text: Taigan stepped through the gate and onto the plateau outside Oma's Temple. The garrison there was already on fire, a great billowing blaze that was quickly consuming the whole plateau, sending bits of charred grass into the sky that trickled onto the woodland below. More blazes would begin, burning out more of the Tai Mora. That pleased him.
  
  "Remember," Lilia said, huffing behind him, "we need to be enough of a distraction to get that chamber clear. If Anavha's wink draws all the jistas here up there, and if Kirana is still there–"
  
  "Oh, fear not," Taigan said. "My distraction will be much more… dramatic."
  
  The fire had also drawn away the guards at the stone bridge leading to the temple. They were halfway to the garrison already.
  
  Taigan strode ahead of Lilia and Zezili, straight for the bridge, already spinning a powerful song to surprise the guards on the other side. He went across the bridge without pausing for them to catch up, though Zezili keep harping at him in Dorinah.
  
  Lilia wanted to distract these people, to cut them off from their stars and hobble them, to buy Anavha and Roh and the others time in the rooms above. But Taigan had other ideas. Hobbling was not enough. Not nearly enough.
  
  The guards inside the temple reached immediately for their respective stars, and six more guards came in behind him from the gardens, shocked at his passing. Taigan cut the jistas off neatly from their stars and immobilized the regular guards with an easy binding song.
  
  "I have a gift for your Empress," Taigan said as Zezili caught up to him.
  
  "The fuck are you doing?" Zezili said in Dorinah.
  
  He pretended not to understand her.
  
  "She has gotten a good many gifts lately," the older jista said. "What makes yours special?"
  
  "Do you want to risk angering her now, so close to the end?"
  
  "You can wait in the gaol."
  
  "We can wait where the guests wait," Taigan said. "Where is that?"
  
  Lilia finally came through the doorway, breathing hard. She narrowed her eyes at Taigan.
  
  "Guests wait here," the jista said.
  
  Taigan flicked his wrist, and snapped every bone in her body. She fell to the floor like a broken puppet.
  
  Lilia gasped. "Taigan!"
  
  He set the rest of the guards on fire. They screamed.
  
  Zezili grabbed his shoulder. "What–"
  
  Taigan immobilized her in a neat net of Oma's breath, spinning a little prison around her to keep her out of his way. She hung just above the floor, spitting and yelling.
  
  "What are you doing? This isn't the plan!" Lilia said.
  
  Taigan shrugged. "These people murdered my entire country," he said. "I didn't think I was terribly upset about it until just this moment."
  
  "But… what did you tell me about revenge? This is–"
  
  "I am very bad at taking my own advice," he said, and burned up the next wave of soldiers and jistas coming down the stairs. He set everything on fire that would burn: the tables and chairs in the banquet hall. The doors. The drapes. The occasional wooden or otherwise organic panel. The carvings on the stairs. The portraits.
  
  Lilia choked and gasped behind him, but he had come here to satisfy a very deep craving, and he was far from being sated.
  
  He took the stairs two at a time, burning Tai Mora and Dhai without distinction. It simply did not matter to him. He paused on the third floor, far ahead of Lilia, and sent a tendril of Oma's breath back down to pick her up. She yelled.
  
  Taigan set her down beside him.
  
  "Murder me too," she gasped. "Just get it over with. Is that what you're here for?"
  
  "Not at all," Taigan said, as the black smoke crept up the stairs. "But if we fail at this little venture, and bird, you have a divine history of failure, I want to ensure I murder as many of these people as I can before the end."
  
  He kept climbing, sending fire down every corridor, extinguishing the lives of every breathing inhabitant his star's power could unearth. He marveled that there appeared to be no omajistas in the temple; without one, there were none who could counter him.
  
  "Kirana was as rash as you!" Taigan called down to Lilia. She had paused halfway up the fourth flight of stairs, huffing for breath.
  
  Ah. The smoke, of course. He considered leaving her. Certainly, she knew how to operate the device, but so did Luna. Taigan smirked at that. All this time, he had been searching for a worldbreaker, scouring one continent after another for the right person, for some chosen one, when it turned out all they'd had to do was train one. Oh, the irony. The years of wasted shit and toil.
  
  "She must have all her omajistas engaged in the temple!" he yelled down again.
  
  Could she hear him at all? Who knew? She was surely drowning, gasping for breath, her vision no doubt tunneling out. Oh well.
  
  He turned away to go up the final stair to the Assembly Chamber. How long it had been since he stood there, trying to convince these foolish pacifists that this was all coming, that this was how it would all end.
  
  "None of you listened!" he yelled at Lilia again, but he could not see her anymore. With everyone and everything burning around him, he had no audience to appreciate his work.
  
  Taigan sent a purl of Oma's breath back for her, tapping along to the rhythm of the crackling flames as he waited for her arrival.
  
  The body he brought up was limp, barely breathing, but alive. He focused his power on her bruised and battered lungs. He eased the smothering inflammation and repaired the oxygen-starved tissue. It was all just so much easier with Oma risen. He felt like the most powerful person in the world.
  
  Lilia gasped and sat up. She clutched at her chest. Stared at Taigan.
  
  "Just this way," he said brightly, holding out his hand.
  
  "You're monstrous," she said.
  
  "I never pretended to be anything else. We are a lovely group of monsters, Lilia, you and me and that construct you call Zezili. One has to be monstrous to do what we are about to do."
  
