Chapter II
Year 798 B.F. — The Fall
✦ ✦ ✦
Jeze ran. That was all she could do — run and not look back, though the sounds behind her made not looking back an act of will that cost something real. Her sisters were screaming. Not the sharp, sudden scream of surprise, but the sustained kind, the kind that stretched and frayed and eventually stopped in ways that were worse than the screaming itself.
"Help me—" One voice among the others, close enough that Jeze could hear fingernails scraping stone. She didn't stop. She pressed her palms flat against her ears and kept moving, gasping through each breath as though air had become something rationed. He promised, she thought, for the fourth or fifth time, as though repetition might make it retroactively true. He promised no one would be hurt.
She didn't stop.
— ✦ —
The East Wing
Dot jolted upright as hands gripped his shoulders and shook him hard.
"Dot! Wake up!"
He blinked, the room assembling itself slowly around him — the narrow chamber, the single window, the dark — and then Liora's face, too close and too urgent to be a dream. "Liora? What's happening?"
The alarm bells answered for her. They were already ringing when he became aware of them — deep, clanging, relentless — and beneath that, the sound of running feet and voices cutting through stone walls from directions he couldn't place.
"We need to go. Now." Liora grabbed his wrist, then stopped herself. "Ser Rick — get Ser Rick."
The cat, already awake and sitting upright on the windowsill, looked at them both with the composure.
Liora crossed to the window and looked down. Dot came to stand at her shoulder.
Below, in the courtyard, figures had gathered — study-hall students, older mages, faces Liora recognised. Mage Celei stood at their front, her expression not angry but resolute in a way that was somehow harder to look at than anger would have been.
"You can still leave," Celei called up to them. Her voice carried easily in the cold air. "Go now. No one will stop you. No one will be hurt."
Liora's grip on the window frame tightened.
"He's done nothing wrong,"
Dot stepped up beside her. She extended her arm without looking, keeping him back from the window's edge.
Below, Celei closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, something in her face had settled into grief.
"Forgive me, Liora."
"Floga."
Fire erupted from the base of the tower — not slow, not gradual, but a sudden violent wall of it, climbing the stone with terrifying speed, the heat arriving at the window almost before the light did.
"We have to go," Dot said. "Now — Liora, we have to—"
"Take my hand."
He looked at her hand. Looked at the fire already licking the outer wall below them. Took it.
"This might not work," Liora said, which was not the most reassuring thing she said to him at the moment.
"Cetremastropa."
— Boom —
The world lurched. Dot felt himself leave the floor — leave the tower entirely — the night air rushing past him, the burning east wing falling away below at a speed that made no sense, the ground nowhere near as close as it should have been. He twisted in the air and caught a glimpse of Liora going limp beside him, her hand slipping from his, and then he was catching her — one arm around her waist, the other reaching — and then the trees were there and they were crashing through branches and then the grass came up fast and he hit it back-first and lay still, staring at the sky.
Ser Rick landed on his chest from somewhere above, with perfect precision and no acknowledgement that anything unusual had occurred.
"Ow."
"How are we alive," Liora said, from somewhere beside him. Not a question — more the verbal equivalent of someone taking inventory.
She sat up. Looked at him. Her expression shifted. "Dot. Your ear."
He reached up and found a branch the width of his finger passing cleanly through the upper cartilage of his ear. He pulled it out. Watched the wound close over in the space of a few seconds.
Liora pressed her hand over her mouth.
"I'm fine," he said. "Weirdly fine." He sat up and looked back toward the east tower, where the fire had taken hold properly now, orange light pulsing through the smoke. Screaming still rose from somewhere inside it — and then, piece by piece, stopped.
"We have to move," Liora said, and took his hand again.
— ✦ —
They found Martha in the corridor outside her chambers.
The hallway looked like the aftermath of something that couldn't be undone. Mages lay across the floor at wrong angles, blood spreading in dark, still pools beneath them. The smell of it was iron and smoke and something older, something Dot didn't have a name for yet.
