On first approach, the Nenavar Dominion was exactly as the map suggested: an endless array of islands. What it hadn’t shown was how verdant they were, embedded in deep blue waters, like beads of jade scattered carelessly on a bed of sapphire silk. They glowed in the fiery light of the rising sun, beckoning Talasyn closer.
The sheer beauty of it took her breath away.
Growing up on the landlocked Great Steppe, Talasyn had often dreamed of seeing the ocean and had always been hungry for tales of water in such mind-boggling amounts, and fighting for Sardovia had taken her everywhere on the Continent but the coasts, it seemed. When the azure waves first stretched out below her tiny airship in the daylight, completely unimpeded by any form of land whatsoever, it had been a welcome thrill. However, at some point around the ten-hour mark, she’d started to consider that perhaps there was such a thing as too much water.
Still, Nenavar more than made up for the wearisome journey, even just from the air. Its beaches alone were a wonder that Talasyn had never imagined possible: soft and gentle, curling along the blue-green shallows in ribbons of pearlescent sand, dotted with spiky-leaved palm trees that swayed and dropped their round brown fruits in the breeze. The water was so clear that she could see schools of fish darting amidst mossy ochre seagrass and rainbow-hued corals rippling along with the current.
This land, it—it filled something in her. After being both intrigued and curiously unsettled by stories of this archipelago all her life, she had finally reached it: she was soaring over these strange shorelines that glinted like a promise, that felt as though they had been waiting for her.
And then the world turned violet, and in her surprise Talasyn nearly sailed her wasp into the damn ocean.
It began with a shivering at the edges, as though some great hand were tugging at the fabric of reality to expose the bones of aetherspace underneath. The air warped. Plumes of brilliant plum-shaded magic erupted from somewhere in the heart of the archipelago, unfurling over green jungle and white sands and blue waters, setting the sky within a radius of several miles ablaze with its translucent mist that spread above the islands like flickering flames.
Once every thousand years or so, a bright glow the color of amethyst illuminates the horizon, Khaede had said. This, then, was the Fisherman’s Warning that the Sardovian Coast spoke of—and it was a Sever. But for which dimension in aetherspace, Talasyn had no idea. She’d never even heard of violet-hued magic before. When distilled into aether hearts, the Squallfast was green, the Rainspring was blue, the Firewarren was red, and the Tempestroad was white. Each of their Severs were plentiful on the Continent, but there had never been any evidence of a significant presence of their corresponding aethermancers, unlike the Shadowforged and Lightweavers.
Or there might have been, in times past. There was quite a multitude of blank spaces between recorded eras, times from which only the barest scraps of writings or artifacts had been unearthed. Perhaps it was merely lost to history, some great migration of Windcallers and Rainsingers and Firedancers and Thunderstruck, brought about by the power struggles that had plagued the ancient Continent before the Allfold was formed. That alliance had provided only a fleeting dream of peace in the end.
Nonetheless, it was generally accepted that, aside from Enchanters, the Continent had largely only ever been home to Shadowforged, whose Severs were as black as midnight, and Lightweavers, whose Severs were said to resemble pillars of blazing sunlight.
This Sever, here in Nenavar, belonged to a type of magical energy that Talasyn doubted anyone back home knew about. Did that mean that there was a unique breed of aethermancers among the Nenavarene as well? Her curiosity heightened along with the sunrise as she watched from her little airship while the magic unfolded. The amethyst glow was nowhere big enough to be seen from Sardovia, but there were likely several Severs and perhaps they very occasionally discharged all at once, which might have been how the Coast’s tale of the Fisherman’s Warning came about. She wondered what the effects of this new dimension were. Rather than take the form of any particular element—wind or water or fire or storm—it seemed to be pure energy, like the Lightweave and the Shadowgate. Could its aethermancers also craft weapons?
It took a while, but Talasyn finally tore her gaze away from the strange magic and coaxed her wasp into a slow descent. The odd Sever stilled, its violet glow abating, just as she pulled up level several inches above the ocean’s surface.
Talasyn was to take the circuitous route, avoiding the watchful port cities and the main inland roads. She steered clear of the central bulk of the archipelago and into a cluster of outlying islands shrouded in mist that swallowed her wasp whole. For the next several minutes, she flew low over the water, every fiber of her being tense. The rumble of aether hearts was too loud in the silence. She half expected a Nenavarene patrol to catch her or a dragon to swoop down at any moment.
But there was no sign of movement on any of the surrounding islands. None that she could make out through the veils of fog, anyway. And neither Bieshimma nor his crew had spotted any hint of the gigantic fire-breathing beasts that were rumored to prowl the Dominion.