  He released the tangle of Oma's breath that held Zezili immobile in the foyer, assuming that she had yet to die, or that his resurrection of Lilia had also affected her. A curious binding, that one.
  
  Taigan was proven correct as he pushed open the door to the Assembly Chamber and Zezili came barreling up the stairs, yelling at him, hardly winded.
  
  "Did you even look back?" Zezili shouted.
  
  He waved at her. "Good of you to join us. So much confusion down there!"
  
  "Fuck you, you fucking–"
  
  He came up against the parajista barrier inside the door and called to Kadaan, "Would you let us pass? There's a great deal of burning down here." All of them appeared to be intact, inside: Anavha and Roh, Kadaan and Saradyn. A strange group of companions, no matter what the sky was doing.
  
  "Thanks to you," Zezili said.
  
  "You're welcome," Taigan said.
  
  "Saradyn," Roh said. "Grab her and keep her quiet when we drop the barrier."
  
  Saradyn lumbered to the other side of the room where a woman was pressed against the wall by the barrier.
  
  Taigan had not anticipated her being there. He sighed. "Oh dear."
  
  Lilia put a hand to her mouth, clearly recognizing Gian immediately.
  
  The barrier dropped.
  
  Lilia was exhausted, her chest still sore. She wanted to murder Taigan where he stood, but when she saw Gian on the other side of the room, she forgot it all for one brilliant moment.
  
  She would know Gian's face anywhere. The woman who had taken her out to Fasia's Point on a vain quest to find Lilia's mother. And again, a different Gian but always the same Gian, in her memory: the Gian whose leg she had mended, whose hair she had brushed and braided, the Gian who loved her when she was no one, nothing, just a filthy, stinking scullery girl. Gian, the lovely face in the dark.
  
  Gian, the one she had lost because of her own terrible choices.
  
  Even as she was overcome, Saradyn picked Gian up and wrapped a big hand around her throat.
  
  "Don't kill her!" Lilia cried. "Wait, just. Let me think." Her breath came quickly. "Let her be, just a moment, I–"
  
  "Anavha!" Kadaan said. "It's time. Lilia! Get back here!"
  
  Anavha raised his hands.
  
  Smoke still poured in from the stairwell and escaped through the shattered hole in the ceiling.
  
  Roh said, "Lilia, come in. I need to block that smoke."
  
  Anavha's gate winked into existence. The others jumped through the wink above the table: Maralah first, then Luna, Salifa and the rest.
  
  Salifa immediately ran up to Lilia, white ribbons streaming from her hair. "Are you all right? What's–"
  
  "Go!" Lilia said, pointing back at the table. "Get in place. I can handle this."
  
  Salifa winced and retreated.
  
  Taigan chuckled. "She isn't even the right Gian, bird."
  
  "Shut your face!" Lilia said. Her hands trembled. The memories tore over her. Gian's face as she gagged and fell over at the table they had shared while trying to parley with Kirana, so long ago, at Kuallina. The spray of black bile. Gian convulsing, another dead Gian. All dead.
  
  "Not this one!" Lilia said firmly. "Not. One. More."
  
  Taigan was right. This was another of her overly complicated plans. This wasn't going to work. She had put them all in danger. She was failing them, just like she had failed Gian. How many more would she sacrifice because she just wanted… to win? To be right?
  
  Gian stared at her, wide-eyed. Lilia crept toward her, hesitant.
  
  "You know me?" Lilia asked.
  
  "I do," Gian said softly.
  
  "Don't scream," Lilia said, "or this big man will harm you. I won't stop him."
  
  Gian nodded again.
  
  Lilia said to Saradyn, in Dorinah, "Release her, all right? Just loosen your grip so she can talk."
  
  Roh called to the others, "Make a circle here around the table. Lilia! We need you and Saradyn! Let her be!"
  
  "How do you know me?" Lilia asked.
  
  "I know your face," Gian rasped, "as it seems you know mine. Some other you, though. She died."
  
  "Most versions of me seem to," Lilia said. She remembered gasping in the foyer and blacking out, left to die for the millionth time by Taigan.
  
  "And me?" Gian asked.
  
  "You've died a lot too," Lilia said. "I'm very tired of watching you die."
  
  Lilia turned back to the others, who had made a circle around the table.
  
  "Let her go, Saradyn," Lilia said.
  
  Saradyn grunted, said to Roh, "You say?"
  
  "Lilia, she'll tell them–" Roh sputtered.
  
  "They can't follow us," Lilia said. "They don't have a Guide or a Kai."
  
  "Fine," Roh said. "Do as she says. Just… take that woman's sword. Lilia, hurry!"
  
  Saradyn took Gian's sword and shoved her back against the wall, knocking the breath from her.
  
  Lilia made her way to the circle, and stood between Salifa and Taigan.
  
  "Hold hands!" Roh said.
  
  Taigan smirked and took Lilia's hand on one side, Luna's on the other. "Are we going to sing religious songs now?"
  
  "All right," Roh said. "Everyone step onto the ring into the floor, on my mark. Now." Roh stepped onto the circle of temple flesh in the floor. The others followed. Lilia felt the warmth of the temple's beating heart beneath her feet.
  
  Nothing happened.
  
  For a long moment no one said anything.
  
  "Well," Taigan said, "I'm glad I murdered as many of them as possible. This was certainly an excit–"
  
  They fell through the floor.