Allow me to interrupt. Everything that had happened up until now -

  The Arena, the Heist, my Pact with Yozi, Nyssara killing her own sister -

  Everything that happened up until now was not of importance.

  It did happen, but it was not of importance.

  How tall is a god? Can you imagine?

  The earth found out before the people did.

  The stones of the palace, which had stood for five hundred years through siege and fire and the death of kings, began to weep.

  Alabaster that had held since the founding crumbled to powder without being touched.

  Cracks spread through foundations that had borne the weight of empire, not breaking but opening, as if the ground itself was trying to see what was coming.

  In the throne room, the chandeliers swayed though there was no wind.

  The flames in the sconces bent sideways, reaching toward something, straining against their wicks uncontrollably.

  The shadows in the corners grew darker and then lighter and then disappeared entirely, fleeing from something that had not yet arrived.

  Because what already is needs no arrival and no central point, no moving waves, no start nor end.

  It was a hum.

  Low and vast and coming from everywhere at once, from the stones and the air and the spaces between heartbeats.

  It was the sound of something waking up, something that had been sleeping for three centuries beneath prayers and rituals and the patient work of faithful hands.

  It was the sound of a door being unlocked from the other side.

  Ysolde stood on the dais where she had stood through all the chaos.

  Her hands pressed together in prayer, her golden eyes fixed on something no one else could see.

  She had not moved. She had not spoken. She had only smiled that empty smile and waited.

  Now she began to rise.

  Her bare feet left the marble first, toes pointing downward, robes falling straight as water despite the absence of gravity.

  Light bloomed from her skin, pale at first, then brighter, then brighter still, until looking at her was like looking at the sun through closed eyelids.

  Until the shape of her burned itself into the vision of everyone who witnessed it.

  The hum grew louder.

  The ceiling of the throne room, which had been painted with scenes of imperial triumph five centuries ago, began to crack.

  And the cracks formed patterns, spread in lines that curved and connected, that wrote themselves across the ancient plaster in a language older than human speech.

  Those who looked at the patterns felt their minds slide away from understanding, felt something vast and patient looking back at them through the shapes.

  Then the ceiling opened.

  The stones lifted and parted like hands unfolding in prayer, revealing the sky above, revealing the stars that were already beginning to drown in light that had no source.

  The palace was peeling itself apart for her, offering itself up, making way for something that could not be contained by walls built by human hands.

  Ysolde rose through the opening, and the light rose with her, and the hum became a chord, and the chord became a voice, and the voice said nothing that words could hold.

  In the streets beyond the palace, people stopped what they were doing and looked up.

  They did not know why. They did not choose to.

  Their bodies simply turned toward the light the way flowers turn toward the sun.

  Instinctively, the way all small things turn toward the vast things that will destroy them.

  How tall is a god? Can you imagine?

  And the sky began to change.

  And she rose, and rising, she became.

  The light that poured from her did not dissipate into the air. It thickened with every passing second. It took shape around her ascending form, building itself into something that had no name in any human language, something that existed in the space between metaphor and mathematics.

  A collosal, spectral entity. Magnificence.

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  A hundred feet tall, then taller, then taller still, its proportions shifting as it grew, never quite settling into something the eye could hold. It was made of radiance, of purity, of the light that existed before the first shadow was cast. To look at it was to feel your own darkness recoil, to feel every compromise you had ever made and every sin you had ever committed rise to the surface of your skin like oil on water. At its heart, suspended in the center of its chest like a seed in a fruit, Ysolde's physical body floated. Small and human and serene, her eyes closed, her face peaceful, a woman dreaming while her dream destroyed the world.

  The palace could not contain itself around her.

  And still she rose.

  People were screaming somewhere. People were running. People were dying. But these things were small, were distant, were irrelevant to what was happening in the sky above them. The colossus did not notice. The colossus did not notice anything. It simply was, and its being was enough to unmake everything it touched.

