text: Oma's Temple, seat for five hundred years of the descendants of former slaves Faith Ahya and Hahko, was an enormous green claw soaring toward the blushing sky. Its reflective glass dome caught Sina's light, turning the plateau and all who walked up on it a fiery lavender.
  
  Kirana Javia, descendant of conquerors and flesh dealers, entered Oma's Temple through the front gates, bathed in Sina's light. The doors opened for her and her retinue without force or violence. This was the one plan she had needed to go off without incident, and it pleased her to find it working perfectly. It had taken her army most of the summer season to clean up Kuallina and clear out the villages between there and Oma's Temple. Many orchards and fields were burned by the Dhai in their retreat, and cleaning up the fields and planting a late autumn harvest had been one of her army's higher priorities. Now, on the cusp of autumn, she had arrived. Kirana slipped off her bear in the front gardens and passed the reins to kennel keepers who were clearly not her people, but cowering, wide-eyed Dhai. Until she could replace them, they would need some cowed Dhai to remain in service.
  
  She expected to see Nasaka at the bottom of the grand tongue of the steps, eagerly awaiting her, but instead she found a mincing little boy called Pasinu. He said he was Nasaka's assistant, and apologized for Nasaka's absence. Kirana suggested they go up and find her, as Kirana was in a jolly mood, and she wanted to meet Nasaka here in her own world, finally, in the flesh, and conclude their decade-long deal for the handover of the Dhai temples.
  
  Pasinu led her upstairs, where she saw the first of the bodies – all children and young people – their limp forms stacked neatly outside classrooms like corded wood. They had died without much fuss, which Kirana counted a blessing. She had ensured Nasaka had enough help to wipe the place clean well ahead of her arrival. She marveled at how well the taking of the temples had gone – clearing out all the full Oras, tying them up at Kuallina for weeks, giving them just enough time to feel they may triumph before she crushed them, had made the temples easy to infiltrate and control with a minimal amount of damage. Remarkable, that after all this time some grand scheme of hers had finally paid off. Walking through this temple after a decade of war and strategy and planning, after so much had been lost, after so many failures, was deeply satisfying.
  
  She pushed open the door to Nasaka's study. Nasaka's body lay prone on the floor in front of her desk, riddled with at least two dozen stab wounds. Blood smeared the floor, the desk. Bloody footprints came all the way from the desk to the door. She even saw blood on the bookcases. It was the most brutal death she'd seen in the whole temple.
  
  "I see she finally ate what she sowed," Kirana said.
  
  Behind her, Pasinu gasped. "Who–"
  
  "Settling grudges during coups is a popular pastime," Kirana said. "I suspect whomever assaulted her escaped cleanly."
  
  "Perhaps it was a novice–"
  
  "No," Kirana said. "This was very personal." She stepped away, and shut the door behind her. It made things easier, though. "As her assistant, I expect you to give me a full briefing," Kirana said.
  
  "Of course."
  
  "We have great plans for this little temple, and its sisters," Kirana said.
  
  It took a day to clean up the temple in a way that Kirana deemed presentable. She went through room after room, reassigning quarters to jistas, her squad commanders, the star gazers, logistics, supply heads, and various support staff. She walked into the great Assembly Chamber at the top of the temple and admired the sky writ large in the atrium.
  
  As they prepared to open a gate to admit her family, she tarried in the Kai quarters, sighing over all the things that needed to be replaced. She pulled open the curtains and stared out over the vast woodlands. Reports told her that many had retreated there. She already had squads in pursuit. She still needed Yisaoh.
  
  Yisaoh. She turned away from the window. Something flashed in the sky, and she went back, squinted. Sina blazed merrily in the sky, but something was folding in on itself just to the east of it, pushing into the sky like a fist through wet tissue paper.
  
  The sky flashed red, and the blazing eye of a star she had seen only in books appeared in the sky.
  
  Kirana ran from the window, yelling for her omajistas.
  
  "Up here!" she called. "Open the wink here! Call my children in! Let them see this!"
  
  The two omajistas came up the stairs, huffing.
  
  "Can you feel it?" Kirana asked.
  
  Oma, finally risen after all this time. It was glorious.
  
  "Heaven above, yes," the woman, Mysa, said. A smile split her haggard face. "You want a wink, Empress?" She held out her hands, and parted the seams between the world as if carving through a brick of warm lard, with not a drop of blood in sight.
  
  Kirana clapped her hands like a child. She caught herself, but only just. She laughed so hard she put her hands over her mouth to stop herself. The omajistas, too, were merry, perhaps too merry, but after all the horror of the last decade, it was welcome.
  
  She saw Yisaoh on the other side, sitting up from her work.
  
  "Oma!" Kirana said. "Yisaoh! Send the children! Oma is risen!"
  
  Yisaoh rushed outside Kirana's frame of vision.
  
  Kirana called to the other omajista. "Go downstairs and open up a wink on the plateau. Start bringing them through, anyone you can. All of them. What we can't support here, we'll send to Dorinah."
  
  Gaiso would have Dorinah in hand soon enough. They already controlled half of that country.
  
  Yisaoh returned with the girls. The two youngest clung to her, but the eldest, Moira, came boldly forward.
  
  Kirana strode through the wink, popping out onto the other side, and embraced her family. Yisaoh held her tightly. The children grabbed fists of her clothes.
  
  "We took the temple," Kirana said. "It was almost easy. You wouldn't think that took a decade of planning."
  
  Yisaoh met her look. Kirana knew the question. She shook her head. "Soon," she said.
  
  "Take them," Yisaoh said. "It's time."
  
  "I'll come back for you."
  
  "I know."
  
  "Travel is easier now. With Oma risen, we are the most fearsome force–"
  
  "We have been very fearsome," Yisaoh agreed, but Kirana heard the implied question, "if we are so fearsome, why can we not kill one woman?"
  
  Kirana kissed her and stepped back through the wink, holding out her arms.
  
  "Moira, Tasia, Corina, come through."
  
  "Go on," Yisaoh said.
  
  The children gazed back at Yisaoh once, twice, until she pushed them through, herding them like wayward cats.
  
  Kirana opened her arms to welcome her children home.
  
  It was not until Moira and Corina were safe in her arms, weeping and trembling, that she realized Tasia was not with them. Kirana looked to the wink and saw Tasia still stuck on the other side, her face pressed against the wink, fingers splayed on the invisible barrier between them. Yisaoh held Tasia's shoulders, her face stricken.
  
  This was not the vision of the future that Kirana had promised herself.
  
  Kirana stood in a new, vibrant world with two of her children, while one child and her wife remained on a toxic wreck of a world she had killed millions to free them from. For the first time since the beginning of the Great War, the Empress of Dhai, Divine Kai of the Tai Mora, wept – and the baleful eye of Oma bathed her in bloody light.
  
  After all this time, the war Kirana had waged for the survival of her people was not over.
  
  The war for this world had just begun.