Chapter I

The moon scowled purple through thick gouts of smoke. Into the sky they poured their choking fumes, smothering the hillside, the trees, the mountain itself. Beneath it all—flames—a sullen orange line that deepened into a pulsing smolder of crimson. An animal shriek lanced through the night, for a moment clear and present, racing ahead in terrorized flight. It echoed ever fainter, swallowed by the haze, and fell silent. The great blackened lunar eye glared on, over river and grass and all of the wide plateau.

Askon walked the familiar ribbon of river, its waters rippling, twisting—for once not silver in the night’s light but smudged sanguine and ochre, obscene shapes roiling and lurid on its surface. He checked his stride, almost turned to meet the suffocating malice of the moon. Almost.

Instead, he blinked hard and felt the cold sharp edges of the thing he carried, felt its facets, imperfect as they were and perfect as they were. The space of a breath had him squeezing through pain until, fingers lined with blood, he tucked it back inside his cloak; a tattered wrapping for a broken thing. Behind him the fire raged, for a moment dimming the moonlight and washing the clouds in yellow-gray and veiny black.

Askon felt the wind’s hot breath against his face, heard it rush over his ears and howl down the river. He took a step, felt his back grow warm, took another, the blaze so bright it seemed to set the stream itself aflame. Now he was running. Panting against the wind, pelting over stony bank and sparkling grass. His cloak whipped behind him, hands red with blood, lungs burning; he ran though he had nothing and no one, only the moon, and the fire, and the river unending.

A loose stone turned underfoot and his legs gave way. He was crawling now, scrabbling, clawing wildly as the smoke engulfed him. The wind roared, the flames lapped like waves, like tide.

Then the world grew still. A silence fell upon him, all the deeper for its contrast to the inferno. He stood, his last breath searing his insides like light and flame and fear. Had he not felt smooth stone under his feet, he’d have been certain of his own death, certain the fire had taken him. Instead, he stepped forward, slow and silent. He dared not look back, walking on and on, the world turning, rolling, spinning beneath him. He traveled a thousand miles in a step, a thousand thousand in ten, and finally stood at the edge of it all, where the water leapt into the sky and fell uncountable miles more.

There, far below the pool of stars and glittering mist, was Thomas. He lay empty-eyed and dead. Broken and pleading. Bound and struggling. Beating the doors of his cell. Cast there, neither furious nor stoic, staring up through the ceiling into watchful half-elven eyes—one green and one brilliant blue. Askon flung himself over the edge into darkness.


They were both awake already, his sister and the shell that had once been Thomas’s wife. And now so was he. He shook the dream fog away, trying to forget his friend’s face. But whether he closed his eyes or opened them, it stared back in all its forms at once.

“A dream?” asked Líana quietly.

Askon nodded and turned his gaze on Elise. She hunkered, rocking forward and back, arms encircling her knees, staring through her curtain of black hair down at the lights spread across the caldera.

“We’ll find him,” Askon said.