Liora dropped to her knees before she had consciously decided to. Martha was breathing — barely, shallowly — her back against the wall, her hands folded in her lap with a strange, deliberate stillness.
She opened her eyes when Liora touched her face.
Something moved across Martha's expression — recognition, and behind it, something that looked almost like relief.
"You cast a spell," she said. Her voice was very quiet. "I felt it — all the way from here. You finally did it."
"Don't." Liora's voice cracked on the single syllable. "Don't do that. We're getting you up. Dot—"
Dot moved to take Martha's other arm. She resisted with a gentleness that was more absolute than force.
"No." She shook her head once, slowly. "Let me rest here. I'll catch up to you. Go, Liora. Please."
"I won't leave you." Tears fell from Liora's face onto her own hands, which were wrapped around Martha's. "I won't. Not now. Not ever."
Dot stood back, Ser Rick pressed against his chest. His own eyes were burning. He didn't try to stop it.
Martha reached up with one trembling hand and removed the cloth covering her hair.
Liora went very still.
Silver. The same silver as her own.
"You're like me," Liora breathed.
"A Drevari." Martha's voice was fading but steady. "Both of us. They despised us for the colour of our hair — called us freaks, omens, aberrations." She looked at Liora with eyes that had stopped being tired.
"The difference is that when my tribe needed me, I ran. I hid my hair. I let them die without me, and I have carried that ever since." Her hand found Liora's face.
"But you — you never ran from anything. Not once. Not from the ridicule, not from this place, not from him—" a glance at Dot— "when every voice around you said to. That is not a small thing, Liora. That is everything."
She pressed a small iron key into Liora's palm and closed her fingers around it.
"My study. Take what you find there. Find a way out of this realm — both of you." Her eyes moved to Dot. "You — take care of her."
"I promise," Dot said. His voice came out steadier than he felt.
"I have never been certain of much," Martha continued, her voice thinning now. "But I am certain of this: the histories will remember your name, Liora. Not as a footnote. Not as a curiosity. As the greatest mage who ever lived." A faint smile. "I look up to you. You made me better than I was."
"Run," she whispered. "Both of you. Run."
They ran.
Behind them, Martha's breathing slowed and stopped.
And in the place her mind went as it went, there was a bench in pale light, and a woman sitting on it — a recognised by Martha,
Take care of my boy, the woman said.
Martha smiled. I tried.
— ✦ —
They turned the corner — and stopped.
The thing in the corridor was enormous. Two heads on a single neck, each one snarling from a different direction, four red eyes burning in the dark. Blood dripped from both sets of jaws in long, unhurried threads.
"Run."
More of them came from the side passages — three, four, the sound of their movement low and guttural, claws clicking on stone. Liora thrust both hands forward.
"Knýta—" Liora chanted
The force wave hit the creatures like a fist, driving them back hard into the walls. Dot grabbed a fallen staff from the floor and swung it at the nearest hound, more instinct than strategy, buying them the second they needed.
"Left — go left—"
They dove through a side chamber door and Liora slammed her hands flat against the air behind them. A barrier shimmered into existence just as the first hound hit it — jaws snapping, claws raking against something invisible, close enough that Dot could see the black inside its throat.
"That won't hold long," Liora said, already moving to the shelves.
The room was lined with Martha's things — books, folded papers, objects whose purpose Dot couldn't guess. Liora moved through them fast, searching. She found a folded note written in Martha's hand and read the first line aloud — ancient letters spelling out something in a language Dot didn't know:
Η Άνοδος του Κάτω Κόσμου Μονάρχη — The Rise of the Infernal Monarch.
Two unsealed letters beneath it. She read the first: The Allthing has ordered the boy's death.
And the second, dated two days ago: Deliver the boy and yourself to the Council, or face execution for treason.
Liora set the letters down very carefully.
The barrier behind them cracked — a sound like ice giving way — and then the door came apart entirely in a storm of wood and force.
Black vines erupted from the smoke that poured through the gap. They found Dot before he could move, wrapping around his arms, his torso, yanking him off his feet and dragging him forward into the dark.