Perhaps the dragons were just a myth. A story to scare off outsiders.
Once Talasyn made it to the shore of the island where the Light Sever was located, she soared higher, sails catching the breeze, avoiding the patchwork of rooftops that indicated villages and the glinting metallic towers that were obviously cities, all nestled amidst clouds of greenery as though they were part of the jungle itself. When she docked her wasp, it was inside a large cave halfway up one of the many rolling mountains—a tight fit, and she estimated that she would have to hike for several hours to reach her destination, but at least it minimized the risk of any Nenavarene coming across an airship of foreign make.
She clambered out of the well and, with the aid of her trusty compass, carefully marked the cave’s location on the map that Bieshimma had provided. Even if she were to reach the Light Sever and successfully commune with it—and that was a big if—she would be in worse trouble if she got lost looking for her only means of escape.
She shoved a generous piece of hardtack into her mouth, chewing perfunctorily before washing it down with a swig from her waterskin. Once the meager nourishment was in her system, she began the long trek.
The miles between the cave and the nexus point were covered in dark green jungle, and the first problem that she ran into was the humidity.
Gods, the humidity.
Although most of Sardovia was cold year-round, Talasyn had spent fifteen years of her life on the Great Steppe, a region of extremes. She was used to the scorching, arid heat of a northern summer, not Nenavar’s damp variety that lay heavy on the skin and filled the lungs even in the dense, overgrown places where sunlight was a distant dream. She’d stripped down to a thin white smock and brown breeches, and she still felt as if she was being crushed in the World-Father’s unwashed armpit, drenched in perspiration and her breath emerging in harsh bursts after five hours’ hiking beneath a canopy of various types of trees that she had no names for. Their branches were draped in profusions of vines that she had to hack her way through with a light-woven cutlass.
The undergrowth contained a host of vegetation that was new to her as well. There were ferns that fanned out in plaited rows along the tree trunks, creeping shrubs whose leaves folded shut when she brushed past them, and plants that dangled red-lipped sacs filled with a clear liquid in which all manner of small creatures drowned. There were black flowers shaped like bat’s wings, yellow petals that looked like frothy trumpets, and enormous velvety blooms speckled white that gave off a foul stench of decaying flesh, making her gag.
The jungle also teemed with insects and birdsong, the branches overhead replete with jewel-scaled reptiles and furry brown things that could have been either rodents or primates skittering out of sight at her approach. There didn’t seem to be another human around for miles.
It was worlds away from Sardovia in every sense.
Talasyn hadn’t objected much to being sent on this dangerous mission because she had another goal—one that she’d kept from her superiors and even Khaede. No one knew about the disquieting sensations that hearing about Nenavar made her feel. No one knew about the uneasy familiarity that she felt for it. She’d set out for the Dominion expecting . . . something. What that something was, she couldn’t rightfully say. She was searching for answers to questions that she couldn’t put into words.
Thus far, however, there didn’t appear to be a lot of answers here. She was tired, coated in grime, and sweating out more water than she could drink without prematurely exhausting her supply.
In the afternoon, Talasyn climbed a tree to work out where she was. The tree looked sort of like an old man, hunched in on itself and covered in wispy leaves, its gnarled branches dripping with aerial roots. The bark was twisted as well, as though made of ropes of wood braided together, and it was riddled with hollows.
With the help of a grappling hook and the juts in the rough, thick trunk that served as natural footholds, it was an easy ascent, and along the way she encountered dozens more of those furry brown creatures that she realized now were definitely primates, even though they were no bigger than her palm. Most fled, but some froze where they clung to the branches with elongated digits and watched her guardedly through round golden eyes that took up nearly all of the space in their tiny skulls.
“Don’t mind me,” Talasyn huffed as she scrambled past three of the creatures. “Just passing through.”
These were the first words that she’d spoken out loud to another living thing in over a day. Far from being honored, though, the three little rat-monkey-things chittered indignantly and—disappeared.
There was no fanfare to it. One moment they were there and the next they were gone.
They had probably just scurried into the leaves too quickly for her to catch, but the overall impression was that they had willed themselves out of existence to avoid her talking to them any further.
“Story of my life,” Talasyn muttered.
By her reckoning, the tree was four hundred feet tall. When she hoisted herself onto one of the uppermost branches and broke through the jungle canopy, it was to the sight of this foreign wilderness spread out all around her in ridges that were carpeted a deep, dense green. The pale blue silhouettes of even more mountains loomed in the distance, wreathed in fog. Flocks of birds soared past her perch, their plumage splashed with every bright hue imaginable, their tailfeathers streaming out behind them like sprays of aether, filling the air with the flutter of iridescent wings and the mellifluous lilt of a song like glass chimes.
