“WE’RE FREE,” CINDER said, his voice breaking with a relief so vast it bordered on reverence. He turned to the other Chandrian, the remnants of shadow still licking at their forms as they came together, embracing with a desperate tenderness that had no place among monsters.
They didn’t deserve this joy. My parents lay beneath the earth, their songs silenced. My troupe had burned to nothing while these creatures danced in the ashes. Cities had crumbled at their touch, and now they stood here celebrating as if pain could be washed clean by time.
Around us, the mountain wore the scars of what had happened. The standing stones still loomed in their double circle, but the trilithon arch had gone dark, its curtain of shadow dissolved. Where Haliax had fallen, the stone was stained darker than the night around it. Iax and his creatures had scattered across the plateau, some pressing against the edges of the world as if testing a door, others simply standing in the open air with the bewildered stillness of things too long caged. The crater’s rim rose behind us. The ridge lay ahead, and beyond it, the long slope down.
My hands made themselves into fists without my permission. But what was I against the weight of their years? One man with trembling hands and a name no one would remember. One man was nothing.
Then memory stirred. Marten’s dry voice drifted back to me from the depths of the Eld. “Call me the proper way, and I will come.”
I had spent my whole life putting my faith in the University’s teachings. In sympathy and sygaldry and the cold logic of the Arcanum. But the Arcanum was very far away. And Tehlu, if he was anything at all, was close enough to hear.
I stepped forward and drew the mountain air deep into my lungs. Then I spoke.
“Great Tehlu, wrap me in your wings. Protect me from demons and creatures that walk in the night.”
The Chandrian continued their reunion, oblivious.
My voice grew stronger, climbing like flame up dry wood. “Tehlu, in your name, watch over me.”
A tremor rippled through them, subtle as wind through wheat. Still, no reaction.
“Tehlu, shelter me from iron and anger. Tehlu, who the fire could not kill, watch over me in fire.”
Cinder’s head turned slightly, his eyes narrowing as he sought my voice.
“Tehlu, who held Encanis to the wheel, watch over me in darkness.” Each word tore from me sharper than the last. “Tehlu, whose eyes are true, watch over me. TEHLU, SON OF YOURSELF, IN YOUR NAME, WATCH OVER ME.”
“Kill him,” Cinder commanded, his voice cutting through the stunned silence.
Stercus surged toward me first, broad as a boulder and twice as fast. But the wind knew my name better than I knew it myself. I called, and it answered. The gust that came was not gentle. It lifted him like a child’s toy and flung him into the darkness.
Usnea came next, already swinging. Again I called the wind, and again it obeyed. She tumbled across the stone, her mask catching moonlight as she rolled.
But there were six of them. Six against one. The math was simple and terrible.
Cinder hurled himself forward, the grey sword in his hand leveled at my chest.
Light split the world in half.
The first bolt fell between us like a judgment. Bright as the birth of stars. So bright that for one blinding moment Cinder became nothing more than a shadow painted against white fire.
He stumbled backward, his killing stroke forgotten, one arm raised against that terrible brightness as if he could ward it away with flesh and bone.
Another bolt carved the earth open, spilling fire where it touched. The air itself screamed.
Then they descended.
Eight figures wreathed in flame that was not flame but something holier, something more terrible. Wings that blotted out the stars. Their swords burned with a light that made looking painful and not looking impossible.
The battle that followed had no words. The Chandrian met them with the desperation of cornered things. The creatures from beyond the door threw themselves forward with mindless hunger. But the angels moved through them like truth through lies, their blades leaving nothing but light in their wake.
I stood frozen, the clash pressing against me like heat from a forge, making my teeth ache. “Time to go,” Denna whispered, grabbing my wrist.
We ran. Behind us, angels screamed war songs that had no words, only fury. Behind us, creatures older than names howled at the stars. Behind us, stone melted and air burned and the mountain shook itself apart. We ran toward the ridge with the singular focus of prey, toward anywhere that was not here.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
The voice stopped us.
Cinder stood before us, having moved through space in ways that space should not allow. “You thought you could slip away?” He stalked forward, black eyes gleaming. “Foolish children.”
I called the wind again, throwing everything I had into a wall of air. Cinder planted his blade in the earth and leaned into it, immovable. His laugh was the sound of ice cracking under weight.
