’d forgotten one. Or I could be sad and productive, and become a revenant.

Luckily, it turns out that being sad and productive is one of my many hidden talents. And becoming a revenant while you still draw breath is considerably easier than when you’re in the grave. For one, you don’t have to dig yourself out of literal dirt. A metaphorical grave? Yes. Absolutely. And it’s miserable. But at least I didn’t have to spend my first two weeks re-alive scrubbing dirt from my grave out from under my fingernails.

I forced myself to realise that it wasn’t much different than when other bad things had happened to me. And that I was fed up with being a bystander in my own life instead of an active participant. I had allowed Caleb and Phillip to shape who I’d become, and now I was allowing them to hold me underwater. And I wasn’t even struggling for air.

I had to decide to take my own life back.

Yes, I wanted to become a better sister. I wanted to be better for my sister. There’s a difference there, I’ll tell you sometime, but that’s not now. I wanted to be better for my sister, and that wasn’t something that she or a healer or my mother or the ghost of my father or Caleb’s hand still etched into the muscles of my shoulder could convince me to do.

That was something I had to realise and decide for myself. I had to claw together enough peace to breathe, and to be in her life.

So, I got my shit together and I got a boat.

†

It’s the morning after, and she still feels like she’s on fire.

It’s the morning after, and everything still smells rancid.

But she has to keep going.

And their first step is to find Hunter, then—if Eda’s to be believed, run.

“Are you sure you don’t want to leave… him to us?” Eda tries, her hand on Luz’s shoulder, Luz halfway out the door, and Luz shakes her head so furiously that she almost barrels into Eda. No, no, no. She does not want to do that, and it’s not that she doesn’t trust Eda. It’s that she doesn’t trust herself.

She doesn’t trust that if she doesn’t see him, knows for a damn fact that he’s alive and breathing and maybe not well but has the option to get well, she just won’t believe it.

And Eda, bless her, after a moment, seems to understand.

King follows her underfoot, almost tripping her twice before they’ve even left the safety of Hooty’s effective range. Eh, who’s she kidding? It’s Hooty. She’s amazed he’s not following them. Eda’s probably threatened him. Scratch that. Eda’s absolutely actively threatening him.

Hooty doesn’t respect rules enough to stay put with something like this.

They comb through their surroundings, systematically checking everywhere a kid Hunter’s size could get snagged, or crawl into. Luckily, it didn’t rain last night, so he’s probably not burnt to a crisp. Unluckily, it’s going to rain tonight.

“Where would I go if I was running from everyone wanting to murder me,” King said pensively, his arms flapping back and forth. “Where would I go?”

Then, very sharply and suddenly, he stiffens.

“The beach!”

†

“You make for a terrible guide, you know,” Arianna grins down at Philly, and he raises his sword in agreement. Arianna sighs.

“I hope there’s never going to be a second time, but if you see someone new another time, come and get me, okay?”

(Arianna would have given all her lives, all her love, for a chance to hold him in her arms—a mirage of the husband and son she lost, all on the same night.)

Arianna shivers, shaking the thought from her body before it manages to settle against her ribcage. She doesn’t have time for the grief. She doesn’t have time for the thinking. She ducks under a stalagmite of dripping mud, and sighs when she sees that they’re going to have to slide down a tunnel of the stuff.

Philly nods.

“If the Collector isn’t here,” Arianna threatens half-heartedly, “I’m not playing with you for a month.”

A month wasn’t long in a four-hundred-year penance, but it was still nice to have a friend and when Arianna was alone, she worried about things she couldn’t change, thought about songs she couldn’t rewrite.

She doesn’t even know if she’s going to stick to the threat—she’s such a sucker for Philly’s whims, they remind her too much of the young man she used to know and maybe it’s time that’s sanded down her sharpest edges and replaced them with cracks: but more often than not, she gives in.

Perhaps it’s desperation.

She can barely manage to stay present for a couple hours now, so she finds that she can’t waste time to figure it out.

She pads after Philly, content to let him lead the way as she mulls over how she’s going to approach this conversation.

With a breath she knows she doesn’t need to take; she grips the top of the tunnel and throws her body down it—reminding her of the times her and Henry would bring Ellie to the playground. Tears spring to her eyes, and Philly grips her hand in the darkness.

†

Unlike most witches of the Boiling Isles, Arianna was aware of the existence of Titan Trapper Island. She’d met a man with a painted face who’d given her a strange skull for her mantlepiece and a small rock alongside the vague hints of how to place it correctly. However, she’d never had a reason to go there.

Frankly, she thought it sounded like a cult.

And usually, cults exist to benefit one aggressively charming man.

Monik had been charming, even attractive—and Arianna had kissed him because she was angry at Caleb, and she’d straddled his waist and bared his throat open for the taking before she’d pulled back. That was years ago. They’d proceeded to sit at the bar and lick their wounds, spilling too many stories about their respective homes from their drunken and swollen lips.