The wind blew cool on Talasyn’s face, a staggering relief from the humidity. It carried with it the scents of rain and sweet fruit. It carried memory on its monsoon currents, vague and fleeting but enough to make her tighten her grip on the branch for fear that she might fall from how it made her reel.
I’ve been here before. The notion took root in her mind and it refused to let go. I know this place. Images and sensations raced through her in a tumultuous stream, swiftly shifting, ever shapeless. But she thought that she could grasp—
Rough hands on her face. A city of gold. A woman’s voice telling her, I will always be with you. We will find each other again.
Wetness spattered Talasyn’s cheeks. At first, she assumed that the rains had come, but, when the liquid dripped in through the corner of her mouth, it tasted like salt. She was crying for the first time in years. She was crying for something she couldn’t name, for someone she couldn’t remember. The wind rustled through the swaying treetops and it whisked her tears away.
I’m sitting in a tree in the middle of the jungle and sobbing, she thought mournfully. I am the most ridiculous person alive.
Then there was a sound like thunder. A pillar of light rose up from one of the northern peaks. It suffused the jungle canopy with golden radiance, a firebrand so bright that it was almost solid, rippling with threads of silver aether as it shot toward the sky.
Talasyn stared at the conflagration, her heart pounding. The Light Sever beckoned to her; it called to something in her blood. She nearly cried out in protest when it vanished, the pillar swirling and crackling with renewed intensity before it finally winked out of existence and left no sign that it had ever been there at all.
She began clambering down the tree. She vowed that she would find out why Nenavar felt so familiar. The answer was here, somewhere. It was within her reach.
But first things first—she had to get to the Light Sever.
It rained in the late afternoon, a deluge that turned the ground to mud. Talasyn sought shelter in another old-man tree, tucking herself into one of its many hollows with her legs curled against her chest.
She dozed in that position while waiting for the downpour to subside. It could hardly have been helped; she hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep since she left the Wildermarch. She dreamed of Hornbill’s Head again, and of the stormship that had taken everything, although she hadn’t had much to begin with. This time, at the end of the dream—when the hurricanes had shattered all the wooden bridges, when the grasslands had reclaimed the city and dust had flooded through its ruins—there was a woman, holding her close, stroking the back of her head, telling her that things would be all right and she had to be strong.
The woman in the dream called Talasyn by another name. One that wasn’t hers, one that faded from her memory as soon as she woke up, along with the woman’s face.
Talasyn’s eyes flew open. The rain had stopped, and the jungle was damp and drowsy in the twilight. She eased out of the hollow and resumed her trek, conscious of how much time she’d wasted. Her every step vibrated with nervous energy as she tried to recall more details from her dream.
Was the woman the same person whose voice had come rushing back to her on the crests of the Nenavarene wind? Who had touched her face with rough hands?
And what about that city of gold? She’d never been to any such place as she’d glimpsed amidst those wild monsoon currents. Why had her mind’s eye afforded her that image only now? Had it been a city here, within the borders of the Dominion?
There was a part of her that fled from that thought the moment it surfaced. It filled her with fear, because she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone . . .
Tell anyone what?
If they found out, she would be hunted.
No, that was what Vela had told her, about being a Lightweaver.
Right?
“I’m going mad in this heat,” Talasyn said, because she was apparently in the habit of talking to herself now. “Absolutely stark raving.”
The jungle was gradually plunged into darkness. The trees grew close together here, and not even the seven moons could penetrate their leafy roof. Talasyn’s light-woven cutlass now served to illuminate her path in addition to slicing through the vines that blocked it. She had hoped to catch a break from the sweltering heat by nightfall, but no such luck. The evening was muggy, sticking to her form in moist, warm sheets.
But she pressed on, deeper into the damp jungle. She could feel the Light Sever. The nearness of it.
As the ground sloped steadily uphill, the cutlass in her hand burned ever brighter, as though the magic that she had coaxed into this shape was being amplified tenfold. A strange taste blossomed on her tongue, weighty and metallic like ozone, or blood. Thorny shrubs scratched at her arms as she quickened her pace, but she paid the shallow cuts no mind. There was power here, old and vast, overwhelming her senses until she felt drunk with it, her skin prickling with goosebumps and her heart thundering against the bones of her ribcage, until, at last—
She gave a start of confusion and disbelief when the jungle parted to reveal a shrine. Perhaps one like those that Lightweavers had built all over Sunstead. And, just like those, it was in ruins. It looked as if it had been in ruins for centuries. Moss-covered slabs of sandstone jutted out haphazardly from the riotous undergrowth, their rough edges catching the moonlight. There were no signs of life.
