We moved.
The tatters of my Grey pages clung to the air as his Requiem Mantle pushed in around me. His power was a declaration, a final edition of the world. My small truths, my personal laws, were holding, but each one cost more than the last. The Skeld Wastes kept score by laying down new, spider-thin sheets of glass wherever our feet passed.
He wore the Ember now as if it had grown there. Six fine threads of it slid off his shoulders, combing through the space between us, tasting my intentions. Every time my mind tried to write an ending to a sequence, one of those threads flicked it away. So I stopped writing endings. I wrote beginnings, over and over, and let Valeria find her own conclusions.
It wasn't enough. He was a fortress, and I was one soldier at the gate. I needed a key.