Monik had spoken too much about his people, and Arianna had answered by throwing around her weight in insecurity.

Before they’d parted ways, shockingly amicably, he’d handed her a small, jagged but no-doubt-shaped-for-a-purpose rock and told her if she ever wanted to get away from the Boiling Isles, that Titan Trapper Island would welcome her. By the tone of her voice, she understood the underlying:

The Island may not welcome you, but I would like to see you again before the afterlife. And she wasn’t even sure that he wanted to fuck her. Even if she wouldn’t mind carving her name into his hips. Perhaps, even drunk on cheap apple blood, he’d found her company worth something. Or, he just wanted to know how she could spin his spear around her body better than he could.

Arianna was perfectly fine never taking him up on the offer. As stated previously, she wasn’t interested in becoming a resident of Titan Trapper Island. In Arianna’s experience, anywhere with an overbearing system, even if it was a beautiful place with beautiful people and beautiful, glimmering spears, wouldn’t welcome you unless you bowed hard enough to walk home with cut knees.

And Arianna had never been that.

But that was before.

She walked to the harbour and tried not to think about what her sister would say to the letter she’d left on the kitchen counter.

She tried to feel sorry about leaving again because she knew that somewhere, she was.

The problem is just that the rage thrumming under her skin, even if she hates to admit so, matters more to her than whether Ellie wants to speak to her.

†

It’s not that I don’t know that I fucked up. It’s that I did it, and I can’t take it back—and I’m not sure that I want to. I wish I could tell you that I regret everything, because that would make me a better protagonist. At least, a protagonist that everyone likes, and everyone moans about not being interesting.

But being interesting means that I’ve been hurt, and I think I’d rather be boring. Even if my younger self would loathe to hear me say so. Tough shit, cutie patootie.

†

Arianna might no longer have innate magic, but a knife held taut against your throat works just as well. She slid from the darkness, seized the captain, and challenged his crew to get to him before she painted the hardwood red. “All I want,” she crooned, “Is passage to Hand Island.”

“Aren’t you Arianna Clawthorne? Phillip says that you don’t have magic anymore,” asked a first mate with a shrill, annoying voice and a missing eye. Arianna raised her brow, silently asking him if he wanted to be symmetrical again.

Instead, she rolled her eyes and offered, “I have magic,” she answered simply, “Otherwise, how the fuck would I have gotten onto your ship without being noticed, hidden until you’re at sea with no escape from me other than the Boiling Sea, and by all means, take that offer, if you prefer it over a change of leadership, if I didn’t have magic?”

She rested her head on the captain’s shoulder, her knife still tightly held against his throat. She even pressed it slightly against the fragile skin, drawing rivulets of blood against the gleaming curved steel.

She grinned at the crew.

Twelve minutes later, she was standing in the hull, a new stylish hat decorating her hair and a pair of leather sailing boots that she could tuck Caleb’s pants into, so she didn’t rip the knees in a fight. In front of her was the captain, tied up and scowling at her. During the scuffle to accomplish it, a button had popped off Caleb’s shirt and she was showing a little more cleavage than she’d have liked, but she had to admit that the look wasn’t the worst she’d pulled.

She looked wild, and she looked free, and she looked like she was trying to leave her past behind. She looked like someone who could bargain, and that was exactly what she needed to be. Maybe that healer her sister paid would even be proud of her.

“Do you have anyone who would miss you if I threw you into the Boiling Sea?” she asked, leaning down to play with one of his loose braids. They were shittily done, brown flyaway hairs tarnishing the beauty of the stolen red beads.

“I have a wife,” he croaked. Arianna shrugged. She hadn’t been planning on killing him, but she knew that he might as well be bluffing. She cracked her knees, and continued to twiddle the braid through her fingers, the dim light from the half-ajar hatch catching the whites of his wide eyes and setting them alight.

“I’m not a merciful woman,” she explains sweetly, “So, you’re going to have to give me a better offer than that.”

†

Apparently, Titan Trapper Island doesn’t get a lot of visitors.

Apparently, she’s so damn lucky that Monik is a glorified welcoming committee, and ready to slap her shoulder like they’d old schoolmates instead of a failed one-night stand.

“What brings you here, Arianna?” he asks, and she can tell that there’s something beyond mirth dripping from his lips, something predatory, but she’s spent the whole night tossing and turning on a ship, dreaming about what’ll happen if she sees Caleb’s face again.

None of the options her mind so generously conjured for her were any good.

In fact, her mouth still tasted of blood from where she’d bitten down so she wouldn’t scream when she’d remembered kissing Caleb on the porch in front of all their stupid friends. Dancing with him on their wedding night, and leaning real close and promising that she’d never leave.

Fuck.

“I want to speak to your Grand Huntsman,” Arianna says and his face falls.

“I expected that,” he answers, “But I’d sincerely hoped you just visited to catch up.”

She grins.

She can play this game.