  Above its head, the sky fell apart beautifully.

  Not clouds parting. Not stars falling. The actual fabric of existence split along a seam that had been weakening for three hundred years, that had been prepared and cultivated and fed with prayers and sacrifices and the patient faith of generations. A wound in the world, vertical and vast, its edges rippling like water disturbed by something rising from below.

  The Portal.

  The door that had been closed since the First Emperor gave his name to seal it. Light poured through the opening, and this light was different from the colossus's radiance, purer somehow, more absolute. It fell on the city like rain, like judgment, like the attention of something that had been waiting on the other side for longer than human memory could hold.

  And in that light, shapes moved.

  Harmony was the horror. They were beautiful in ways that made beauty meaningless, that made every beautiful thing that had ever existed seem like a crude approximation, a child's drawing of something the child had never seen. They moved in the light the way fish move in water, natural and graceful and utterly inhuman.

  The cleansers.The purifiers.

  The beings that existed before darkness was invented, that hated everything that cast a shadow, that had been called by three centuries of faithful preparation to scour this world clean of every imperfection.The colossus opened its mouth, and the voice that emerged was not sound. It was pressure. It was presence. It was the weight of absolute certainty pressing down on every mind in the city, on every soul that heard it, leaving no room for doubt or resistance or hope.

  "THE DOOR IS OPEN"

  The words did not echo. They did not need to. They existed in every stone and every bone and every breath drawn in the city below. They wrote themselves into the foundations of buildings and the memories of everyone who heard them. The Portal stretched wider. Fifty feet across. A hundred. Growing by the moment, its edges creeping outward like a wound that refused to close, like a mouth opening to swallow everything.

  "THE CLEANSERS COME"

  In the streets, people fell to their knees. Worship? Surrender? All the same. Their legs would no longer hold them. The weight of what they were witnessing pressed them down, drove them to the ground, made standing impossible. They looked up at the colossus and the Portal and the shapes moving in the light beyond, and they understood for the first time how small they were, how fragile, how utterly insignificant in the face of forces that did not know or care that they existed.

  Some of them prayed. To gods, to ancestors, to anything that might listen. Their prayers rose into the light and dissolved there, unanswered, unheard, consumed by a radiance that had no use for human faith.

  Some of them wept. For themselves, for their children, for the world that was ending around them. Their tears fell on cobblestones that were already beginning to crack, already beginning to open, already reaching upward toward the light that would unmake them.

  And some of them simply watched. Unable to move, unable to look away, unable to do anything but witness the end of everything they had ever known. They watched the colossus spread its arms wide, watched the Portal yawn wider still, watched the beautiful terrible shapes in the light grow clearer as they approached the threshold.

  "EVERYTHING THAT CASTS A SHADOW WILL PURIFY"

  And the colossus smiled.

  The expression spread across its face of light, too wide, too knowing, full of something that was not joy but wore joy's face the way Ysolde wore her human body. It was the smile of something that had never understood smiling, that had learned the shape of the expression without grasping its meaning. It was the smile of something that did not distinguish between love and annihilation, between mercy and extinction.

  The faithful emerged from their hiding places and walked toward it with their arms spread wide. Valric Thenn, dying in the ruins, lifted his hands in supplication and begged to be remembered. Across the city, those who had believed, who had worked and prayed and waited for this moment, rose from their knees and moved toward the light that would consume them.

  They thought they were chosen.

  They did not know they were fuel.

  They were not of importance.

  How tall is a god? Can you imagine?

  And somewhere in the passages below, two figures emerged from a corridor that had been a tomb.

  Nyssara, with her sister's blood still wet on her chest.

  And Yozi, with a hungry gem pressed against his heart and a demon whispering warnings in his ear.

  They looked up at the colossus, at the Portal, at the end of everything.

  Seemingly not of importance.

  How tall is a god? Can you imagine?

  They kept climbing.