“I’m sorry, Ye Eun. He’ll be fine after a while. Don’t worry.”

“I never listen when big people say that. ‘Don’t worry.’ As if they know. As if they can protect you from anything.” The child watched me for a moment, taking in my tense shoulders and swollen eyes—and her hard expression softened. “Sometimes when I think of the Underworld, I scream for hours and hours. I have to. I can’t do it in front of the little ones, but when it gets bad—I go to the shrine.” She pointed through a window up to a stony, overgrown path that crept into the woods behind the house. “It’s old. Traitor Prince says shamans built it centuries ago. It’s meant for prayers, but when I cry … I don’t think the Storyteller minds.”

I nodded. “I don’t think so either.” And since my numb feet had nowhere else to go, they left the house, turned, and crept up the path.

Wind chimes echoed through the trees. Bits of color flashed, crystals hanging high above in the branches. They must have been tied decades before, when the skyscraping trees were close to the ground. The chimes grew in volume until the path finally ended, and I arrived at a lean-to with a peeling green roof, overgrown with vines. Stacks of smooth boulders marked the remains of a shaman’s meditation garden. A mysteriously clean marble altar rested beneath the lean-to, and fading on the rotting green overhang was a mural: the Pelican of Am, splaying its wings.

I fell to my knees. Dew seeped through my trousers. I felt suffocated—trapped in a cage with no walls, stretching to the cloudy Songland sky. I had failed Aritsar. I had failed Dayo. And now, I would fail Ye Eun, Ae Ri, and countless others as well.

Monsters were nothing. The true terrors were people like me—the ones who saw suffering, who heard the screams of a hundred generations echoing for miles around them—and still did nothing.

Chimes jangled in the trees overhead. A delicate breeze rattled the shrine, and for a moment, the pelican’s eyes seemed to flash.

“It’s never enough,” I told the mural. “The ones I save won’t outnumber the people I’ve hurt. Not in ten years. Not in a hundred. Or a thousand …” The damp carpet of pine needles looked suddenly inviting. My voice slipped away to a whisper as I sank to the ground, resting my cheek by a mound of stones.

Hours could have passed, or minutes. I neither knew nor cared. The chimes grew louder and distorted, and with the growing cold, a new kind of sleep spread through my body: the kind from which many winter travelers have never woken up.

But before my mind could slip beneath that cold, still pool forever … Something glowed from the shrine. A pulse of heat rolled over me in waves, like the gale of an enormous creature beating its wings.

Then a tritoned voice—not old or young, not male or female, but warm as the sun on a clear savannah morning and resonant as a griot’s drum.

Do not ask how many people you will save. Ask, To what world will you save them?

The voice, soft and calm, seemed to fill all of Sagimsan Mountain.

What world, Wuraola, is worth surviving in?

Then I woke, alone.

The chimes were silent as I sat up, and pine needles fell from my hair as I blinked dazedly. Gold streaked across the sky. The morning had aged to afternoon—mere hours between now and sunset.

I turned up the path and ran. I did not stop to wonder why my cloak was warm as a brazier, instead of damp from dew. I did not question why my limbs were lithe and swift, instead of rigid with the forest’s chill. I did not ask myself if the tritoned voice had been real or a dream.

I knew only one thing: A world worth surviving in wasn’t built on the screams of children.

When I returned to the camp, Ye Eun stood on the porch with Ae Ri, watching grimly as I mounted Hyung. “Goodbye,” she said, and did not ask where I was going.

I whispered my destination in Hyung’s ear, and used my thighs to coax the emi-ehran into motion. Then, propelled by the heat of Ye Eun’s gaze on my back, I disappeared down the hillside forever.

Mountain air burned my lungs. My hair swelled in the wind, beating my shoulders in a black cloud as I clung to Hyung’s neck. The emi-ehran bounded down into the Jinhwa Pass, leaving paw-shaped craters in the snow. The storm had stopped; the old magic must have sensed that I was leaving. Still, a white wasteland stretched for miles before us. In the distance, a fortified wall marked the border of the Arit empire, and beyond it, my first lodestone.