“You know me better than that, Monik. You really, really do.”

†

“Billam.”

“Arianna.”

“Sincerely,” Billam spoke grandly, doing a mocking bow as he did, “What is the occasion for such a stately visit?”

Billam extended his arm towards her, his bleached skull glimmering in the pale morning sunlight. “Have you finally decided to help us on our quest?”

Arianna spat, interrupting him, “No,” she whispered, grabbing his arm by the wrist in mid-air and tugging him against her hip, “But,”

She bent down to stand at his height, grinning, “But I do intend to liaise with your…”

Arianna licked her lips. “… Grand Huntsman.”

She tightened her hold on his wrist, her nails digging into his pinking skin, “And don’t touch me, honey.”

Billam’s unnatural irises lit up. Apparently, her reputation travelled further than she did. Arianna wasn’t sure whether she was impressed, annoyed or she should be trying to figure out a way to work it to her favour. She knew that some witches thought she’d fucked her way to power, and she wouldn’t be opposed to it if it meant that Phillip would rot—but Billam really wasn’t her type.

She released his wrist, red and raw, and crossed her arms, shifting her weight. “You will take me to the Grand Huntsman,” she ordered, wiggling her hips in a poor imitation of seduction, “And then there might be a reward for you.”

The reward would be that Arianna didn’t put her knife between his eyebrows, but that was a boring offer.

“The Grand Huntsman must be summoned,” Billam parroted, “With the blood of the last remaining Titan.”

Arianna shrugged and clicked her tongue as she reached into her pocket. She brandished a vial of glimmering liquid in front of Billam, spinning it in her fingers. “Titan’s Blood,” she said simply, “Fresh Titan’s Blood.”

Billam tried to grab it from her, but he moved too rashly, his steps predictable, and Arianna raised the vial over his head as soon as his feet scuffed the dirt.

She tsked. “You’re an asshole, Bill. I almost want to teach you to be better at it. I’ll say that we got it together if you get the summoning on.”

She narrowed her eyes, knowing full well that he was studying the snippet of abs he could see between her rising shirt and trousers that didn’t exactly fit her like a glove. “And you won’t be a complete disgrace to your people. It sounds like a good idea to me.”

He didn’t look at her like Caleb did, but no one ever would. For a moment, he studied her, a wicked glint in his eye that Arianna wouldn’t mind bashing her head against, and she wasn’t sure whether he recognised the same cruelty in her or if it was the curve of her waist and swell of her breasts and the fact that she might have replaced already minimal fat with more muscle during the past months, but her ass never got smaller, but he waved his hand and instructed her to follow him.

No, he didn’t look at her like Caleb did. Caleb looked at her and saw every part of her—fully in awe of her deadly competence and experience that he would never gain, but he could also hold her as if she was allowed to break and still trust her strength in the morning.

But Billam walked in front of her and began talking about what they would have to do without taking a moment to breathe and Arianna could work with that.

†

Monik leads her to the garden, and she wonders if he’s the same man she remembers. If he’s going to sit with her as the stars dance in front of them, or if he’s going to tell her to go fuck herself as soon as she shows her hand and acts like the person she actually is.

Monik grips her hand, and Arianna lurches away.

“What happened to you?” he questions, and she can tell that it’s not because he wants to slay her, “The last time I remember seeing you, you were soaring through the sky on your own glory. You look so gaunt now.”

Arianna’s eyes sting, but she wills herself into molten steel.

“I had a miscarriage,” she says. “It takes it out of you. And now I have business here. I have a score to settle, if you have to know. And it won’t affect you.”

Monik sighs. “How far along were you?”

“Eight and a half months.”

“I’m sorry.”

If Arianna was someone else, she might have collapsed against his chest. But she’s not, and she’s tired of sorry. It feels like biding time until she loses the attention of the world, until she loses the flames burning so deeply inside of her. And without Caleb and her magic, she knows that she’ll be truly nothing without her rage.

She feels time moving between her and Monik, she’s twenty-two in the bar, she’s twenty-eight and standing on ground she doesn’t know, can’t feel the hum of life underneath her fingertips, she can’t make destruction sing to her anymore—or at least not like before.

Caleb never had innate magic, and he didn’t let that stop him, did he? She still fell hopelessly in love with him, didn’t she?

Sucker.

“You shouldn’t be,” she says, “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

Liar, liar, Arianna on fire.

She changes the topic.

“Monik,” Arianna asks earnestly, “Why are you associating with someone like that? He’s so shitty. You have to be smart enough to realise that. I wouldn’t have chatted with you at that bar if you weren’t.”

“He promised to heal my partner.”

Arianna… didn’t take Monik for being in a relationship, at least not when he met her. Even if they didn’t fuck, she knew that he wouldn’t have hated her if she’d been into it. He wasn’t the man who’d slink off to have a clandestine, illicit affair with a foreign woman either. She shifted her hips, and he chuckled darkly.