Had Nenavar’s Lightweavers suffered the same fate as the ones on the Continent? Had they all been eradicated?
Talasyn cautiously walked beneath a vine-entangled, half-toppled entrance arch and down a cracked passageway lined by pillars etched with intricate reliefs that she would otherwise have paused to examine, but she was focused on the nearby nexus point. Its pull on her soul was magnetic. It called to her like the monsoon winds.
The shrine was vast. A complex rather than a single building: snaking halls and rubble-strewn chambers, the doors of which had collapsed long ago. She negotiated her way through the debris and stepped out into a courtyard the size of a stormship hangar. It was open to the sky but already reclaimed by the wilderness, dozens of those enormous old-man trees having anchored themselves firmly in what was left of the stone facade, their thick roots and myriad grasping arms choking out the paved floor and the surrounding walls and rooftops. The seven moons circled the heavens, raining down a light that was as bright as day.
She ventured further in. At the center of the courtyard, amidst the tangle of shrubs and tree roots and overgrown grass, stood an enormous fountain, which was the only structure that appeared untouched by the passage of time and whatever destruction had befallen the complex. It was carved from sandstone, built around a depression in the flooring as wide as several trees clumped together, its spouts fashioned to look like snakes—or maybe dragons, she realized as she peered at it more closely.
This was undoubtedly the location of the Light Sever. Talasyn’s every instinct screamed that it was so. The magic sang to her veins from behind the veil of aetherspace. She just had to wait for it to break through again.
“There you are,” a familiar voice rasped behind her. The unmistakable shriek of the Shadowgate flaring to life shattered the still air.
Talasyn didn’t freeze even as the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t waste a single second, transmuting her cutlass into a poleaxe and spinning on her heel, leaping straight at the tall figure clad in black and crimson standing several paces away. Her wide blade caught in the prongs of a shadowy trident, light to darkness, the resulting sparks glinting off Alaric Ossinast’s narrowed silver eyes and his obsidian mask carved into a wolf’s fanged snarl.
They’d met like this on the ice floes a fortnight ago, and he’d been a tight coil of menace and determination while she had been scared out of her wits. But this time was different—this time, she wasn’t afraid.
This time, she was angry.
Talasyn set upon the Kesathese prince in a barrage of short, quick strikes that drove him backward even as he deflected with masterful swiftness. She was hoping to corner him against one of the pillars, but he managed to sidestep around her, bringing the trident down over her shoulder. She slanted her own weapon at a defensive angle, and her teeth rang from the force of his blow.
“You’ve been practicing,” he told her.
She blinked at him through the haze of their intersected magic.
“There is some improvement in your combat technique, I mean,” he clarified.
“I know what you meant,” she snapped. “Do you make it a habit to compliment everyone who’s trying to kill you?”
“Not everyone.” His eyes flashed with a hint of amusement. “Just you. And that was hardly a compliment—I’m merely relieved that you’re much more interesting to duel now.”
She pushed against him with a newfound burst of strength, sparked by her ire, and she managed to slip free of the blade-lock. Once more they waltzed, in flashes of gold and midnight, over the stone and the roots, through the warm moonlit evening.
Talasyn didn’t want to think about how she was almost enjoying this. There was something to be said about letting her magic run free in this wild and ancient place. There was something to be said about testing her mettle against a man like Alaric, and making him break a sweat even as she fought for her life.
But she wasn’t supposed to be feeling anything remotely close to enjoyment. He was in her way; he was wasting her time.
Their weapons caught and held once more.
“How are you even here?” she demanded. She wasn’t enthused about how shrilly the words emerged from her lips, but she was so annoyed with him. And he was standing incredibly close to her. “How did you find me?”
“You have a traitor in your ranks.” He said it matter-of-factly, and that was somehow so much worse than if he’d been smug. “Your people are switching sides because they know that the war is already lost.”
“Calm down, it was only one person,” she retorted even as she wondered with no small amount of alarm who it could be. Someone close to Bieshimma or the Amirante, no doubt, for them to know about her mission and to have acquired a copy of the map— but she would deal with that later. She had to finish this first. The fact that Alaric had allowed such information to slip meant that he didn’t intend for her to make it back to the Continent and alert her superiors. She was going to enjoy foiling that particular plan of his.
Talasyn kneed Alaric in the stomach, taking advantage of his momentary falter to put some distance between them, couching her limbs into a two-handed guard with her blade held to the right side of her body.
