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"Up ahead—the eluvian," Neve called from ahead, her voice grim. "Almost there. Keep moving!"

A roar collected behind them and the ground rose to answer, tossing rocks into the air and sending them all stumbling. Lucanis leapt at the last moment, coasting through air as the tremor shook the ground, landing spare feet from the eluvian and casting a look over his shoulder as he sent himself through.

A great, retina-searing light rose from the place where Ghilain'nain had fallen. It would consume this place, would devour it. He could not, would not feel sympathy for the god. He could not help feeling a kinship with the vastness of this destruction, for great talons of rage had found his flesh, too, where he had left it weak and exposed.

Emmrich waited on the other side, gesturing Lucanis onward. He raced forward several steps and stopped, dragging in breath as he slowed. Davrin and Taash were next, followed by Neve. Who were they missing? Who was left?

Lace, dead. Bellara, gone. Rook—

Rook.

The roar did not follow them through the mirror. They watched, silent, as light devoured the ground they'd just left behind. When it struck the mirror, Lucanis closed his eyes against the searing energy reached after them. They had made it out.

Others had not been so lucky.

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"It is not certain that Rook is dead," Emmrich said, his tone so level that it made Spite claw at the inside of Lucanis's skin. "However, it would be wisest to prepare a plan for this eventuality in the event that she is unable to rejoin us. Does anyone have thoughts?"

They had all taken a moment to clean themselves, for what it was worth. It had been a necessary precaution after fighting the amount of darkspawn they'd fought. Washing the ozone and filth away had not settled Lucanis's mind in the slightest. He'd scrubbed the soap roughly over scars and fresh bruises alike, had ignored the new stings and burns that would likely make similar permanent notations on his skin. It would have been a gift to stop thinking.

The task, the pain, had not been successful. It had been too difficult to ignore Spite's keening inside his mind. Lucanis was fortunate that he'd had such long practice at controlling such reactions, at least outwardly. He did not know if he would have been any use at all had he given in to the demon's urge to claw and rend and shriek.

Rook had tried to tell him that she loved him. He had stopped her. A part of him had been so certain that one of them would come to grief if she did, as if speaking the words aloud would curse their odds of success. A superstitious thought, a Crow thought, and he damned it to the Void now. He should have let her speak. He should have told her…

He did not know what he should have said to her. He did not know.

"We have to kill him," Taash said, their face a mask of wrath. Their eyes were red and swollen. Though they had just returned from a bath like everyone else, salt already streaked their cheeks.

They had loved Lace and lost her. Lucanis felt the pulling weight of the grief behind this thought and did not look directly at them again. They had a goal; whatever he might feel, might think, the contract was not yet done.

The thought was less effective at refocusing him than he might have hoped.

"Of course we will," Emmrich assured them, his expression never flickering.

Lucanis had wondered at this once—this stoicism of the Mourn Watch, peculiar as it was. A Crow would hide their emotions, would playact desire or scorn as needed for the job. He did not think he had ever seen one adopt this expression of polite interest, as if they were only considering entertaining the points someone else had raised. Rook had done the same when they'd—

"The dagger is lost," Lucanis said, staring at the pillar behind Emmrich's head so he would not see her. "We would need to return to the island to seek it again."

"About the dagger," Davrin began, and the conversation went on.

Rook, Spite called inside him, tearing at the shreds of his restraint. Rook. Rook. Rook.

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The island had not been beautiful before, but it had not been a wasteland either.

Glass crunched beneath Davrin's boots as the two of them crept through what remained of that final battleground. The wind sang through the remnants of this place, eerie and moaning. Only the vaguest of structures remained, the squared-off lumps of incinerated bricks suggesting the intricate ruins they'd seen on the way in. The ground still radiated heat, drawing sweat from the faces of both men.

They had seen destruction before, before this quest had begun and after. Minrathous after the dragon, Weisshaupt…none of it compared to this. Lucanis had thought he understood the word desolation before, but saw now that he had been incorrect. This was desolation, this complete absence of life. He could not imagine even a weed finding purchase in the wrath-soaked earth.

