Dawnbringer.
It was both a naming and a benediction.
It was her first incarnation as a creature of the mortal plane, never remembered until now. Dawnbringer-her purpose to bring hope and justice, like the new sun spilling light at the edge of a darkened world.
Lakini could name her faces. Lakini. The one who had no name but was known as the Lady of the Sparrows. One of her rare male incarnations. Pashia the Golden.
Dawnbringer.
A thick mist clouded the edge of her vision, bright and shot through with silver. She blinked, but the mist didn’t go away, spreading instead and obscuring the faces so that one by one they faded away.
There was a great weight on her chest-not on, not exactly, but inside it, pressing against her heart. Beat by beat the flow of blood through her veins slowed. The pressure would have been painful if not for the warmth and lassitude that served as a drug, numbing all sensation.
She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, knowing that as she exhaled, the mortal components of her body would dissolve, each tiny particle returning to the bosom of the land she’d wandered for so long. Like all things living and unliving beneath the sun and moon of Faerun, she was composed of star-stuff, and as a dying star she would scatter for a time before being remade as something, someone else.
Everything changes. Everything dies. She had been an instrument of that cycle of killing and dying often enough to know. Dying, she remembered Wolfhelm and the smith.
There was a smell like gangrene in the smith’s small neat hut behind the smithy. His eyes were yellow, and thick black hair had sprouted all over the arm that had been bitten.
She sat by him a long time as he tossed and cried out in his sleep. At one point his lips drew back, and she saw long yellow canines were sprouting from his gums, over his normal, human teeth.
He lunged at her and snapped. She drew back just in time.
Jonhan opened his eyes and looked up at her, startled. Lurid yellow eyes looked back into her gray ones.
Her voice was gentle. “How do you feel?”
“Terrible,” he said. “But I was dreaming, and that felt good.”
“What did you dream?”
He grinned wolfishly. “Killing. Eating.” He looked startled at his own words.
“Killing what?”
“Rosebud. You. Everybody. All meat. All rabbits to be eaten.” He drew a great, shuddering breath, then looked at her, stricken by what he said. “You’re going to have to kill me.”
“Yes,” she said, and then, “Are you ready?”
He swallowed. “Yes. Can you make it quick?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You’ve done this before.”
“Yes,” she said, drawing her dagger.
Outside, the donkey’s braying sounded like weeping.
Lakini was floating in the warm waters, each ripple moving her body as if she were composed of water herself. This is death, she thought. It’s not familiar to me, although I’ve done it before.
Something tugged at her right wrist. She ignored it, and it tugged again, insistent.
Blinking her eyes open, she looked down at it and frowned.
There was no sea, no feeling of peace and contentment. Pain lanced through her again. She sprawled against a tree in the middle of the dark woods, cold and alone. The bracelet around her wrist tightened again and, as she watched, one end of it uncoiled from the rest, reared snakelike, and jabbed the skin of her palm.
It wasn’t painful, but her body jerked against it. She no longer felt as if she were dissolving. She was all too corporeal.
A voice, clear and implacable, came from the center of her being.
Your work is not done here.
Let me go, she thought, despairing.
Your purpose is unfulfilled. You must remain.
Reborn, she would be whole again, an unblemished weapon ready to do the will of the gods. She would remember nothing of the sanctuary, of the Houses of Beguine and Jadaren, of Kestrel or the Rhythanko. She might remember Lusk, even if he took a new form. She knew that the beings that were Lusk and Lakini had found each other again and again over the centuries, bound together in a time mortals would consider ancient.
Lusk … He had tried to kill her, at the behest of something outside them both. She knew, with a wisdom older than her Lakini body, that Lusk had begun to walk apart from the path of his deva nature long ago.
Should Lusk die, he would not return as a deva, but as a rakshasa, a tiger-demon, his outer form betraying what his inner nature had become.
If she denied her rebirth, would she take the first fatal step off that path, condemning herself as well?
Outside her, the Astral Sea called on her to let all go, to dissolve. The voice inside her called on her to remain. Lakini herself was trapped between them.
I must decide.
Another vision came to her, this one not of her past lives or the dwelling places of the gods. This was a mortal face; Kestrel’s face, with nothing divine about it. It was a human face, touched with the hands of time.
The thing on her wrist moved again. If she had had the strength to pry it away and cast it aside, she would have.
No. It was too much. She took everything that remained to her and flung it at the cosmos. No!
The cosmos struck back with a flash of white light. It erased all her senses. She was blind, deaf, paralyzed. Nothing existed but the light.
Then, slowly, she was aware of her body again. There was no pain. She lay half-curled on her side. She had a sense of a circular chamber, of huge, hand-wrought stones, and of powerful presences standing around her.
She should get up; she knew it. But she couldn’t, whatever the consequences.
One of the presences reached out and touched her mind. It felt cold, slightly alien, but it spoke to her gently.
What are you doing, child? By now you must have learned to accept death.
I have unfinished business here. Even to her, Lakini’s thought sounded childishly stubborn. Well, let it be so.
This body is finished, and so, too, all business it may have.
I … do not agree.
It cannot be that you refuse your reincarnation.
But I do.
She heard another thought-voice, imperious and impatient.
You dare contend that a few mortal creatures and their concerns are more important than the will of the gods? More important than the purpose for which you were created? A deva is more than herself. In you is contained the entire nature of life, death, and rebirth. In shedding your body and its wants, desires, and histories, you symbolize that everything can become pure again. Denying this is blasphemy.
Let her refuse, and so cease.
This voice came from something that seemed to coil through the air like thick, greasy smoke, overpowering the senses. It was amused, taking satisfaction in her distress.
She will dissolve into the aether, and it will be as if she never was, all her lambent memories fading. There was an underlying hunger to the voice. If that’s what she wishes, let it be.
She felt it pressing into her, as if it would crush her in its coils. Then something broke it apart, as a fresh breeze clears a smoky room. Lakini felt the new entity kneel beside her and touch her hair gently. She had a sudden vivid impression: green eyes in a pale face, with hair the color of sunset.
Lady, she thought at the entity. The human woman has lost everything she loved. Does that count for nothing?