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This is how it starts. Fifty years after The War For The Fold, Alina and Zoya stand over Mal’s grave. A Mal who rejoiced in his belief that Alina was normal again, not just struggling to recover after the act of merzost it took to tear down the Fold and kill The Darkling. A Mal who proudly boasted that none of the orphans they raised were Grisha (Alina identified them early and sent them to the Little Palace before Mal ever noticed they were different). A Mal who didn't understand why Alina raged against Tsar Nikolai when he did nothing to help Grisha when Fjerda was drugging them en masse with jurda parem. A Mal who raised his hands to her once and she told him that if he ever did it again she'd make the war look like a Saint's Day Feast.
Alina leans against Zoya, the Squaller’s arm wrapped around her shoulders. They stare down at the simple headstone she gave Mal. Malyen Oretsev. War Hero. Husband. Tucking her head into Zoya’s neck she says, “Sometimes, I think I killed the wrong men.”
Zoya doesn't answer. But within a month of her return to Os Alta, her own husband, Tsar Nikolai is dead, and Zoya places their firstborn son, a Tidemaker, on the throne. Decades later, his grandson, the new Tsar, is ripped apart by a mob that breaks down the gates to the Grand Palace and pulls the imperial family out by their hair. The mob tears down both palaces and instates a new type of government they call demokratiya. The problem Alina finds with it is when the majority rules, the minority, the oppressed are at best overlooked and at worst pushed down further.
And so it goes.
Sometime during her second century of life, Alina goes undercover in a Ketterdam brothel to track down a Grisha trafficking ring. The trail leads her to a network of Shu Han laboratories. The labs keep immaculate records dating back centuries. What she finds there hurts her soul. The records tell of a young Grisha who had bright white light and heat pouring out of her veins, how she escaped after five years in the labs, only to be dragged back after being caught in a border raid. She sacrificed herself to save a man and a child. She died after ten more years of experimentation.
Alina immediately knows who this woman is. She remembers the bright flash of light the night her parents, or rather, her father died. She had been told, had told herself, for years that she hallucinated it, a child's way of blocking out the memory of watching her mother die.
She tears apart the laboratory with a ruthlessness that will be spoken of in poems for centuries to come. She frees the Grisha trapped there and they take no small joy in aiding her in her rampage. Alkemi destroy the chemicals the scientists use. Durasts break down the machines. Heartrenders kill their captors. Squallers and Tidemakers alike tear down the lab with their respective elements. Inferi light up the lab with fire as they leave.
Some of the Grisha go their separate ways after the lab is burnt down. But most follow Alina as she tears through Shu Han, teaching her makeshift militia what she learned in the Second Army along the way. Later, years after she's left Shu Han, the militia will go on to march on the Jade Palace and execute the Empress for crimes against humanity. Swiftly followed by everyone involved in the labs who previously escaped their wrath. Shu Han will eventually become the sole refuge for Grisha on the continent.
Three or four centuries in – Alina is beginning to lose track – she comes across a young girl, a child of no more than six hiding in a peculiarly dark shadow she knows so intimately it brings tears to her eyes. She lets miniature suns float on her fingertips and draws the girl out of her hiding spot. The girl reaches out to touch one. (I've never turned away.) “What are you?” the girl asks.
“I'm the sun summoner. Like you're the shadow summoner. Where are your parents?” she asks, dreading the answer.
The little girl sniffles, dark almond-shaped eyes filling with tears. “They saw the shadows. They want to hurt me.”
Alina bites her lips and says, “I won't let them.”
“Why?” the girl asks, like she hasn't known human kindness in a long time.
(She probably hasn't.)
“We're special, you and I. People like us are meant to be family.”
(Alina tries to tell herself she means Grisha. She doesn't.)
She picks the little girl up in her arms and almost as soon as the girl's shadows fade away, a couple comes out of the woods. They look too much like the girl not to be her parents. The woman, like Alina, looks to have some Shu ancestry. “You there, put her down. She's Grisha, a witch, and needs to pay for her sins.”
Alina snarls at them. “So am I.”
She turns her head just a fraction toward the girl. “Look away,” she tells her.
The girl quickly tucks her head into Alina’s neck and squeezes her eyes shut. Satisfied, she turns her attention back toward the advancing couple and, with the hand not holding the girl, sends out a blinding light. If they can't see their daughter for the gift she is, they don't deserve to see at all.
She walks out of the forest and doesn't look back.
The girl's name turns out to be Anastasiya. Alina wants to laugh at the irony. Resurrection.
She treats the girl like the daughter they never got to have and in turn little Asya looks to her like the parent she should have had. She speaks of The Black Heretic, in some circles (Alina's circles) called The Starless Saint, with a painful kind of reverence and Asya learns to do the same.
