The Last Wave By, Crying How Bright

The Place Between
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As the end came, she was less a person than a strung-out heaping of emotions, poorly wrapped in the skin known to others as Xalati Katya Vekhir.

Joy, fear, confusion, rage, awe, bliss, nausea, despair: all foreign-born, rippling a millionfold of colors bent through the prism of her mind.

And then those born of herself:

Fear for her friends, who had stayed, those idiots, and nearly died of it—could still yet die of it if they did not fucking move now

A rightness seeping from her bones that she should have someone to fight for again, beyond herself.

Hope, that perhaps Tala still lives and remains away from this strange place. Had those glimpses through those panes of water been true? Could it be that Ixtalan was with them—grown, somehow, and not quite how she’d expected, but still herself, as brash and stubborn as she’d always been?

Bitterness, that they never had more than those brief minutes stolen on a dreamlike beach somewhere, that she still was not entirely certain had truly happened.

Sorrow, to never be standing on the cliffs of Shepherd’s End, looking over the ocean; never to see her home and the rest of her family again.

A fierce joy, to be weapon in hand, staring into the face of the monster, to spit in its eye and hold it at bay for a precious few seconds.

Regret, that she had not said more—had not told Salinger and Peach to tell Ixtalan that she could not make it to the tower after all, but that she loved her and would be waiting for her, whatever was beyond.

And an enormous relief, to finally meet the end she’d been chasing and denying near half of her life.

Light and agony swallows her, and she has only a flash to feel piercing horror and the realization that no, I do not want this, I cannot—

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The Last Wave By, Crying How Bright