Her heart beating fast, Ellie landed in the courtyard in a swirl of leaves, her lockstave held close to her side. Behind her, the monks gathered curiously. Apparently a vision was news worth interrupting their meditations for.

Gussie, Nox, and Twig stood off to the side. The Falcon girl lifted an eyebrow when Ellie glanced her way. Of the four, Gussie was the most skeptical about the Order and their so-called ability to glimpse the future.

Twig, who was a total believer, gave Ellie an encouraging thumbs-up.

Drawing a deep breath, Ellie turned to the great stone door that had so tempted her. Now it stood open, revealing a dark passageway into the mountain.

“Hurry, girl!” snapped an old monk behind her. He scowled and waved his hands as if to push her in. “How rude to make the elder wait!”

“All right, all right,” she muttered. She handed her lockstave to Twig, then walked into the tunnel.

The coldness of the mountain’s interior closed around her. She shivered and glanced back, just as the stone door began to shut. It groaned before sealing with a loud thump and leaving Ellie in total darkness.

That thump echoed through the passage ahead like an ominous drumbeat.

“Okay.” She squared her chin and shook out her wings. “Just because it feels like a tomb doesn’t mean it is one, right?”

Her nervous laugh fluttered weakly into the dark.

She followed the tunnel with one hand dragging along the wall, wondering how many nervous people had walked this same path before her. Did she even believe in these visions the Restless claimed to have? Charlo had told her only the oldest, most devout monks even had them. And who knew what a lifetime of staring at rocks did to a person’s mind?

The darkness was so deep it felt surreal, like she’d fallen into a dream. It had been two months since Ellie had left her hometown of Linden and her clan, on a quest to join the Goldwing knights. And it had been one month since she’d learned those knights were not the heroes she’d always imagined, and that the king she’d hoped to impress was really a monster. Now here she was, a fugitive, walking deep into the heart of a mountain to hear some old seer’s vision of her future.

Ellie began to giggle.

When she rounded a corner minutes later, to find a sudden gleam of light ahead, she was still giggling. Not because it was particularly funny, but because it all felt so nerve-racking and impossible, like she’d fallen into someone else’s story, a place she didn’t belong.

Then where do I belong? she wondered.

That sobered her up. It was a question she’d been dodging, a hole in her heart she hadn’t quite looked directly into ever since fleeing Thelantis. She knew, vaguely, what she wanted to do—use the skystone to heal people suffering from wingrot. But she had no idea where to start, or how one small rock could make a real difference when so many people were sick. And she still wasn’t sure where she fit in, specifically. Should she take the stone and travel around in disguise, finding the sick and healing them with its magic? Or should she stay in Cloudstone, and entrust it to someone older and stronger—and not wanted for high crimes—to see the job through instead? Charlo had been pressing her to do just that, though she had told him nothing about the skystone. He’d told her this town was a home for the homeless … which pretty much described Ellie.

She’d spent the last six years knowing exactly where she belonged. Or, at least, where she thought she belonged: with the Goldwing knights. But that dream had turned into a puff of smoke, and now she felt like she was flying over endless ocean with no idea where to land.

Maybe Elder Rue could help.

Maybe that was why Ellie kept walking, despite her doubts about visions of the future.

Maybe the answer to that question—Where do I go now?—lay just around the next bend in the tunnel. Maybe Elder Rue had had a vision of Ellie joining the Restless Order, donning a blue robe and meditating on a mountain peak. The idea made her stomach churn.

At last, she stepped into a large cavern—and gasped.

Channels had been carved into the stone floor and filled with oil, which now burned with low, steady blue flames. These spiraled inward to the center of the chamber, where massive rods of white crystal jutted from the ground. Their facets glimmered in the glow of the fire, the crystals’ depths sparkling. On the cavern ceiling, a massive pattern came into relief, a version of the same symbol Ellie had seen repeated all throughout Cloudstone—an inverted triangle with a spiral inside it.

A lone figure sat before the crystals, dressed in the usual blue robes, watching Ellie approach.

