Page 67 of Ash and Feather

She stopped herself from scooping up more water, clenching her hands into fists that she pressed into the sand next to her.

“I don’t think I even fully understand what they hope to gain from escalating this into a full war,” I continued, wandering through the collection of pools as I spoke.

The one Karys knelt beside rippled with the darkest of warnings, but all of them had changed over the past month; I’d witnessed various shades of those bubbling warnings, and not a single surface experienced sustained calm, now.

“They must realize they can’t annihilate all of the gods,” I said. “No matter what weapons they manage to create, they aren’t strong enough to take on the upper-gods above us. They’ll overstep with their demonstrations and warmongering, and the Moraki will intervene eventually and finish them off. I’m certain of it.”

Karys’s breath audibly hitched, and hastily I added, “Though, obviously, I’d rather it not come to that.”

She shook her head, eyes shining with an emotion I couldn’t easily name as she looked up at me. “It isn’t about annihilating the Marr entirely. It never has been.”

I made my way back to her, my gaze curious, urging her to continue.

“It’s all a ploy to get the Creators to regret their decision to cast us from their graces in the first place,” she continued after a pause. “It’s all some of the elves think about…all they’ve thought about fordecades.

“When I was growing up, almost every gathering of my kind led to the same conversations about it. So even though I don’t remember a time when we were the most powerful beings in Avalinth, I still grew up feeling like I had been personally cheated out of an inheritance I was owed. Like I was a victim of the tyrannical Moraki. And that if I made them regret theirdecision badly enough, I might be able to claw back some of the power we once had.”

I didn’t reply right away, trying to imagine a younger version of her sitting among a budding, rebellious movement, absorbing all the frustration and anger being poured over her.

The emotion simmering in her eyes was clearer now—a tired resolve mixed with quiet sadness, a feeling even deeper and more complicated than these pools that reached all the way to the mortal realm.

Moth took his crown in his beak and carried it to her, nudging it into her hands as if to offer a distraction. She took it absently, her fingers carefully tucking and smoothing some of the bent blossoms back into place.

“And what about now?” I couldn’t help asking. “Do you still feel cheated?”

She was quiet for a time, looking back at her reflection in the pool, eyes narrowing as if trying to recognize the face within it.

“Not entirely. We were stripped of our stronger magic, that’s true—but we weren’t stripped ofeverything. And we weren’t completely wiped away as we could have been. We had other chances, other ways we could have rebuilt. But once you’ve had so much power, I suppose it’s hard to learn to live with less. Most humans now refer to us as theFallen, but we actually called ourselves that first. And now we have extremists alienating us further and further…” She shook her head, placing the crown back on the head of a surprisingly accommodating Moth, then rose back to her full height while swiping sand and bits of flower crown from her palms.

“I’d always thought it was more complicated than what many of my kind insisted,” she went on, “even before I met you. I didn’twantit to be complicated,though. Blind hatred is easier, after all.” Her heavy gaze fixed on me. She sighed. “Sometimes I wish I could still hate you the way I once did.”

She mirrored the grim smile I gave her as I closed the space between us, taking her hand in mine.

“If only,” I said.

She stared at our intertwined fingers as she continued. “I’d started to think I could be a bridge between our two worlds—that maybe that was the destiny the Moraki had intended for me when they allowed me to accept your magic, even though I was…well, you know what I was.”

I found myself wrestling with the same question as before: “And what do you think now?”

She lifted her eyes to me. “After what I witnessed in Ederis…I’m not sure. I don’t know how I can walk back across the divide, face my sister, and…”

I waited patiently for her to finish. When she didn’t, I merely gave her fingers a little squeeze. I wouldn’t force her to keep talking. Especially not when I didn’t know what to say or what to think, either.

She moved away, weaving through the pools until she found a long stick next to one of them. She used it to trace lines and circles in the sand, as if mapping out our next moves.

Moth intently watched the tracing, his flame-tipped tail flicking back and forth. More than once he started to grab the stick only to be stopped by a stern look from Karys.

“We have to go to Mindoth’s Keep, don’t we?” she decided after a few minutes of silent debate. “To protect the humans there, de-escalate the battle somehow. That’s ultimately your charge as a middle-god…” She trailed off, forehead creasing in frustration, as if she’d just remembered that she, too, was technically a god.

I could hear her thoughts relatively clearly. They grew louder with her increasingly troubled emotions, just as mine had when I’d hesitated by the garden gate earlier.

But I could have guessed what she was thinking even without our connection.

Where was her ultimate obligation supposed to lie?

I decided to stick to talk of strategy instead of trying to answer that question. It was easier.

“They’ll be expecting us to come to the aid of the humans they’re attacking,” I said. “Which means they’ll be prepared, if and when we do.”

---