súton (n.) twilight; the approach of death or the encroaching end of something significant.

Over the course of the day, the sky had grown darker, painted blue on blue, into deeper and darker shades of night. Now the world had drawn back the veil on Venus; it was strange that the pearly planet should look as red as fiery Mars. They stood out like two red eyes among the night's scattering of starry freckles, tiny scintillas that hinted at some great light lurking beneath the velvety black curtain of the sky. Whenever she looked upon the stars, Jaga Szymańska felt as though she could hear Arsen Grigoryan's voice on the wind – "if they appeared only one night in a thousand years, would we call them magic too?" Every night, these envoys of beauty; Jaga never tired of them.

At the end of that first long night, the night that had been many nights, when she had succeeded in clawing herself free of her monstrous form after inheriting the Moon's curse, she had gazed at the sky, and she had marvelled. Out there, in the wilds, far from humanity, the sky had not been black but purple, and blue, and pink, and swirling with the milky sheen of galaxies beyond their own. She had stared, and she had marvelled. In that moment, she had never felt more human. She had found the constellation that would guide her back to Opona, and she had named each star in its shape on her long walk home, reciting them like a prayer: Esteban. Matthias. Arsen. Oxana. Decebal. Voski….

There had been twelve stars in total, in that constellation. She had named the last two: Dagmara. Kinga.

She suspected Decebal Nicolescu was doing something similar now; after their meeting with the chancellor, the Warriors had wandered until nightfall, having a final coffee at the café on the corner and watching the tram rattle through the street, heaving with human life. Avrova had retreated for a night's sleep shortly before midnight; Kinga had assumed Decebal had followed, but she found him now on the steps to the officers barracks, looking over the spires of the city. There was too much lamplight here to perceive the sky clearly; it was a pale imitation of itself. Jaga did not mention this to Decebal. What good would it have done?

She knew the Chariot heard her approach. It was the click of her crutch; she didn't think she would re-adjust to being bipedal in all the time that was left to her, but she could not muster up resentment about it. She was unwilling to allow it to be otherwise. Even now, she could feel something sleeping inside her, something clawed, something with hooks, something desperate to consume or be consumed. All day and all night, she could feel it turning within her; it was malignant. Sometimes she felt it straining against its prison of bone and sinew, aching to be free; it had a silent voice, like the big hush after a rainstorm, and when she closed her eyes she could see its face, tin-white, like arsenic, its big staring eyes. It was she. She was it. Jaga was the monster, and she was the monster's keeper. She had lost to it her mother's warm brown eyes, her father's sweet smile, the memory of her older cousin's kindness. When she returned in the shape of Jaga, it was flat, diminished – a clawed thing masquerading as the girl she had once been.

It was a masquerade that was well-practiceed. If her ersatz brother could tell that she was moiling now, he made no mention of it. He just gestured to the stars. "Something up there," he said softly, "is so enraptured with starting over that it permits the pain of endings – and all so that we can experience the exhilaration of new beginnings. Isn't that beautiful?"

"Finding religion now, Decebal? Oxana would be pleased."

"Better late than never." In the wan light of the street lamp, she could see quicksilver streaks glimmering beneath his eyes.

"Yes." Jaga smiled. "Better late than never."

He was fading now, faster than Jaga had ever seen him fade before. His dark hair was like the ash of fresh timber, piled into shape – a single movement, and it crumbled, dissipating into the still air. His skin was more like sand now, its structure untenable; she could see his flesh and skin shifting as he moved, a simple turning of his head chipping pieces from his neck like a sculptor at sandstone.

"They'll do a good job," Decebal said. His voice was peaceful. He had always been the most easy-going of them all, willing to give himself up to the wind and go where it willed. "We don't have anything to worry about. They'll do such a good job."

Jaga said, "as we did."

"Yes." Decebal paused. His face was half-formed. His deterioration was the precise opposite from what Klaara's had been; as she had been slowly frozen in place like so much granite, Decebal had crumbled into nothingness before her very eyes. "Didn't we?"

"Of course." Jaga leaned on her crutch. "Don't do the dead the disrespect of doubting our accomplishments." The stars were winking; fading in and out of view, wreathed by grey clouds. "Pity this generation. They have so much to live up to."

"And they will be able?" The skin on his remaining arm was sloughing away, a sheet of dust like might lay upon a shelf left long-undisturbed. Beneath lay, not flesh, but the grey-brown particulate of semi-stone. To look at it was to instantly perceive something unnatural, that which was curse-wrought.

