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The slow-flickering flame in her palm illuminates the inky outline of blood on his torn shirt, where the blade punctured through. Dawsyn touches the fingers of her other hand to it now and feels the hybrid, her hybrid, shudder delicately. He does not wake.

The iskra magic stirs within her, already summoned by her thoughts. Her mage blood sings, alight and ready. Together, the two sides of her, dark and light, fuse willingly. No longer combative.

Ishveet to repair,Baltisse had taught her.Bones or blades. Anything broken. They are not so different.

“Ishveet,” Dawsyn murmurs now, her voice as ashy as the earth beneath her. Her palm glows with the magic, growing steadily brighter. She feels it flowing through her blood, but before it can do much to mend Ryon’s wound, the glow flickers. It recedes.

Dawsyn feels the depletion. The magic crawls back to its crevices inside her.

She sighs. Then she sits. She tries to see.

At first, the only discernible things are the pockets of glowing amber – torches left alight, ends buried in the ground. But soon, Dawsyn can make out other things. The darkness isn’t so absolute. It strangles one’s sight at first, but soon envelopes you, welcomes you into its folds, and shapes begin to emerge. The blindness lifts.

The bottom of the Chasm stretches out before her. Its width is less immense than she’d imagined. Littered between walls are the slumped and sleeping forms of maybe a hundred people, layered in furs. They lie with their heads on sacks and bags, bundling their children into the curve of their hunched bodies. Others sit alert, watchful, unable to sleep for any amount of time in a place so strange, so odious.

The walls of the Chasm glisten where the torch light reaches its sharp edges. The rock cuts inward and juts outward, slicing jagged patterns up and up. There is only a narrow strip above them that reveals the day. A thin belt of white she can only see if she squints. There is, oddly, no teeth in the cold. The air is close and still, not biting. It does not reach the bones.

Every sound in the Chasm echoes on and on, following those cutting paths of the rock face to its escape. Moving bodies, hushed conversation, the languid tumble of water that meanders down the middle. The living vein of the Chasm.

Soon Dawsyn, Ryon and the others – Tasheem, Rivdan, Hector, Salem, Esra and Yennes – will need to wake the rest. They will need to begin the journey to the Chasm’s end.

Dawsyn prays another end exists at all.

She stands and dusts the strange dirt from her body. It seems to cling to her. She hates to think what particles might reside in it. Every so often, she sees the remnants of what might be white bone half-buried in the ground. How many have fallen off the Ledge in fifty years? How many have been thrown in from Glacia?

Dawsyn paces carefully over sleeping forms. First, she passes Esra, rolled up on his side, huddled inside a thick fur-lined cloak, then Salem, who frets in his sleep.

She passes Yennes, who does not appear to have slept at all. The older woman sits with her back against the rockface, hands trembling, mouth pinched and eyes alert.

Two paths, both are filled.

Dawsyn nods to the woman. She knows Yennes defies all sense in being here, helping them. She prays that Yennes, so timid and meek, does not need to suffer the Chasm long.

Finally, she comes to another familiar body. One that’s perfectly still. Covered head to toe in a cloak, and unflinching at the permeating cold of this place.

Baltisse.

Dawsyn lowers herself to the ground beside the mage and reaches for the cloak. She pulls until it reveals a vacant face.

Dawsyn Sabar has seen many unsettling things in her life, but none are so unnerving as the sight of a once powerful sorceress reduced to nothing but a shell in the dust. Baltisse’s fair hair has already lost its lustre, the sheen from her skin is marred in dirt. Her eyes, always so molten, so visceral, are now a pale innocuous blue. She is here, and not. Dawsyn hopes she has already found her way to that other realm, into the arms of a Holy Mother who showed her little mercy while she lived.

Dawsyn swallows and traces a vein at the mage’s neck with her fingernail. “I am sorry,” she whispers to her. And she is. She is made only of her remorse. Her regret. She feels it in every single cell. Every trace of her. Her being shakes with it.

“Dawsyn?” comes a voice. She turns to find Esra, his eyes swollen and red. The man, his face ruined and then put back together by the dead mage before them, blinks in rapid succession. Usually so tall, his spine seems curved with the strength of his sorrow. “Is she…” He hesitates, swallows thickly. “Can she be moved? Must we leave her?”

Dawsyn’s fingers clench around the mage’s cloak.No. We can’t.But what she says is, “She must stay, Es.”

Esra kneels beside Dawsyn, the tears shining on his cheeks. “She would loathe it here,” he says. “Though I think it an appropriate grave for a witch.”

Dawsyn smiles wanly at him, placing a hand on his trembling shoulder. “She isn’t here, Esra.”

“No.” He clenches Dawsyn’s fingers. “Already, it feels different. Do you feel it?”

She does. There is a… hum missing from the air around them. A vibration they had once taken for granted leaves an eerie, hollow silence in its absence. She nods to Esra, the action painful.

Silence consumes them, heavy and slow. But when Baltisse does not rise from the earth with ethereal redemption, Dawsyn asks, “Why did she do this?” The words have been stuck in her throat for hours. She has been unable to swallow them.

Esra seems uncertain when he responds, as though it is the easiest of answers, the most obvious of the lot. “Tosaveyou,” he says, eyebrows lifting. “To save Ryon.”