“We’re not strictly monogamous, the majority of my people,” he says, and Arianna’s rolling her eyes and getting back on topic, if a little brusquely.

“What’s wrong with your partner?”

“He’s petrified.”

Arianna’s barely holding herself together, and she’s worked herself to the bone; she’s never managed to un-petrify someone unless it was right after, and she’s got a garden of monuments to her sins to work through with no magic, but she’s completely, deadly serious when she offers:

“Take me to him.”

Monik tsks. “You just told me that you don’t have any magic,” he explains simply, as if she’d have forgotten. She hasn’t. She’ll never forget. The entire reason she’s here is that one being took her magic, and she wants another to give it back.

“Bill is never going to heal him,” she says.

And Monik meets her eyes.

And he knows.

†

Before she submitted herself to Bill, she tried to be someone different, and she sought out the Titan in the depths of her homeland. She sat on the beach, staring at the unfurling horizon, her sister’s shoulder pressing against hers, and they lay down their swords, trying to pretend that they wouldn’t be back at each other’s throats by sunrise.

Laying down your weapons and laying out your worst secrets. Almost a Clawthorne tradition by now. It was twenty-eight days since Caleb died, and Arianna had lived twenty-eight years too long.

She said that her mother didn’t want her to stay, and Ellie confessed that she should have left before the sunset. But she didn’t.

The brief peace was shattered in the morning. She doesn’t remember why or how. She just remembers that it was.

“You need to prove yourself worthwhile for the Titan,” Ellie snarled, “You need to prove that you’re an unselfish person. And that’s just not in the cards for you, Arianna.”

“I thought that I could walk away easily, but here I am. I’m sorry. Could you please forgive me?”

“No.”

And Arianna didn’t know what she’d expected. She hadn’t expected a yes. But she hadn’t expected a simple no either. She’d expected screaming, maybe she’d throw something. Break her mother’s stupid heirloom vase, break her father’s stupid heirloom nose.

Her hand was still on the doorknob as Ellie spoke, “But I… I can believe that you want to try. The problem is that trying just isn’t enough when you said you’d try a thousand times over.”

“I don’t want to say try harder, but I want to say that you… well, there’s a reason that it hasn’t worked before, right?”

†

The Titan, when they appeared through the haze of thick, sweet smoke, was like nothing Arianna had imagined.

“I came to ask where to find a new face, Great One,” she managed, bowing her head like her father had taught her and ignoring her stained clothing and loose hair. She had not straightened or pulled back her hair since Caleb had died.

If she was to be a crone, she might as well look the part.

“Every face is part of a story, child. Would you leave yours behind?”

The sickly heart above her beat out a steady rhythm, shaking the brittle cavern as it did.

“This face is a symbol.” Years of visiting but never staying, of running until her feet blistered—of being told that she resembled her father, that she carried his gentleness well, that she brought hope. And now, her smile was a silent rebellion.

“That is not a life I want to lead.”

She wanted to be a daughter. She wanted to be a sister. She wanted to be a mother, a widow, even. She wanted to be someone who stayed, something solid to lean on, a lighthouse in the night, leading her love to safety at her shore.

She told herself all of that. It sounded good. It sounded nice. It sounded like something she might have liked, once upon a time. But it was also a lie.

Symbols were set aside. Kept safe.

And Arianna wanted to bruise.

The Titan tilted their head, watching her with many eyes.

“You think of your face like a mask—something to be replaced without other effects. But your emotions and experiences are written on the surface I create. The grief behind your eyes, the laugh lines forming in your cheek—they would be wiped away. Wiped clean.”

Arianna wrinkled her nose. “But my experiences would still be mine, even with a new face.”

“Experiences remain, but—separate. You accumulate new grief. New joys. The old ones still exist, but their effect and presence fades,” the Titan leaned forward, ghostly faces following, “Is that what you wish, Arianna?”

To remove the pain from her memories of Caleb and Phillip, of her friends, her brothers, of the flames in which it ended. The anger. Her resolution would carry her through the fight against Phillip, even when the emotions faded. She would still love Caleb and hate Phillip; she was sure of that.

Wouldn’t she?

The joy of the first time she flew with Caleb would fade. Of watching her father use all the magic he knew to improve her sandcastles. The peace of carving with her mother, one she’s never been able to truly replicate—or training with her father, before he decided to…

Well, she wouldn’t mind forgetting that.

Assuming she succeeded against Phillip, she could make new memories for herself. New memories with her sister. She wouldn’t forget how her sister smiled when she was trying to show that she found her interruptions funny. She could carve, still. She could replace the comfort of their late-night conversations with something else, but there would no new opportunities with Caleb or her parents.

And if all her new memories were war and secrecy and vengeance and rebellion… if she built a new self entirely out of the anger that Phillip had forced to make a home inside of her, without the foundation of love and loss—

Who would she be?