One day, during their lessons, Asya asks, “If he was so devoted to the Grisha, why did you kill him?”
“Because I was a naïve little girl, easily manipulated by those calling for his head. I didn't know what it was like to be hunted and feared yet.”
“And now you do?”
Alina nods. “Now I do.”
And that is that.
Years go by. Anastasiya grows into a smart, capable young woman. Stubborn, headstrong, with a slightly cruel streak that Alina doesn't even try to snuff out. (It would hurt too much.) The life she has with Anastasiya hurts just the right amount.
Then stories start flooding into the local Grisha villages about labor camps in Fjerda. Grisha taken out of their beds in the middle of the night and put to work in grueling conditions, running their power plants, making their weapons, healing their soldiers at gunpoint.
It takes time to set up the network, but Alina does it without a single complaint. Houses of ot’kazat’sya and Grisha alike willing to house escapees running all along the Fjerda border and down through Ravka. Some routes even manage to go all the way down to Shu Han. Guides who know the paths, know the safehouses, lead those who manage to escape the labor camps to freedom. And Alina learned long ago she's not willing to ask anything of her followers that she won't do herself.
It's after one such trip that Alina comes back to find the little cottage she shares with Anastasiya ransacked and her daughter in all but blood missing.
It's supposed to be a warning. It turns into a rallying cry. Alina carves through Fjerda so viciously it puts what she did in Shu Han so many years ago to shame. She breaks Grisha out of the labor camps, setting the camps on fire as she goes. She Cuts down all drüskelle that cross her path. She kills entire villages when she finds them burning Grisha in the name of Djel. (If they were innocent, they wouldn't have stood by and watched as her people burned.) She amasses an army. One that will never serve ot’kazat’sya. (She almost wishes she had creatures like the nichevo’ya to aid her in her endeavors.)
Maybe it's that thought that leads her to where she is now. Sitting in the middle of a prison camp, her dying daughter's head in her lap, wishing nothing more than to hurt, to burn, everyone who had a hand in torturing her little girl. “Sing to me one last time, madraya?” Asya asks, “and then make it quick?”
She's helpless but to do what her child asks. (She's reminded of a request so long ago, to burn The Darkling’s body and for somebody to mourn him.) She'll mourn them both, like she does her mother. All immortal beings torn from the earth too soon.
And then, as she slides the Grisha steel out of her daughter's chest, she's hit with the injustice of it all. How much longer can she go on, killing everyone who kills them, one by one by one? The answer is not much longer.
She calls on the merzost and screams. She's vaguely aware of the buildings and people around her turning to ash. Drüskelle turn into terrible creatures – zmei, archaeologists will call the remains – and then they burn too. She screams for her mother, long dead in a Shu Han laboratory. She screams for Aleksander, her equal, dead at her hand. She screams for Nina and Marie and Genya and Ivan and that little boy, a Squaller like his great-grandmother, torn apart by a mob so many years ago. She screams for the Grisha she could not save and the ones she lost leading them into battle. And, most of all, she screams for the little girl hiding in shadows, now dead in her lap.
When her throat is raw and burning hot tears run down her cheeks, she looks up as Anastasiya’s bleached bones crumble to ash.
Low in the sky hangs a small white second sun. She's surrounded by cracked, dry earth and ash stretching for miles.
This is how it will end. She'll walk for days through the Making-bedamned desert until a Squaller-powered aircraft looking for survivors finds her. (She'll make sure they never question why she's the only one.) She'll travel to Novyi Zem and spend a century or so sketching, singing and songwriting. She'll even learn how to play guitar.
Then, when no one is looking for the Sun Heretic of the Golden Wastes anymore, she'll travel down to the University of Ketterdam and then back to Ravka. She'll spend another century researching merzost and the Making at the Heart of the World. She'll mourn the choices she could have made back when He was still alive. And then it will come to her. And she'll know what she has to do.
She'll hike the long, lonely miles from Novokribirsk to where What-Was-The-Fold meets The Golden Wastes. Three acts of merzost meet here. Three tears in The Making at the Heart of the World. She'll kneel down at the border and call upon the remnants of the merzost and pray. It will be a desperate act, but what's left of Morozova’s journals say it should work. She'll promise she'll fix it all, if only given the chance. She'll make different choices, be a different person than she was. Ravka – no, her Grisha need more Heretics and less Saints. She understands that now.
And then, the Making, aware in a way she didn't know it could be, just as desperate as she is, will wrap itself around her, leaving just a little bit of itself behind. Do you promise, it will ask.
I promise, she'll answer.
There will be a flash, not unlike the ones she used to tear down the Fold and create the Golden Wastes. And then, she'll open her eyes, back in the body of a child, staring up at Anya Kuya, who is demanding she explain what happened to the potatoes.
Now, it will begin again. And this time, it will go like it was meant to the first time.