This Woven Kingdom(This Woven Kingdom #1)(5)
And then, a hand.
His hand, conjured from a curl of darkness. He was looking straight into her eyes when he dragged a vanishing finger across her lips.
She screamed.
In the Beginning
THE STORY OF THE DEVIL had worn thin in the retelling, but Iblees, Iblees, his true name like a heartbeat on the tongue, was lost to the catacombs of history. His own people knew best that the beast was wrought not from light, but fire. Not angel, but Jinn, an ancient race who’d once owned the earth, who’d once celebrated this young man’s extraordinary elevation to the heavens. They knew best whence he came, because they were there when he was returned, when his body cracked against the earth and their world was left to rot in the wake of his arrogance.
Birds froze when his body fell out of the sky, their sharp beaks parted, broad wings pinned open in midair. He glistened in his descent, flesh slick with fresh melt, heavy drops of liquid fire rolling off his skin. His drippings, still steaming, would hit the earth before his heft would, disintegrating frogs and trees and the shared dignity of an entire civilization who would be forced forever to scream his name at the stars.
For when Iblees fell, so too did his people.
It was not God, but the occupants of the expanding universe that would soon forsake the Jinn; every celestial body had borne witness to the genesis of the devil, to a creature of darkness heretofore unknown, unnamed—and none wished to be seen as sympathetic to an enemy of the All-Powerful.
The sun was the first to turn its back on them. A single wink and it was done; their planet, Earth, was plunged into perpetual night, armored in ice, flung out of orbit. The moon faded next, knocking the world off its axis, warping its oceans. All was soon flooded, then frozen; the population neatly halved in three days. Thousands of years of history, of art and literature and invention: obliterated.
Still, the surviving Jinn dared to hope.
It was when the stars finally devoured themselves, one by one; when land sank and fissured underfoot; when maps of centuries past were suddenly rendered obsolete. It was when they could no longer find their way in the perpetual dark that the Jinn felt truly, irrevocably, lost.
They soon scattered.
Iblees had been charged for his crime with a single task: to haunt forever the dirt forms that would soon crawl out of the earth. Clay—that crude, rudimentary form before which Iblees would not kneel—would inherit the world the Jinn had once owned. Of this, the Jinn were certain. It had been foretold.
When? They did not know.
The heavens observed the devil, the half-life he was forced to live. All watched silently as frozen seas overwhelmed the shores, tides rising parallel to his wrath. With every passing moment the darkness grew thicker, denser with the stench of death.
Without the skies to guide them, the remaining Jinn could not determine how long their people spent compressed under cold and darkness. It felt like centuries but might’ve been days. What was time when there were no moons to mind the hour, no suns to define a year? Time was told only through birth, through the children who lived. That their souls were forged from fire was the first of two reasons any Jinn had survived the infinite winters, the second: that they required only water for nourishment.
Clay shaped itself slowly in such waters, shuddering into a finished form while another civilization died, en masse, of heartbreak, of horror. The Jinn who endured against all odds were plagued always by a rage trapped in their chests, a rage held at bay only by the weight of an unyielding shame.
Jinn were once the sole intelligent beings on Earth; they were creatures built stronger, faster, simpler, and more cunning than Clay would ever be. Still, most had gone blind in the perpetual blackness. Their skin grew ashen, their irises white, stripped of pigment in the dark. In the torturous absence of the sun, even these fiery beings had grown weak, and when Clay, freshly formed, finally stood tall on steady legs, the sun flared back to life—swinging their planet back into focus, and bringing with it a searing pain.
Heat.
It desiccated the Jinns’ unaccustomed eyes, melted the remaining flesh from their bones. For the Jinn who’d sought shelter from this heat, there was hope: with the return of the sun came the moon, and with the moon, the stars. By starlight they navigated their way to safety, taking refuge at the apex of the earth, in a blistering cold that had begun to feel like home. Quietly, they built a modest new kingdom, all the while pressing their supernatural bodies so hard against the planes of space and time as to practically disappear.
It did not matter that Jinn were stronger than the Clay bodies—human beings, they called themselves—that now owned the earth and its skies. It did not matter that Jinn possessed more power and strength and speed. It did not matter how hot their souls burned. Dirt, they had learned, would smother a flame. Dirt would eventually bury them all.
And Iblees—
Iblees was never far.
The devil’s everlasting, shameful existence was a powerful reminder of all they’d lost, of all they’d endured to survive. With profound regret, Jinn surrendered the earth to its new kings—and prayed never to be found.
It was yet another prayer that went unanswered.
Three
ALIZEH SHOVED INTO THE EARLY morning light.
She’d shoved out of bed, shoved on her clothes, shoved pins in her hair, shoved shoes on her feet. She usually took greater care with her toilette, but she’d slept later than she’d intended and had no time to do more than run a damp cloth over her eyes. The finished commission was due for delivery today, and she’d wrapped the glittering gown in layers of tulle, securing the package with twine. Alizeh handled the large parcel carefully as she tiptoed downstairs and, after building the fire in the kitchen hearth, pushed open the heavy wooden door—only to be met with fresh snowfall up to her knees.