“Thank you for your wisdom, Titan,” she whispered to the wisps and the beating heart above her, “I will remain as I am.”

†

There is no me without you.

†

I know I had to do it. I know I had to do it. I know I had to do it. I know I had to do it. I know I had to do it. I know I had to do it. There was no other choice for me. I have to keep my family safe. I know he doesn’t think I’m strong enough to carry this through. I can’t think about it. I know why I did it. I know, if I had a chance to do it again, I would. I know all of this. I know, I know, I know.

It doesn’t make it any easier to sleep.

And I wonder, somewhere strangled, if the Titan is disappointed with me. I wonder what I could have become if he’d been a better man and I wasn’t forced to live in the shadows of love and hate. I’m not stupid. I know things could have been different.

I know things should have been different.

†

She feigns interest as Bill—she’s decided that this name suits him better—prepares the ritual, pouring her counterfeit product into a fucking goblet of all things. She’s not in the interest of destabilising an autonomous state just because their leader gives her the creeps—she’s not eighteen anymore—but she won’t lie and say she isn’t thinking about driving Bill’s jagged hunting knife upwards through his jaw to kiss his stupid eyeball.

He's even holding it wrong.

He’s insulting such a nice knife, really.

“Are you ready, Arianna?”

She’s not.

She nods.

And everything goes black.

There’s steps between Bill speaking and everything going black like she’s in a bad play, but it’s just chanting and slamming their fists to the ground and screaming about how they’re not worthy, and frankly, she’s not interested in remembering any of that.

She opens her eyes to a room of spinning time.

She’s still on her knees, and she slowly pushes herself up, overbalances and faceplants right back on the ground. The familiar ache she’s accepted as part of her is vanished into smoke, and it feels like she weighs nothing.

“Hello?” she tries, reminded of the time her father threw her into a barrel of water, closed the lid and tasked her with escaping before she died.

She’s standing in a weird in-between of life and death at twenty-eight instead of eight, so she obviously made it.

Who are you?

“You can call me Widow.”

That’s not a real name.

It sounds like it’s giggling. Arianna cocks her hip and takes a step she hopes comes off as confident. She flicks her hair, pushes her chin up and tries not to think about that this could be the end of her; that she could die on Bill’s floor, frothing from the mouth. And that he’d probably do despicable things to her corpse, whether downright being a necrophiliac or just using her body in some other sick and twisted ritual. Both seem plausible.

“I’m not giving my name like it’s nothing,” she answers, and it’s true. Names have power, and she doesn’t treat them lightly. That’s at least one thing her parents managed to drill into her.

You’re more fun than the little one!

Arianna grins, all teeth.

“That I am. I can assure you of that.”

†

Her and Philly fall through time, before landing face-first into mud that she really, really doesn’t want to put anymore thought into.

And in front of her, is the silhouette of the Collector, clapping excitedly. “Arianna! Philly!” he squeals, “You came! I’m so lonely down here!”

Arianna, in a split second, hauls herself up, pushes Philly behind her and raises her hand at the Collector.

“Where are we?” she snarls. She notices flecks of memories decorating the walls, but they’re not ones she recognises. With a gasp, she knows there’s only one option.

They’re in the depths of his mind that not even Arianna has reached.

She turns to glare at Philly, but her gaze softens as she watches the hand slotted against her turn ever so slightly transparent, the scar on her knuckle juxtaposed against Philly’s eternally unblemished skin.

The Collector snaps her back.

“You’re always so combative,” they giggle, “You’d think that you have some great rebellion against the mind planned or something.”

Arianna narrows her gaze.

“That can be arranged,” she answers coolly, “Do you remember what you promised me on Titan Trapper Island?”

†

“King,” Luz tries, “There’s nothing here.”

“No, look!” King growls, sinking his hand into the sand, and when it goes through, Luz barely manages to lunge herself at him and pull it out when she realises that her fist’s wrapped around a wrist that isn’t King’s.

She yanks a thin hand with long, slender fingers out of the time pool, dripping in liquid gold.

†

“Well, in such a long and glorious life such as mine, one does forget—”

The Collector leans back against the darkness, waving his hand dismissively at Arianna. She scoffs.

“Let me remind you, then,” she growls, “You promised me that as long as I would follow the tide of my life, I’d have my revenge. And I haven’t had my fucking revenge.”

She breathes in, casts one final glance at Philly, before pulling out a glyph. On the exhale, she taps her finger against it, watching the paper be consumed with flame. “I have more of these,” she threatens, her voice smoother than she’s remembered it in years.

“And there’s so many memories here. So, so many pivotal memories. And Mr. Superior, you and I both know what happens when someone sets fire to your mind.”

She kicks back, her arms jerking out in a show of cockiness. “So,” she grins, “Make your choice motherfucker! If you don’t release me, I’ll make our good old mutual friend into nothing but a drooling, babbling mess on the throne room floor. Or, you release me and pray to not Titan, but me that I feel like letting you out.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

Arianna holds it closer, her finger ghosting against the paper.