"Dot—"
Liora seized a spear from the wall and slashed through the vines — one, two — but more replaced them, and the smoke thickened, and from inside it something stepped forward.
The face was wrong in a way that was hard to look at directly — features set at angles that didn't correspond to anything human, a mouth that moved in ways mouths didn't move. It held Dot suspended in its vines and regarded them both with something that was not quite curiosity and not quite hunger.
A dying mage staggered through the doorway behind it, trailing blood, and drove a glowing spear into the creature's back with the last of everything she had.
"RUN—"
The demon turned. The mage's body came apart. Liora grabbed Dot's hand as the vines fell loose, and they moved.
— ✦ —
The realm's outer edge was a darkness with texture to it — a wall of pressure, faintly shimmering where it met the treeline, the boundary between Hidenheim and the world beyond. They hit it at a run and stopped, hands flat against the invisible surface, breathing hard.
"We need a breach," Liora said. "A weak point — somewhere the barrier's already failing—"
The ground behind them detonated.
Earth and stone blew outward in a radius around the thing that rose from it — the demon, larger now, or perhaps only closer, its four red eyes finding them immediately across the distance. It moved toward them without hurry. It didn't need to hurry.
Liora's mind reached for the shape of a spell and found only static. Her hands were shaking. She couldn't find the words, couldn't hold the structure, the demon was still coming and Dot was beside her and—
The claws closed around Dot and lifted him off the ground.
"Liora — run. Leave me — just run—"
She looked at him. At the demon. At Dot's face, which was terrified and still somehow telling her to go.
"Run away," she said quietly. "If I can't save you from something like this—" she exhaled— "how would I ever become a great mage?"
She found the words.
The mark appeared on her forehead — the shape of a half-moon, luminous and old, the light of it falling across the ground at her feet. She spoke the spell.
In the space between one moment and the next, Dot was standing on the ground.
And Liora was where he had been.
— ✦ —
The memories came in the moment between the spell's completion and what followed it, the way they sometimes do — all at once, in no particular order, vivid in the specific way of things that matter.
She was small, and the world was new and hostile and cold. A woman was speaking to Martha in a low voice — she's a Drevari, are you certain about this — and Martha said yes, and smiled, and small Liora stood at the threshold of a place she didn't understand and stared.
Days later: sitting alone against the outside wall, hair hidden as best she could manage, crying over something a classmate had said. Martha coming to kneel beside her and fastening a necklace around her neck with careful hands. Go away, Liora had said. And Martha had said: I lost someone too. It nearly destroyed me — nearly took my life, before someone reached in and pulled me back. Let me do that for you. And Liora had thrown her arms around her and cried properly, and something small and sharp had clattered to the floor between them — a knife she had not thought of as a knife until that moment.
Years of practice. No mark, no power to speak of — only her switching ability, objects traded between positions, a trick that felt embarrassingly small against the real magic the others wielded. Trying again and again in the empty practice room, failing, growing angry, trying again.
The night Dren Chaster had carried an unconscious boy into the realm over his shoulder and laid him down on a bed in the east tower. The mages' council erupting. Get that thing out of here. We won't sacrifice ourselves for a demon child. And the east wing being sealed, and Liora listening at doors she'd been told not to approach.
The cat, and the window, and the boy sitting bolt upright in the dark with eyes that didn't know who they belonged to yet.
I didn't like him at first, her future voice said, soft and rueful. I was exactly like the others. But he reminded me of my brother — the clumsy, earnest, helpless quality of him. So I kept coming back.
The evening she had told him what she wanted to become. Not just any mage. A great mage. Known in every realm. She had given the little bow as a joke — and he had clapped, genuinely, like a child watching something wonderful. I believe you can do it, he'd said. No qualifications. No hesitation.
She had blushed. She hadn't thought about it again until now.
A small hand slipped into hers in the dark — her brother's hand, which she hadn't held in a very long time.
It's time, isn't it, she said.
Yes, he said. It's time.
— ✦ —
The demon's claws came through her chest.
