And for the lead itself to have survived intact to hit the wall as well?

That couldn’t happen.

These musket balls were his own. These were the musket balls that had been in his pistols that night. He couldn’t deny that. But these musket balls hadn’t torn through a body—much less bone—before hitting the wall.

Impossible.

Gavin couldn’t be alive. Dazen hadn’t missed. Couldn’t have.

But that was the only possible answer. Wasn’t it?

Did his father know even Dazen’s musket-ball-casting method? It was possible, but why?

“Oh, my dear Black Prism,” the dead man said. “You can’t say you weren’t warned. So tragic. And the perfect Guile memory is such a special thing, is it not? You did this to yourself. You knew the risks, but you couldn’t help but draft black, could you? Black, the color of… Say it.”

Gavin’s mind went many places at once.

He was standing on the beach with the Third Eye.

He was standing in the hot, smoking ruins of Sundered Rock.

He was standing in front of his mother, after returning from the war, with his brother unconscious in a trunk right behind him, telling her No, no, he was dead. He didn’t suffer.

“Say it,” the dead man said.

Gavin said, “Black is the color of oblivion. Black is the color of death. Black is the color… of…”

‘You didn’t spare Gavin out of pity,’ the Third Eye had said to him. And then she said, ‘Does the man who killed his brother expect the truth to be easy?’ He’d interpreted her words to be wry; he’d thought there must have been a little stress he missed in the moment: ‘Does the man who “killed his brother” expect the truth to be easy?’

But there had been no wink or smile or nudge. Had there?

She had known how he would take those words at the moment, hadn’t she? But she had also known that he would later remember those words. That was why she had been so very precise, so that without her lying to him, he could continue to delude himself until it was time to stop deluding himself.

“Tell me,” the dead man said. “When did your nightmares about your brother stop?”

“Around the time I killed him.”

“No, Dazen. That’s when they began.”

No. Impossible. The dreams about his brother’s escaping his prisons had begun right after the war ended, right after Sundered Rock. They had stopped only recently.

“Because…” the dead man said, as if leading a very stupid pupil to an obvious truth, “because black is the color of…”

“Of madness,” Gavin said hollowly.

“Dazen, Gavin has been dead seventeen years. He was never imprisoned. You killed him at Sundered Rock.”

“That’s not… that’s not…” Gavin felt suddenly lightheaded. The tightness in his chest returned. He fell to the floor.

“All your contortions and striving have been to hide a man who wasn’t there. Did you think it was a coincidence that as you lost blue, you dreamed of him breaking out of your blue prison? That as you lost green, he broke out of green in your dreams? The black luxin hell you brought to earth at Sundered Rock killed one man, but it destroyed two. Do you remember the bowl in the blue prison? And the cloth woven of human hair?”

Gavin remembered.

“How would you remember that? He never told you about it. He hid it from you.”

“I must have discovered them when I went through that cell.”

“Where was it when you were in the blue cell just weeks ago?”

“It must have been repaired.”

“Your father bothered to repair a slight depression in luxin more than a foot thick? And reset the trapdoor? And he repaired the green chamber? And somehow he didn’t repair your trap in your work chamber where the rope didn’t burn properly? And he cast new musket balls, all to make you think now… after all this, that you’re mad? Does that sound like your father’s work? Gavin was never here. It was always you, it was always only you.”

“And if I couldn’t know any of that stuff about him, how could you? I know these cells aren’t connected. I know it’s will-castings that I did. How could you know any of this?” Gavin asked.

“We know, Dazen, because you came down and raved to us. Told us why it had to be this way. I, for one, always figured that the truth was, you made this prison for yourself. Surrounded by problems too big for you, you made a problem small enough for you to handle.”

Dazen felt the tightness increasing in his chest. He remembered, as in a dream, coming down here that fateful night. He opened the yellow chamber and thought of closing himself inside. He argued with himself, aloud. There was no one here but his reflection, his own image crafted so carefully to look like a dead man, his brother.

The dead man laughed. “Come now, think of it! Did you really think that after Sundered Rock you were able to stuff your brother in a box, and keep him alive but drugged for the whole journey home, and bring him into the Chromeria—and no one ever noticed?! You had a box that you wouldn’t let the servants touch. Do you think they wouldn’t tell your father and mother about such a thing? Do you think your father and mother didn’t break into it immediately?”

There had been a chest. He opened it in his memory, and this time, overlaid on the phantasmal image of his brother unconscious, he could finally see the truth. Inside the chest had been a spear of living black luxin. Black luxin he’d drafted himself.

It was the implement he’d drafted in those last desperate moments at Sundered Rock, the weapon with which he’d killed his brother. Beautiful and terrible as the night sky devouring itself unto eternity.

He’d carved the cells out of the Chromeria’s heart with that spear, cutting through rock and the old bones of buried drafters and the luxin encased in their bodies with equal ease, until it too had failed, and broken apart into ten thousand pieces of hellstone.

The ten thousand pieces that he had then used in crafting the tunnels themselves.

How else could he have stolen such a kingdom’s fortune’s worth of hellstone without his father’s noticing?

But what would his mother have done if she’d found that spear straight from hell in his belongings, still smeared with his brother’s blood?

She would have wept, and prayed, and waited, and hoped that her last son would come back from his madness. She would have been gentle, and patient, and protective. As she had.