“I must admit that I went too easy on you, back on the lake.” Alaric assumed an opening stance of his own, the hilt of the trident angled to the ground, his feet closely spaced. “You have proven to be far too much trouble. Consider my misplaced compassion formally rescinded.”
“You and I have very different definitions of compassion.”
When they crashed into each other again, it was vicious and relentless, both of them going straight for the kill with each strike. The shrine’s ancient stone foundations shook and the jungle was ablaze with sound and fury. When they skidded apart after another exchange of blows, Alaric’s gauntleted hand stretched out and unleashed tendrils of the Shadowgate to constrict around Talasyn’s waist, lifting her off her feet and hauling her toward the screeching edges of the trident. Summoning all of her strength, she twisted her body in midair so that she slammed into him instead; his weapon and the crackling tendrils vanished as he landed hard on the floor of the courtyard, flat on his back with her straddling his hips, her poleaxe transmuting into a dagger that she held to his throat.
“Who is the traitor?” she growled.
Alaric’s fingers twitched. With a mighty groan, the tree looming over them from one of the rooftops was ripped apart by splinters of shadow magic. What was left of the trunk came toppling down over their heads, and Talasyn instinctively made to get out of the way—but, the moment the dagger was lifted from his neck, Alaric surged upwards, rolling her over and to the side. The light-woven dagger disappeared from her grasp and the ground shook as the dislodged tree slammed into the spot where they had been a scant half-second ago.
Now the one on her back, Talasyn glared up at the impassive, half-shrouded face above her. “You could have killed us both!”
“Given our respective objectives, it would probably save a lot of time if we died together,” Alaric mused.
“You talk too much.” Her fingers scrabbled over the stone tiles as she readied to conjure another weapon, but he was having none of it. He pinned her wrists to the floor with heavy hands, the sharp points of his clawed gauntlets raking into her skin.
And then the Lightweave . . . left. It fled from Talasyn’s veins. That was the only way to describe it, the sudden absence akin to the immediate ringing stillness after a door had been slammed shut. Inside her there was—nothing. Absolutely nothing.
“What was that?” Alaric hissed, his body tense and strained on top of hers. “Why can’t I . . . ?”
The ability to open the Shadowgate had apparently left him, too. Talasyn opened her mouth to issue some form of snappy retort, to rail at him for ruining everything and for being a blight on her existence and on the world at large. At that precise moment, however, a smattering of footsteps reverberated throughout the courtyard.
“On your feet!” a stern masculine voice commanded. “Slowly. Hands up where we can see them.”
The words were in Sailor’s Common, the trade language that the Continent had made its mother tongue centuries ago, but it was in a thick accent that Talasyn had never heard before. The light of the seven moons shone down on thirty armored figures that had, unnoticed by either Talasyn or Alaric, come swarming out of the ruins to surround them, taking careful aim with long iron tubes that had triangular handles and some form of trigger apparatus. More than a few soldiers were carrying what looked like metal birdcages on their backs, strapped to their shoulders and waists.
There was a gaping hole in Talasyn’s soul where the Lightweave used to be. She and Alaric extricated themselves from each other and stood up. She would have shoved him away from her in a fit of sheer pettiness if instinct hadn’t warned that any sudden movements would be ill-received. “If we manage to get out of this alive, I’m going to wring your neck,” she promised him.
“If,” he emphasized crisply.
Talasyn calculated the odds of her being able to fight her way out of this. She couldn’t aethermance for some reason, but she had her bare fists, her teeth. Eventually, she had to concede that there were too many soldiers and she didn’t know what those iron tubes did, what they were capable of. They reminded her of cannons, a little, but—handheld cannons?
The Nenavarene who’d ordered her and Alaric to their feet stepped forward, allowing Talasyn to get a closer look at his armor. It was a combination of brass plate and chainmail, the cuirass embellished with lotus blossoms wrought from what appeared to be genuine gold. Its wearer was lean, with the calm, authoritative demeanor of a distinguished officer, a graying undercut, and dark eyes that stared at Talasyn—
—at first with anger, and then with some combined shard of recognition and disbelief, and then with a sorrow that made her skin prickle.
The officer shook his head and muttered something to himself in a language that Talasyn could not parse but was unsettlingly familiar to her ears all the same. He raised his voice and issued a clipped order to his troops.
Streams of violet magic shot out of the iron tubes. The same magic that Talasyn had witnessed flaring from a nexus point earlier that day, but paler, more subdued. At the corner of her eye, she saw Alaric crumple to the ground and she moved to dodge, to fight back, but the barrage emanated from all sides. She felt lit from within by a rush of heat and static as several beams collided with her form, and then—
—darkness . . .