“You wouldn’t dare! It would kill you, too! Or trap you with me forever! You’re not strong enough!”

The tears brimming at the edge of her vision for days finally solidify, falling to jagged pieces on the floor as she screams with the same vigour as the first time she woke up here.

“You’re just making this even more enticing, old friend. If stopping Phillip means this, I would never hesitate!”

She remembers Caleb saying something about Hell having no fury like a woman scorned, and if sacrificing herself means that Phillip will finally feel that—well, it’s not the first time she’s thrown herself away. The flames know her name, by now.

And now, she’d like for them to know his.

She watches fire lick the edge of the frame, never taking her eyes off the Collector.

“You don’t understand,” she continues, “The thought of staying here even a second longer than necessary gets my skin crawling, and the thought of it being forever makes me want to tear myself apart. But the thought of knowing that Phillip lost? It makes everything worth it.”

The tears burn her cheeks.

“You don’t know even half of what I’ve seen! You don’t know what I’ve felt, what I’ve been forced to do, to watch, to feel! Every fucking one of Phillip’s injustices feels like something I did, because I was there! And I watched it happen! And there was nothing,” she drops into a hiss, “And there is no price to steep to pay to end that. None. No matter what, whether he wins or not, I die in here. Make your fucking choice before it’s taken away from you. Trust me, I’d know.”

†

“I’m sorry,” she says, because she doesn’t know what else to say. The door in front of her is promising her salvation from a place she never wanted to be in the first place, but when she grips Philly’s hand and tries to pull him through, she almost falls. She turns back, one foot still in the grave, and listlessly gapes as he’s separated from her.

It looks like he’s watching her through a window. Maybe he is. Maybe he will continue to do so. Tears well in her eyes, and when she coughs, black soot stains her lips. “Philly,” she breathes, “Philly.”

Philly shakes his head ever so slowly. Resolutely. He’s trying to untangle his fingers from hers and her breath picks up, her eyes wide.

She never wanted to be here, but she struggles against his efforts, clutching him, a silent prayer—begging him to stay.

He lets go, but he doesn’t fade. He stays, fingers against the glass, expressionless gaze watching her move. Watching her leave. Unless he suddenly decides to pipe up for the first time in three hundred years, she’s not going to know for sure—but she thinks he’s telling her to go.

She needs to think he is. So, she takes the last step out, and for the first time in three hundred or so years, Arianna Clawthorne draws breath, the air burning as her chest rose and fell.

She turns back towards Philly, still watching her, his palms square against the glass separating them now. She knows to live; she won’t see him again. She knows, instinctively, that he’s more dead than she’s ever dared to be. But it doesn’t mean that the grief doesn’t threaten to stop her halting heart, it doesn’t mean that she wouldn’t go back to hold his hand through the waves.

Would, not could. She can’t.

She’s not the same woman who arrived in this Hell. And she’s sure of it, she might not have been upon her first step inside; but she has atoned, and now, she is going to claim her debts in blood. She remembers sitting cross-legged on the floor, listening to Caleb tell her grand stories about men who changed the world and became enshrined in stories as saints of their people.

Arianna is a sinner, yes. She’s always been wholly unworthy of Caleb, of his hands untangling her hair with the gentle fascination that made her want to seize him and run into the abyss—but her heart thumps against her breast and she’s the patron saint of debts to be repaid with interest.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m sorry.”

And she turns around.

She plays with a loose thread on her shirt, “You’re right,” she says to the emptiness, “I’m a prisoner of the Collector and Belos and I need to find a way to break free.”

She flicks her hair over her shoulder. “I’ve been called a revenant for too long and never done anything to earn that title.”

She throws herself through, immediately feeling like she’s been set on fire.

†

“Little girl, who begged so much that you hate the word please?”

Arianna picked a red hair off her skirt, before facing him fully, his blue eyes cracked at the edge, a vast sea threatening to pull her under. She thought about the muddied webs back in her childhood bedroom, and the things she whispered to the Titan as the waves lapped the shore, and she spoke honestly, the words washing over her and tasting of honeyed florals, bitterness at the tip of her tongue:

“I did.”

Billam studied her like she was an oddity instead of a woman, and her husband had slept in a liar’s bed for the last three years of his life and the tears welled at the beds of her eyes and she—

“You’re really willing to throw yourself away for a man?” and she could tell that there was a hungry glint to his eyes, but she blinked, and he didn’t even have Caleb’s eyes anymore. She balled her hands into fists, her nails digging into her palms.

“Yes.”

Honesty was never her strong suit, and every time she tried to brandish a crowbar and pry out the broken shards of truth inside of her—she ended up cut in the crossfire. Caleb was blue, and blue was the life she fled, and the ocean that took her away was blue, shimmering with the thin, imperceptible division between their worlds—one that should never have been broken. But she stepped into the mist, into the clouds, and she stood on Titan Trapper Island; a place she had promised herself that she would never go.