The Jinhwa Mountains bordered two Arit realms: Moreyao to the west, and Biraslov to the north. Hyung veered toward the latter, and pale-skinned border guards in fur hats watched in terror as I neared the wall. I flattened myself against Hyung’s sinewy back as arrows sailed past. The guards were too far away to see my council ring—they had taken me for an intruder. But I would not stop. Ducking for cover, I wrestled the crown princess mask from beneath my tunic. Arrows grazed Hyung’s unnaturally thick pelt, glancing off without piercing. Swallowing to moisten my throat, I held out the mask and read its name. I had to believe now. I had to believe what I said, or there was a chance the mask would not listen.

“Iyaloye,” I hollered …

And nothing happened.

No light. No sign. Had it all been a lie? Perhaps Olugbade had been right. Perhaps I didn’t have the Ray, perhaps …

Then I remembered: The Lady was dead.

I put away the princess mask and seized instead the mask of the empress.

“Obabirin,” I yelled as Hyung careened toward the wall. “Obabirin!”

The mask’s eyes flashed, emitting a blinding light that made the guards stagger back.

The stream of arrows ceased. “I am Tarisai Kunleo,” I screamed, heart pounding. “I bear the Ray of Wuraola. Obabirin. Obabirin!”

And Hyung soared through the opening in the border wall.

The lodestone was yards away. Warriors were yelling, running to block our path.

I roared the old Arit word again, and with another flash of light the warriors halted. Hyung leapt over them in a bound that knocked the breath from my chest, and we landed running. A yard more—then another—and with a tremor that shook every bone, we had crossed through the first lodestone.

Through waves of nausea, I smelled the sweet, green perfume of rice fields, and heard new voices cry out in surprise. According to the map in Ye Eun’s schoolroom, I was now at the northwestern tip of Moreyao, and my next lodestone was two miles south. Hyung plowed on, passing fields in a blur, leaping over carts and dodging petrified village farmers. We reached the next port in minutes.

“Obabirin,” I cried, and again we were through.

Balmy sea air. The port had spirited us to the coast of Sparti. My insides threatened to rise up my throat, and against Hyung’s rippling muscles, my ribs had begun to bruise. But there was no time for rest, no time for any thought but forward.

After the fifth crossing, my left hand grew numb. I flexed the fading fingers, willing them back into view as we flew across the foggy moors of Mewe, only to see my thumb disappear when we crossed a lodestone into Nontes. By the eighth crossing into Djbanti, I could not feel either foot, and when I inhaled, my chest shuddered with excruciating pain, as though a lung had gone missing.

Still, Hyung’s paws beat against the ground. What story will you live for? What story do you live for?

The humid air of Quetzalan rainforests washed over me, and my vision swam. It was the thirteenth crossing. “Obabirin,” I croaked as we crashed through the dense brush and vines, narrowly escaping the blow darts of hidden warriors. This time, my voice dissolved into a cough. Something gurgled in my throat. A stream of crimson trickled onto my chin and I wiped it away.

Crossing seventeen hurled me into the spice markets of Dhyrma. I wasn’t sure whom the merchants feared more: the enormous Underworld beast, or its half-vanished rider, with her clothes stained with blood and vomit, and her ghostly hand outstretched, bearing a lioness mask with glowing eyes. Spots began to cloud my vision.

I lost count of the lodestones.

A wall of heat told me I had passed into the Blessid Desert, and the scent of camels and cinnamon reminded me of Kirah. I wondered, dreamily, if I would ever see her face again.

Forward. The red earth and colorful awnings of Nyamba.

Forward. Grass, everywhere, and the distant hum of tutsu. Swana, I realized with a surge of fondness before blacking out again.

When I returned to consciousness, the air hummed with voices. Bodies pressed all around, and above me loomed the smooth onyx face of Enoba the Perfect. A statue in a grand market square.

“I’m here,” I murmured through lips I could no longer feel. Oluwan City—I had made it to the capital. “Dayo. I’m … I’m coming.”