“Elder Rue,” Ellie called out. “You wanted to see me?”

The old woman didn’t reply, only stared at her expectantly.

Ellie began walking toward the center of the cavern, following the spiraling path created by the channels of blue fire. The flames rose only as high as her knees and burned without heat, so the chill of the cave still made her shiver. Around and around she walked, while Elder Rue waited in serene silence on a mat of furs.

Finally, Ellie reached the center of the spiral, and stood dwarfed by the towering crystals. After a moment’s uncertainty, she slowly knelt down the way she’d seen the monks sit for their meditations, with Elder Rue across from her.

Ellie cleared her throat. “You, uh, sent for me?”

The old woman squinted at her, and Ellie frowned as she really studied the elder for the first time. Her dark skin and wings, her frizzy gray hair … it was all terribly familiar.

“You’re not related to Granny Tam, are you?” asked Ellie.

The woman blinked, then grimaced. “Ah. I heard you met my sister down in the low lands.”

“Your sister!” Ellie coughed.

“One cannot choose one’s blood kin,” sighed Elder Rue. “My sister left the true path long ago. Now, as for why I summoned you.” She raised a hand, gesturing to the crystals behind her. “As the elder of the Restless, it is my duty to spend every waking moment meditating upon the Mountain’s Heart, to glean what I may of the future.”

Ellie nodded, her fingers curling into clammy fists.

“It takes months, sometimes, to catch a single glimpse of what’s to come. Months of staring, pondering, waiting … occasionally nodding off for a few hours.” Elder Rue chuckled. “Even when we do manage to see anything, it’s often too blurry to understand, or it involves someone we’ve never seen and never will see. But once in a decade or so, if we are lucky, we might glimpse something we do understand.”

“You saw something about me?” whispered Ellie.

Elder Rue nodded. “You. The Sparrow who carries one of our lockstaves—there was no mistaking you. I saw your future, child, or at least a reflection of it.”

“What does that mean?”

“Our visions aren’t always literal.” Elder Rue shrugged. “Sometimes they require … interpretation.”

“So what did you see?”

The Elder shut her eyes and murmured in a deep voice, “You will carry a flame through the darkness, to light a great fire. But if you drop it, or if the flame goes out … the sky will fall.”

Then she opened her eyes and sighed heavily, as if uttering those two sentences had exhausted her.

Ellie blinked. “That’s … it? But that could mean anything!”

“It doesn’t matter whether you like the vision, girl,” said Elder Rue stiffly. “This isn’t a tavern, delivering up whatever you order.”

“Sorry. I know you only get a vision every decade and all that. But … couldn’t you be a little more specific?”

“I can only tell you what I saw, and I have.” Disgruntled, the elder shimmied herself around to face the crystals again. “Considering my age, that’s likely the last clear vision I’ll ever receive too. Humph! Youths these days! Always ungrateful.”

“I just wish I knew what it meant.” Ellie sagged a little. It wasn’t that she’d been hoping for something like Go to this exact spot on this exact day and you’ll meet your destiny … But then, to be honest, she kind of had been hoping for that. Instead she had a metaphor. She didn’t know anything about flames or the sky falling. How was that supposed to help?

“Well … I guess that’s all, then,” she said, rising to her feet. “Thanks.”

Elder Rue said softly, “I know what it is your Crow friend wears around his neck.”

Ellie froze. “I, uh, don’t know what you mean.”

They hadn’t told anyone here about the skystone, knowing the trouble it had brought them everywhere else. In fact, they’d said little about their pasts beyond that they were wanted for theft, which the Restless Order had accepted without comment. The people here had little love for Garion, whose ancestors’ harassment of their Order was what had originally driven them to live in the mountains to begin with.

Ellie and her friends had agreed to keep the skystone secret, but clearly they hadn’t done a good enough job. Or maybe Elder Rue had glimpsed that in her crystals too.

Without turning around, Elder Rue continued, “We have legends about skystones in our order, you know. They’re rare and sacred artifacts of great power. It’s said that meditating upon one can even lead a person to Truehome.”