And she whispered things to the waves that only the sand and the sea would ever know.

The truth of the matter wasn’t whether she was willing to throw herself away for Caleb. The fact was that she already had.

She was just fulfilling the terms of a deal she’d signed a decade ago.

So, she had nothing against telling Billam the full truth.

He would never see her as anything other than a prize to be won, and when the truth came out, tarnished gold and guilty. And she would regret nothing.

Billam’s bulbous eyes watched her for a moment longer, then, seemingly satisfied with her answer, he retracted his glare and offered her his hand.

“It’s a pity,” he said, danger lacing his voice, “It’s a pity that a dead man has such a hold over someone as formidable as you, Arianna Clawthorne. If you ever wish to rectify that, I’m always looking for a wife. Even if you’re not ready to be a wife, if you want to rectify your husband’s shortcomings—”

Finally, she chuckled at him. She took his hand, curling her fingers around it and yanking him taut against his chest. She raised him into the sky, their eyes meeting level as she felt her fingertips dampening with blood. “Listen,” she crooned.

“And listen well.”

She breathed in.

“I want absolutely nothing to do with you for the rest of my life. You’re a despicable man who’s leading your people to ruin for nothing more than the temporary gratification. One day, I’ll destroy you, and I promise you, I won’t even spare you the time of day to make it glorious.”

†

She didn’t want this.

She’d wanted Caleb with her.

Fuck, she’d even take her sister, or Philly, even if she’d sworn to herself that she’d protect the girl, and she didn’t think Philly deserved this, either. The little stalwart mirage of what once was, who like her, shouldn’t be here, but was and just tried to saunter through without snapping.

But she’d left rational thinking behind before she’d even ventured in the heart of everything she feared, into the belly of the beast, before her toes touched the cold ground of time’s longing embrace, when she’d decided to open her wounds to the crowd and beg them for salt.

Because that’s what this was, wasn’t it? She wasn’t just showing off her hurt, she was asking—ordering—for more hurt to be inflicted. She’s been like this for many years, she thinks. She remembers the pale blue sky reflected in Caleb’s eyes, and tries to breathe through this death, too.

It’s not the worst one she knows.

Maybe she’s lost her mind. Maybe she’d lost it before. Maybe it’d left with Caleb. It was hard to tell now.

She doesn’t know what to call this place, but she knows that it’s life and death, piled on top of one another like layers in the cake Ellie baked for her wedding, like the fraying holes in her heart; alien and familiar all at once. Unrestrained growth and glimmering, shimmering rays of changing light. Like the cancer that’d carried her mother into the hereafter, sweeping the shores, and this time, taking her, too.

Caleb would have talked about it differently. Would’ve had the words. She’s selfish enough to wish he was with her, just so she could bask in brilliance she never learned to carry. Maybe, in another life, one where she kept him, one where they didn’t meet on the shores of the beach, she’d have had the words, too.

Before she’d fallen to her knees and allowed the ancients to eat her alive. Heart and all. Heart first please.

It was easy to think: it wants me, it wants me, I have wasted too many years not succumbing to the wrath instilled in me, no one knows how much I miss you, no one knows how much I want to pick you up from the recesses of my mind and go back in time, it wants who I am, it wants what I want. But it could and would not want.

That’s not this story. That’s never been her story. There was no intelligence to be found other than her own, shaping the magic to her needs. Nothing to communicate with or outsmart. Just primal energy, and a woman on her knees.

That’s her story.

She doesn’t know what happened to her sister, other than that she’s dead. She doesn’t know if Philly’s still watching her, she doesn’t know if the dead can see the living, because she’s not sure she’s ever been truly dead—and she’s not sure she’s living now, either. She doesn’t want him to see her, she thinks. He doesn’t deserve that.

Neither does her sister.

Maybe want was the right word, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she was in the right place, doing the right thing. Maybe she wasn’t.

There was a hole in the floor, and she knew it would lead her to the source, time swirling around her in orbs of gold.

She descended.

The transformation was gentler than the disease she compared it to, though still ever little bit as destructive. She submitted herself, and she resolved to see it through. She’d felt it running under her skin for miles, but this was something deeper, stronger, like someone had slowly been turning up the volume on the stereo and now the sound was ear-splitting.

Like the lobster in the pot.

It was going to take her apart.

If I was a better person, she thought to herself as she sunk into the ground, I would be thinking about everything gilded and golden and loved. But instead, she let it take her and thought of Phillip, her fist around his throat.

There were others inside, once she was there. Kids giggling as they taught each other new and impossibly stupid grugby moves.

Her, crying and holding Caleb’s lifeless frame, Orrin sitting next to her, a face she hasn’t seen in over four hundred years, bisected by the holes in her memory. The giggles of a deranged child. The desperate pleas of the same child. Caleb’s gripping her hand, and her eyes misted at that—before he vanished under her touch, smoke, mirrors and nothing but fragments of thought, of being. She felt his fear thrumming under her skin, wore it like it were her own, like it was the coat he bought her for her birthday.