"Some." Jaga thought of the candidates that they had seen ranged on the field earlier that day. Were there any there who could live up to the strength she had seen in her short lifetime? Could soft-figured, sweet-natured Inanna Nirari ever capture the sheer explosive determination of Voski Grigoryan? Could narrow, watchful Ragnar Kaasik ever hope to rival Matthias Kloet's acuity of insight, his incisive mind and wit? Could pale, empathic Zoran Czarnecki adequately replace Avrova Vovk and all the havoc and heartbreak she had wreaked in nine short years as a xrafstar? "But we have not made it easy for them."

She gestured to his scar. He had earned it on Illéa – the first person to reach the island in two hundred years or more. His experiences with the druj had returned him shaken and wide-eyed. Jaga could still remember what he had murmured to Esteban Jiménez as their leader had helped him to his feet: "we are not the only monsters in this world."

"The first Irij on Illéa is not a title easily replicated."

"Irij," Decebal repeated. "Not Kur?"

"Ours is the honour. We fought for the right to call ourselves countrymen." Jaga smiled, but it was a brittle smile. "I'd like to see them try to take it from us."

Decebal had asked such a simple favour of the chancellor: to be buried in a military cemetery as the Warrior he had been, with a headstone that called him what he had always sought to become: a soldier of Irij.

No one in the room had asked if there would be enough of him to bury.

It had been a good request, one denied to so many of their comrades. Oxana had been buried in the woods, hastily and without funeral, for fear that she might bring someone else into the grave with her; Voski had not left a body behind; Alajos had been drawn into the earth without need for funerary rites. Jaga had not even been able to mourn Arsen, as she ought to have mourned him; she had been drawn into her curse, and lost her grief to the simple reality of mindlessness.

She could tell that Decebal was thinking of their comrades - their brothers and sisters - as well. They were not usually a group that allowed sentiment, but with the recklessness of one who knows the hourglass has run dry, he said, "I was so glad to be your friend." He inhaled sharply. "I am so honoured to call you sister."

"I wouldn't have given you up," Jaga said. "For the whole world."

"I'll see you soon," he said, "won't I?"

Jaga said, "there is no place you could go that I would not follow."

They were silent for a long moment.

"I wish I could stay longer," Decebal said. "I wish I could tell them. I wish I could have warned them… I wanted to hold on." His voice cracked. "Jaga, I so wanted to hold on…."

And oh, God, she reached for him, and he reached for her, even as his bones collapsed beneath him and he dropped into dust. He passed through her arms; it was like trying to embrace smoke. There was only his last breath, ghosting warm along her shoulder, and then Jaga stood alone on the street corner, watching the dust twist along the grooves of the cobbles, straining fruitlessly to reach the sky.

Inhaling deeply, her lungs stung with the frost-bitten sting of the night air. She blinked back tears that were not there; she looked down at her hands, and found that they were still hands.

Overhead, the moon was a pale sliver of itself, scythe-sharp. She stared up at it, until it wavered before her eyes, distorted and grew grotesquely large across the galaxies. From behind her, she heard the unmistakeable voice of Matthias Kloet, barely breathed in the dark. "He's gone."

"Yes." She knew that the Hierophant did not need confirmation. He had known this, had hammered it out on his typewriter and left the ink to dry years ago. There was so little Matthias did not know, but there was so much that he did not understand. Even now, if she had asked him when Decebal had died, he might have answered ten years ago or ten minutes from now. The ribbon of time was frayed; it threatened at every other moment to snap.

"A pity," Matthias said. "I always liked Grigoryan." He paused. "Less blood than I expected." He looked back and forth. "I've never seen a Hanged Man go so cleanly."

He had only ever known one Hanged Man, but Jaga did not say this. She just said, "Grigoryan was always neat."

She wasn't sure if he was speaking about Arsen or Decebal now, as Mathias added, "he tried to stay, Jaga."

It didn't matter. It was true for both. He had tried. She knew that he had tried. Hadn't they all? All but Jaga. That was the part no-one understood about the Kur Moon. Her curse did not fate her to death like the others. In the moment, when she lost herself to her curse, it seemed as though it had never been otherwise. She had no desire for it ever to be otherwise. She was it, and it was as it had always been. It was a monster, and, if she let it, it would live as a monster to the end of its days. What reason had it to be otherwise? And life without reason was a peaceful existence.

But Jaga was a Warrior. Her life had never been her own – just as her death had been written for her, just as it had been written for all of them. Matthias' predecessor had left them his notes, in a little bundle tied with string; on Jaga's page, there had been only a single word, slashed in the paper as though by a knife: KINGA. Jaga had no need to fight against her demise; she knew that it would come to her.

She turned to go back into the barracks. As though in farewell, Matthias twisted his gaze upon her. It was a sight familiar to Jaga - he was barely dressed: bare-foot, a shirt lying open over a scarred chest, his hair dishevelled. But his eyes were glacial and unseeing; to him, she might as well have been a ghost. He said, very softly, "do us a favour, Szymańska. Die when you ought."