Davrin gestured, indicating he would go straight while Lucanis covered him from above. Lucanis moved silently, climbing the smoothed face of a cliff and crouching in the shadows of the former walls there. The lack of cover made him itch, but only from habit. There was nobody here. He would have heard even the slightest movement over the ground here. Of this, he was certain.

Here: the suggestion of a circle, an arena of sorts. He had leapt from this spot, dagger in hand, and had struck the killing blow. Rook had been across from him in the lower level—he could almost see her shadow standing there still—and Lace had been falling into a pit of Blight below.

Davrin ducked from pillar to pillar, sword in hand, and glanced toward Lucanis.

His first assessment had been correct: there was nobody here. Nothing moved, not even when the wind whistled through. Everything that might blow away was gone.

"No signs," Davrin told Lucanis once he'd made his way down again. Lucanis nodded his agreement, and winced at the scrabbling in the base of his skull.

Rook, Rook, Rook—

"I am looking," he told Spite, scuffing the nascent trickle of blood from his nose. "It will be easier if you stop."

He tried to push away Spite's distress. More, he tried to ignore what it likely meant: the demon had sought her in the Fade and had not found her. Lucanis would have struggled to find her there, but Spite would surely have felt her even if he couldn't reach her.

Not here. Not at the Lighthouse, the Necropolis, or any of the other places they'd looked. Not in the Fade.

Gone.

"Let us at least look for Lace," he told the Warden, who'd already turned that direction. "She would ask us to try."

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Treviso was grotesquely merry tonight.

Lucanis crouched above it, watching the movement of the people in the market below. The revelry felt surreal. So much remained to be lost. So much was already gone. Still, the people below only knew the release of occupation, the sensation of a deep breath after months and months of holding it.

He was good at remaining still. He'd been practicing since he was a boy. Still, he could not help the movement of his thumb over the thing in his hand, as if tracing the shape of it could summon some semblance of Rook's presence.

"None of our contacts have heard or seen anything new," Teia said from his left. She lounged on the roof, looking down at the streets as if she did not have a single care. The crease in her forehead told a different story.

"They were discreet, of course," she added. "Still, she is well known now. Someone would have seen her if she'd been taken through Antiva. There is nothing."

He had expected as much. There had been nothing the last time he'd asked too, and the time before that. In truth, Lucanis had not needed to come here in person to receive his answer. Their network of information was solid now, the factions Rook had courted committed to working together until the end came. Someone could have told him just as well in Arlathan or Rivain what Teia knew in Treviso. Even so, he had needed to be here. To remember.

"Well? Something you said or something you didn't?" Teia asked.

Lucanis pressed his lips together. It had never been his favorite aspect of hers, that she could see so easily the things he did not want known. He had never met anyone as good at reading others as she was, had made a point of learning what she knew to hone his own skills. Lucanis had told no one what he and Rook were to each other—he did not know himself what they were to each other—but Teia had long since guessed.

The glass face of the locket in his hand was faceted and pressed sharp into his thumb where he ran it over the image carved there. A Nevarran custom, Emmrich had told him. A token.

A token. While she'd been dragged somewhere else, it had been tucked between his armor and the linen of his shirt. He hadn't even tried to give it to her.

Teia's eyes caught the necklace as he tucked it away into his shirt again. Her lips parted to speak, but he had already heard enough.

"Send word the moment you know anything," he said, and did not wait for her reply before he was moving again. Spite's wings caught the air in time to drop them at the eluvian once more.

Nothing new, nothing more. Wherever she had gone, it was nowhere he could follow.

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Lucanis had spent little time in Rook's rooms before she'd vanished. He had not told her how the vast tank of water set his teeth on edge, had made something that was decidedly not Spite claw at him beneath his skin.