“Truehome,” muttered Ellie. “That’s the place you people are trying to get to, isn’t it? The reason you’re always meditating? That’s what that symbol represents, right?” She pointed to the triangle and spiral carved into the ceiling.

The Elder nodded. “Truehome is a state of mind—a clarity of thought and transcendence of place that brings total freedom. When you find it, it is believed that you find yourself. It is what we Restless spend our entire lives seeking. All people are born into exile, you see, separated from their true and best existence. That is why we Restless meditate—it is a devotion to finding our way home.”

That last part, at least, Ellie could understand. For the first time, she thought she might see how a person could spend their days on these mountains, staring at leaves and rocks—hoping to discover what they were meant to do, where they were meant to go.

But that wasn’t Ellie’s path. She belonged somewhere, she was sure, but it would have to be a place she found for herself, not some revelation hidden in the pattern of raindrops on grass.

“Did you see the skystone in your vision of me?” asked Ellie. “Is it the flame I’m supposed to carry?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well … could it be?”

“Perhaps.”

Holding back a groan of frustration, Ellie glanced toward the cavern entrance. She wasn’t going to get any more help from Elder Rue, it seemed. Whatever the vision meant, and whatever the skystone had to do with it, Ellie would just have to find out on her own. Or maybe Gussie was right and nobody could see the future. Maybe what Elder Rue really needed was a week of fresh air and sunshine to clear her head. Spending every day in a cave had to be messing with her brain.

The elder was already falling back into her trancelike state. Taking this as her cue, Ellie retraced the spiraling path and followed the dark tunnel out of the mountain.

None of the monks asked her about the vision, not even Charlo, though she could see curiosity burning in his eyes. She suspected they had some rule about speaking visions aloud, the way you weren’t supposed to tell someone what you wished for on the first star of winter solstice—because then it might not come true.

But that night, as they lay in the spare room Charlo’s family had offered them, Twig and Gussie pestered her relentlessly. Finally, she broke and repeated the elder’s words while swaying gently in her hammock.

“Carry a flame through darkness?” echoed Gussie. “Of course she said that. These so-called fortune-tellers always phrase things so vaguely that they could mean practically anything. It’s more proof that their visions are a crock.”

“Or,” said Twig, “she really will have to carry some all-important flame and light some all-important fire and save the world!”

Nox snorted. Ellie twisted around to peer at him, where he lay with his wings lazily dragging on the floor on either side of his hammock.

“Well, smart guy, what do you think?”

“I think no one controls my future but me.”

“Hey, maybe the prophecy has something to do with you!” said Twig. “That bit about flames and fires … I mean, it would make sense, considering.”

Considering, Ellie knew, that Nox was fireproof.

That was another secret they’d kept from the Order—a secret even bigger than the skystone. Ellie twisted again to look at Nox and saw his wings had gone stiff. He didn’t like talking about his weird invulnerability to fire, and she suspected he was sorry he’d even told the three of them about it. Not that he’d had a choice—they’d all seen him run through a wall of flames and come out the other side without so much as a singed feather.

Maybe Twig was onto something.

But she couldn’t see how Nox quite fit into Elder Rue’s vision. And he wasn’t likely to offer any ideas.

She sighed. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and—”

“Shh!” hissed Twig.

They all went still, hearing the warning in his voice. Ellie’s eyes and ears strained to sense whatever it was Twig had heard. But there was another sense she didn’t have that the younger boy did—what she thought of as his “inner ear,” which gave him the ability to feel a person’s emotions and intentions. Was that what had alerted him?

“There’s someone in the room with us,” whispered Twig.

The hair rose on Ellie’s arms. “Charlo?”

“No, it’s—”

Ellie screamed as a shape lunged out of the dark, a figure way too tall to be her new friend. It was a shadow of a man, hissing with glee, his dark wings spreading wide as he grabbed Ellie by her hair.

In his hand flashed a dagger.