And Arianna. Arianna-who-was, Arianna-who-would-be, Arianna-who-never-was, Arianna walking into the belly of the beast with fake, unearned swagger, like she’s really going to stop the end of the fucking world, Arianna sitting at her sister’s kitchen table, one of the many times she was so casually cruel and called it honesty. It never was. Arianna, who should have let Caleb leave, out of kindness or sorrow, weeping in the bathroom, she didn’t care and—

Phillip, who was there at the end, the beginning, the end. Was it the end?

Whatever had started this—she doesn’t think it’s herself, anymore, not entirely, not the her that fell, that swan-dived—it was something unlike them all, and still strange to her, even as she feels its beating heart in her chest. Incomprehensible. It broke them all down and kept bits, remnants, echoes. Recognisable now, but more jarring from the resemblance.

Arianna thought of Phillip and wondered if what remained would keep her voice.

It had almost rebuilt her fully when the hand cut through everything, supple and breathing, flushed from experience, screaming words she didn’t understand at her, its drive alone letting her keep herself intact in the face of fragmentation.

Yellow eyes met Arianna’s, broken to shards.

Those eyes were like honey in darkness.

She’d slayed the monsters, drawn up the spells, sent men into a mystery and waited and waited and waited when nothing had happened and none of them ever returned. She’d lived a life before, and after. She’d looked into Caleb’s eyes and known what he had been longing for long before they spoke it aloud. Self-destruction.

That’s what she told the Collector, so long ago, now. That’d been what she was longing for, too. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have come here. She wouldn’t have been brought here. She wouldn’t have stayed here.

Now, she looked at someone else. Someone made of those fragments and echoes.

She wasn’t Arianna anymore, but Arianna was part of her, now, Monik, Catherine and Ellie and Ezra and Dell and Phillip and Caleb. Some more alive in her than others.

Arianna was someone she could hold close to her heart; if what was inside of her still could be called a heart, that is. Phillip was a nick in the blood vessel, a hand around her throat, arm around her waist, the only reason her heart was still beating, still knew the song, the steps, the dance of life.

He would also be the one to stop it.

“You aren’t Phillip,” she said, “Are you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I don’t think so. Not anymore.”

She remembered, again, how Phillip had ducked her answers when she interviewed him at the kitchen table, when she begged for him to be a brother again; she can’t remember whether that happened in her kitchen, or in a golden palace or someplace where it’s both.

One moment, she’s sitting with her hands clasped against the wooden dining table she’d topped his brother on the night before, the next, she’s kneeling in front of a throne, a knife up her sleeve next to her beating heart.

This man was neither woman’s memory, was both, blurred over one another like a rubber stamp that’d been pressed to paper twice.

“Are you Arianna?”

She didn’t know how to answer him. She didn’t know if she wanted to. She was, in some fundamental way, Arianna. But she was also more. And also nothing at all. All at once.

She held him and felt them move through her.

“Take my hand!” the voice screams, slicing through the memory.

†

Lilith is clutching her staff, and the guards tilt their heads up at him as if he’s going to solve their problem.

He thinks of Arianna more than he thinks of her father. He doesn’t know if Arianna ever carved anything after the age of twenty-one, but he looks at the curling initials right under the perch of the staff, and he thinks of her.

And he imagines her sitting in the garden, hunched over, telling him that it was only a summer thing—that she was only seventeen and she knew nothing, but she knew she missed this. He thinks about being drunk for the first time, and walking home on broken cobblestones, slotted between Arianna and Caleb.

“You can keep it,” he growls. “For now.”

“Let’s just say…”

And he can hear her laugh, ringing in the back of his mind and he can imagine her doubling over, clutching her stomach.

“… I’m returning a favour.”

†

Philly watches her fall into the abyss through his vanishing hand.

Because he never belonged to Phillip.

He belonged to her.

And now, she’s cut herself loose.

†

Here is the story of the morning that everything was about to change:

The river water reaches the boiling tide for the first time in memory, then abandons the shore with a knowing smile; a queen returning to her kingdom as the rainclouds gather, drowning the land.

One lone island, divided by tensions, sullen and sore from the caresses of the brutal past could no longer continue, and the people must choose where they stand.

The fisherfolk turned towards the seas for salvation, and the farmers took to the hills and trees in search of a refuge they would not be granted. And with the raging storm and angry clouds, the island roared her challenge full and loud.

The old man sitting on his throne greeted her like an old friend.

She wrote the land with a thundering crack and earth-moving roar, slicing the island from mountain to shore in her age-old grief, and shouting and screams followed as rivers and families were broken in two, with naught they could do.

A thundering crack, another earth-moving roar—and the island of one is one island no more. Shouting and screams, naught they could do, the island of one is now an island of two.