There had been rare occasions during his time in the Ossuary that he'd been able to see the boundaries of his cage. Every time, the swimming creatures had only reminded him of the suffocating weight of water above them. Escape was not impossible. He had told himself so. But day after day, he could feel the pressure of that unending blue. It would drown him, crush him, wash him away even if he broke whatever spell had created the Ossuary. During the long hours of torture and pain, he had thought that perhaps it would not be so bad to be crushed if he took the rest of them with him.

This was the thought that had called Spite, he thought, but the demon disagreed. Well. Of course he did. It was his nature to be contrary.

Now, Lucanis sat on the settee in her room and stared ahead, turning the locket over and over in his hands. He'd been told to sleep. It was out of the question, of course. Spite would be gone again in an instant, stalking through strange places and putting Lucanis out of reach when—if—information finally came.

What had he been waiting for? He did not know now. The right words, the words that felt like his own. Perhaps so. Perhaps it was only that this comfort, this fascination, had taken him so thoroughly by surprise that he had not been able to trust it.

"You will find it morbid, I expect," Emmrich had told him some weeks ago. "I take it that such perceptions are not uncommon when it comes to our customs. Still, tokens of affection like this are common enough in Nevarra, and especially among those who spend time with mortalitasi."

"Hair," Lucanis had said, trying to picture what the mage was describing.

"Hair is one aspect of the living which remains when the dead are mummified or buried, but it is one of the first things lost in cremation or when defleshing and cleaning bones for inhabitation. A token of life beyond death, one might imagine. Rather, one might suppose it represents something that endures beyond the physical reality of itself. A romantic notion, of course, but one must suppose that is the point. Why do you ask?"

Lucanis had looked at the pale, polished skull of the lich who had so recently been a man and had been forced to agree (silently, at least) that this was a morbid notion. Of course it was the sort of thing Nevarra favored.

But—to give something to her that was only hers? It was easier than words. He did not know the words.

In her quarters now, he pressed a nail into the catch of the locket and let it flip open. A circle of black hair, tied into its loop with violet thread, rested behind glass there. When he closed it again, it colored the faceted image on the front a mottled black and purple and silver.

At Weisshaupt, there had been an instant's difference between success and failure. If he had killed Ghilain'nain there, perhaps Rook would not have been lost. Perhaps she would be here now, planning and organizing and…

An instant. A moment. If he had acted, if he had struck as he'd meant to, it would all have been over. What was the use of him if he could not strike when it was needed? If he squandered rare chances and missed his mark?

There had been an instant's difference between pressing this gift into her hand and walking away. He had made the wrong choice.

Sleep, Spite said, and there was something odd in his—its voice. Sleep. I will stay. I will wait for her.

"Will you?" Lucanis said aloud, dropping the locket once more into an inner breast pocket. "You won't go looking again?"

I will stay, Spite repeated.

Lucanis passed a hand over his face and slumped sideways into the cushions. A knife that was not sharpened would be useless in a fight; his reactions would be slower in the battle to come if he did not allow his body to rest. Even now, he could feel the weight of exhaustion dragging at his muscles and reflexes. Rook would need him sharp if he found her.

When he found her.

This room smelled like her. The place she'd slept was the worst of it all, that odd sweet scent inundating the pillow he pressed his face into. Dying leaves and rot, Spite called it, but Lucanis had never agreed. Rosemary and incense, he thought, and closed his eyes. He was asleep before the next thought came.

When he woke some time later, he was still lying in her room, but the locket was not pressed against his chest. The chain tangled between his fingers instead, the oval silver of the locket nestled into the space at the center of his palm.

"We will find her," he told Spite, who had allowed him to stay here, where she had so recently slept.

We will find her, Spite agreed.

He looked ahead as he stood, eyes catching on the slow-moving fish behind glass. The weight of his failure pressed on him, vast as an ocean over his head. There was no time to indulge it. There were things to do, contingency plans to make, weapons to sharpen.

When he found her, they would be ready. He would not miss his chance again.