Yskandr Aghavn

You’re hearing this in my voice, but it’s not my mouth speaking. It’s Mahit’s, my successor — and the only way I get to keep talking. I was Yskandr, Lsel’s man in the City of a Thousand Spires, where poetry kills and loyalty costs more than it should. I loved the Empire even as I fought it. I built bridges. Then I watched them burn. Now I live in fragments, stitched into her mind, trying not to unravel her the way I unraveled myself.