She came to the peak to ask what her magic was becoming. The witch answered with a hand in her chest — and what walked back down was not what climbed up.
Sylvie and Heyou crossed the last rope bridge to Ygva’s Peak, high over a drop with no bottom to it. The Askavir came back over the peaks as they crossed, and its wingbeats shook the span, and Heyou set each foot down with a maker’s care and did not fall. Midway an eyeless, half-there Ghostly Specter stood in Sylvie’s road; she asked it, courteously, to let her pass, and it stepped aside without malice. Kelun went on ahead to announce them, as though there were forms to be kept. Heyou asked Sylvie what waited at the top. They would be let go, she said, or they would be killed; there was no telling which.
Jamal and Draz had come down on this same mountain when the Askavir dropped them, set apart on it, and had spent the climb seeking each other through the crags; they came on Sylvie and Heyou again at the top just as the witch came for them.
Ygva gave them neither. She came out of the air among them without warning — seven and a half feet of her, and no word of parley — and swept one hand across them, and the breath went out of everyone it reached; only Sylvie, standing apart, was spared. Five misty things rose at her call and struck, and their blows passed through and did nothing. Jamal had the Blessed Branch and threw them to Heyou; Ygva snatched the branches out of the air, and was gone to the high ground with them in her hands.
From above she worked her staff — cloud-alignments, knotwork, the old celestial craft — and cast a moonbeam that found Sylvie and struck her in the heart, precise as a needle. Then she came down to hover over the water before her. Heyou loosed the goblins’ black powder and Draz threw his torch into it, and the blast tore into Ygva and her spirits — and into Sylvie, who dropped, and lay as the dead lie. Ygva looked at Heyou then as though she knew him, and called one of his own lost legs up out of the world; it spun through the air and kicked him in the head. Draz saw Sylvie down and his fear turned to something colder; he climbed for the angle and loosed, and the shot unmade every spirit still standing and opened Ygva’s guard. Jamal struck her with the Guardian's collar, the dead beast’s trophy, and drew blood. It was not enough. Ygva gathered up the senseless Sylvie and vanished with her to a private fire.
Sylvie woke on a padded bedroll with Ygva kneeling over her, tending her like something she meant to keep. And Ygva told her what the world was. It had been an egg, she said — a shell for great things to grow in, that had hatched and gone, and left the rot of an empty shell behind: the dark, the cold, the failing pyres. The gods the others mourned were monsters to her, cosmic horrors that had used the world and abandoned it, and she meant to drag them back down and bind them here. Sylvie’s own magic, she said, was a lure — a light that drew them. She named her of the moon. Then she gave her the choice: give up her Splendor, and go free; or keep it, and be kept, until the binding was done. Sylvie heard ten years of her life folded shut in a sentence, and said so — that she had been thrown back to the beginning again, with nothing to show for the climb.
The others were moving in the dark below. Draz slid closer for a shot; Heyou bound the summoned leg to his back and crept toward the firelight, near enough to see its glow, too far to hear what was said. Jamal tried Kelun for a safe road to the fire, and was told the construct had nothing Ygva wanted just now. Then Draz put an arrow into the quiet of that conversation. Ygva answered it without rising: she drove her clawed hand into Sylvie’s chest and tore the heart out of it, took up the three Blessed Branch — two from Jamal, one from Sylvie — and was gone. The branches were lost, and the heart with them. The thing they had climbed the mountain to win was carried off the top of it in a witch’s fist.
And Sylvie sat up. There was a hole where her heart had been, and she was not dead. Draz backed away from her. She spoke into their minds, quiet and wrong, though her voice had not left her. The magic in her had turned over while it lay there open. She was no different in her craft — the same learning, the same discipline of the tomes — but the well it drew from had changed. Where once she had reached for the residual light the gods left behind, she reached now into the umbral dark; where she had wielded Splendor she wielded Dread, and would heal no longer by giving light but by taking it, the warmth drawn out of other things and into her wound. Heyou found his old leg among the ashes of the fight and had it set back on, and it kept a mind of its own. The mission was failed, the branches gone, the heart gone. She who had climbed the peak to ask what her magic was becoming had her answer now, and it was not sorcery or splendor.