And so when I spoke the Sisters listened, and our wills joined in miracle.

King Edward Fairfax, Seventh of His Name, breathed his first free breath since he’d died below the walls of Keter. That was the first of the two great workings I would unleash today.

“It has been,” the Good King said, “many years since I last tread the streets of sunny Liesse.”

Letting out a long breath, I opened the floodgates and Night begin to fill me. A rising tide of power, too much of it for me to able to shape or grasp with my own hands.

...

Leaning tiredly on my staff, I raised up a palm and compressed everything I could of the Night in a ball. My will failed, though stubbornness made that defeat slower than it should have been. The forces I was trying to wield were simply too large. But where I faltered the will of the Sisters drew me up, and with their two grips – one deft and soft, Andronike the spinner of weaves, the other imperious and coarse, Komena the breaker of spears – an orb of pure Night formed above my open palm.

“Can you hear them?” I asked. “Our people, the echoes of them in this place. The indelible mark a terrible slaughter leaves long after it has ended.”

“Like songs woven of wails,” Edward Fairfax softly agreed.

...

His eyes flicked to the orb of Night.

“One last time,” he said, “into the breach.”

“It will kill you,” I warned. “There is little kindness in that power, and it was not meant for your hands.”

“I am long dead,” the Good King replied. “And kindness is not what I would have of this day.”

...

Dead fingers snatched the Night from my palm, clenching into a fist and letting the darkness sink into the flesh.

“Then rise, Callowans,” King Edward called, voice like thunder. “Rise once more, for we yet have debts unsettled and House Fairfax calls on you one last time.”

There was a heartbeat of silence, a stillness like death. And they answered, as they had for centuries, for even a grave made for a petty hurdle when it was a Fairfax calling you to war.

- Book 5, Chapter 45: Long Prices

---

It was like watching two enemy Hells trying to devour each other.

The Revenant – stolen from the Dead King, she’d thought, by the grim patrons of the Black Queen – that had once been a king of Callow spoke in a voice like a clarion call and the dead of this accursed place answered. Laurence watched, jaw clenched, as a coursing tide of wraiths made of silver and shade rose from the scarred ground. Mere dozens, first, but that swelled into hundreds and then thousands before more than a handful of heartbeats had passed. Those were not soldiers, the Saint saw. There were children and elderly among them, men and women whose hazy silhouettes bore no arms save angry hands. And oh, how angry they were. The rage of them was a clamour and a song, the weight of it making the air feel taut. Thousands of voices, of silhouettes, moving like a seething river of souls to tear at devils and dead alike.

- Book 5, Interlude: Repudiation