He moved again, that terrible speed, but this time his target was not me.
It was Denna.
I would like to tell you the fight was close. I would like to tell you I was clever, that I nearly had him twice. But this story has no room for comfortable lies.
“No!” The word tore from me as I threw myself forward, stupid with fear. My body met his in a tangle of limbs and we went down together, his sword skittering across the stone as we hit the ground, and I got my hands on his throat and squeezed with everything I had but Cinder twisted beneath me, fluid as water, and drove his elbow into my temple and the world tilted sideways. Before I could press back he was on his feet, the grey blade already in his hand, moving to a tempo my body could not follow. I saw the glint of it too late.
Pain shot through my left hand.
Then a deeper, quieter pain as three of my fingers fell to the ground.
I should have screamed. Instead something cracked open inside my chest, white-hot, and I crashed into him before the scream could form, driving my shoulder into his ribs and sending the sword spinning from his grip. My fist found his face and I felt his nose break beneath my knuckles, heard the wet crack of cartilage giving way, and I hit him again and my ruined hand found his white hair and I drove his skull against the base of a standing stone once, twice, and I was reaching for his eyes when his hands caught my wrists and his strength was not human, had never been human.
Cinder threw me aside and was on top of me before I could roll, hammering his fists down into my face, each impact pushing my vision further toward black. I tasted blood. My jaw went loose. Through the ringing I heard my own breathing, wet and wrong.
He stopped then, one hand pinning my shoulder, and waited for my eyes to focus. He wanted me to see.
He smiled. The same smile he had worn the day he killed everything I loved.
I raised my ruined hand and drove what remained of it into his face, grinding the raw stumps of my fingers across his eyes. He recoiled, clawing at the blood, and for a bare moment his vision was gone. I tried to roll free but he caught me by the throat and forced me flat, snarling. Behind him, through the red haze, I could see Denna moving low along the ground, circling wide while his attention was fixed on me.
Cinder found his sword where it had fallen. He planted his boot on my chest, pinning me to the earth.
The blade rose high.
Then he froze.
Behind him stood Denna, breathing hard, her hand still wrapped around the handle of the knife she had driven into his neck.
“Pity,” Cinder said, his voice conversational despite the steel in his spine. “You would have made a fine apprentice.”
He turned with the blade still in his neck and drove his sword into her belly with the casual efficiency of a man closing a door.
The sound I made had no words in it. The wind answered what my voice could not, erupting in a gale that tore Cinder from the ground and sent him tumbling across the broken stone.
I was beside Denna in an instant.
“Help me up,” she whispered, clutching the wound as her blood seeped between her fingers.
I obeyed without thought, pulling her to her feet, though closing my ruined hand around her arm sent a white bolt of pain from wrist to shoulder. We stumbled toward the ridge, her weight against me, my blood mixing with hers on the ancient stone.
And yet, I turned. I don’t know why I turned, but I did, and I saw Cinder pull the knife from his neck with no more concern than a man removing a splinter. He tossed it aside and his eyes found mine. I knew then that he would never stop. That his first purpose under a free sky would be to hunt us down.
But as I looked at him, the cracks in my mind opened wide and the sleeping mind poured through. The world thinned. I saw Cinder as he truly was, all the way down. I saw the young man he had been in Murella, once considered virtuous. I saw how small betrayals had layered blood upon his hands until he burned down his own people’s silver tree. I saw how that first act had opened a door in him that could never quite close, and how the centuries of torment that followed had made him cruel.
I lifted my ruined hand, blood running in a thin line to the ground. “By my own blood, I bind you. By your own name, let you be accursed.” I spoke a word, and the mountain shuddered to hear it. The long name at the root of what Cinder was, turned against him like a blade reversed. “This is my doom upon you. Your own name will turn against you. You and all who follow you will know no peace. This is my doom upon you!”
Cinder’s face twisted from amusement to rage to what might have been fear. He lunged toward us, only to be met by a burning sword as one of Tehlu’s angels descended upon him.
Denna tugged at my arm, her voice barely a whisper. “Let’s go.”
And so, we fled into the night. I did not know it then, but I had left more than blood on that mountain.
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