The half-moon mark on her forehead dimmed. Dot was on the ground, unhurt, staring at her with an expression that had not finished forming yet — still catching up to what had just happened, still one moment behind.
Liora looked at him. She tried to hold herself upright and couldn't, and her knees met the ground, and she found she wasn't afraid. She was very tired, and there was a great deal of warmth, and Dot's face was the last thing she wanted to see and it was what she was looking at.
"Thank you," she mouthed. "Dot."
She fell.
"No—" Dot crawled forward, hands scrabbling on the earth. "No — Liora — no—"
The demon raised its claws above him.
And nothing happened.
A figure had appeared between them. Not arrived — simply was there now, where it had not been a moment before. Hooded. Still. The demon held its position, uncertain.
"Wait," the figure said to it. Quietly, the way you speak to something you own.
Dot looked up. The man lowered his hood.
"Who are you?" Dot's voice came out broken and raw. "Who the hell are you?"
The man looked past him, at Liora's body.
"Remarkable potential," he said. "Wasted."
Something ignited in Dot's chest — not grief exactly, not rage exactly, something beneath and behind both of those things. His eyes went red at the edges. He felt his fingertips change.
"I asked you a question." Each word was separate, deliberate, the way words become when what's underneath them is too large to release all at once. "Who are you?"
The demon lunged — not at Dot, at the figure beside him, on some blind animal impulse. The man extended one hand and touched its hide.
The creature came apart in a spray of black.
"Filth," the man said, without inflection. He turned back to Dot. "You really are interesting."
Dot lunged.
The man was behind him before the lunge completed. Something cut through Dot's body — clean, precise, the kind of cut that knows exactly where to go — and he screamed and hit the ground on his hands and knees, blood soaking the earth.
"I'm going to kill you," Dot said, eyes blazing crimson, claws pressed into the dirt. "I swear it."
"We'll meet again, then." The man stepped back. Somewhere behind him, a woman's voice:
"Shall I take him?"
"No. Leave him. He's of no use to us yet."
A pause. The man surveyed what remained of Hidenheim — the smoke, the flame, the silence where there had been voices — and something in his expression approached satisfaction.
"The fall of man," he said, almost to himself. "The world truly began there. Not before." He glanced at the woman beside him. "Hidenheim fell when it began to despise itself. Long before tonight."
"A wonderful thing to witness," she agreed.
"Destroy it."
The woman raised her hand. The sky opened above Hidenheim like a wound and poured fire down through the gap — not the ordinary fire of torches or spells but something absolute, something that didn't leave wreckage so much as remove the possibility of what had been there. The towers went first. Then the walls. Then everything else.
A portal opened. They stepped through it and were gone.
— ✦ —
Jeze was still running when the blast found her. She had time to register the heat — extraordinary, sourceless, like the air itself igniting — and then she was gone too, and the screaming finally stopped.
Dot crawled through it all.
The realm was coming apart around him — the anchor destroyed, the structure that held Hidenheim separate from everything else dissolving from the inside out, walls and towers beginning to lose their relationship with the ground. He crawled toward where Liora had fallen, through the fire and the falling stone, and reached her, and gathered her to him, and held on.
— ✦ —
Valdheim — The Human Realm
Outside a certain town
The farmer had been up since before dawn. He was standing in the near field, doing the ordinary thing of looking at his ordinary sky, when the ordinary sky tore open.
He ran. He didn't stop to understand what he was seeing — the rift widening, the impossible structure falling through it, towers and walls and all the stone of a place that had not existed in the human world descending toward the earth with a sound like the end of something. He ran, and behind him the mage castle of Hidenheim struck the ground in a thunderous avalanche of dust and ruin that was visible from every hill for miles in every direction.
Minutes later, hoofbeats.
A man swung down from his horse and moved through the wreckage without hesitating, stepping over broken stone and splintered timber, until he found what he was looking for: a boy, barely recognisable, body knitting itself back together with impossible slowness, arms wrapped around someone he wasn't letting go of.
The man lifted him gently and held him.
"I promised," Dot said, his voice barely there. He didn't open his eyes. "I promised."
To Be Continued