Skye is dead.
How she perished is a mystery. All she knows is that she is trapped in After, a makeshift city of souls surrounded by infinite darkness and terrifying monsters that tear ghosts apart.
But while all other ghosts accept the eternity of...
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Scenes melted into each other as time passed before me. I was just an observer with my eyes forcefully glued to a screen while someone else fast-forwarded. The shadow picked through its own memories, showing me only what he needed me to see.
Finally, everything slowed down, and I hovered just behind Blackburne's shoulder as he wandered into the palace, passing by all the hieroglyphs in the entry hall and following the sound of echoing voices. In the rose-colored light streaming from the skylight above, he and I both discovered Tamzi reclined in his throne and looking bored out of his skull while an advisor prattled on about city expansions or something else equally unexciting. To my surprise, he looked way less like Crow and more like a king, wrapped in exquisite red robes lined with gold fringe. Matching ruby earrings dangled from his ears and his hair was tied back in a coiffed chignon. He rested his head on a hand and seemed much more interested in the many jeweled rings on his fingers than whatever the man before him was saying.
Amber eyes accentuated by sharp winged eyeliner came alight when he took notice of Blackburne lingering in the doorway of the throne room. The king's tall golden crown nearly fell off his head when Tamzi sat up and hurriedly waved away his scribes and advisors. "Nymandus!" he greeted. "My friend!"
Blackburne, too, looked nearly unrecognizable. There was the obvious lack of his facial scar, of course, but it was so odd to see him look so...dressed-down. His armor was gone, replaced by a loose-fitting shirt that was laced up in the front and a simple pair of riding breeches. His hair was undone from its usual style. I never realized just how long his nearly lux-red hair was before. But perhaps the most jarring difference was the genuine smile he wore as he approached the king. He clasped a fist over his heart and bowed deeply at the king's feet, saying, "Your majesty."
Tamzi's expression soured. "No need for all that. My name is Tamzi, not your majesty. And I will not have my friends bow." He slid from the throne and ushered the knight to his feet, saying, "Come. Let us go someplace less stuffy. This chair is even more uncomfortable than it looks."
The knight followed the king's flowing robes from the throne room. "How have you been faring?" Tamzi asked as they wandered through a hall of open archways overlooking meticulously manicured sand gardens in the royal courtyard.
"I've been well," Blackburne answered. Then he shrugged. "For a dead man."
Tamzi let out a single breathy laugh at that and leaned against a railing, admiring the courtyard and the city beyond. "Such a lovely sight, no?" he said wistfully.
The knight joined the king and drank in the sight of the bustling black kingdom that thrived beneath a twilight sky swimming with red auroras. A cloud of ibises took wing from the sparkling pools in the palace grounds and flew off into the surrounding desert. In the courtyard below, a lion yawned before returning to its nap in the sunlight. "It is," he said, nearly whispering. "This whole place is unlike anything I've ever seen before. Your Majesty—"
