Eliana
“My brothers and sisters, my friends and compatriots, do not let these humans deceive you! They promise peace, but what they want is our destruction. You can feel it in their minds as well as I can, but you have let your desperation for peace, your exhaustion, get the better of you. I say to you now: Reach inside your ancient minds for the strength I know you possess. I say to you now: Stand with me, here on these icy shores, and fight for our homeland! This is our world! We were born to it, and we will not let these humans, with their weak minds and feeble hearts, send us running like cowards into the darkness!”
—A speech delivered by the angel Kalmarothto angelic forces at the Battle of the Black Stars
Below the palace of Dyrefal and the dark-cobbled streets of Vintervok, buried far below the snow-dusted mountains, was a world of stone and shivering shadows.
As Zahra escorted her through the soaring obsidian halls, Eliana marveled. Each new chamber was different from the last—some vast and lofty, lined with rows of pale-gray stone arches boasting carvings of the saints at war. Others were narrow and still and padded with shelves of books, as if the mountains themselves were crowding down close to hear the pages whisper secrets.
Slender torches mounted to the walls in elaborate iron casings threw shifting shapes across every surface, creating the illusion that Eliana was traveling beneath the canopy of a forest shaken by soft winds. Enormous tapestries decorated the walls, warming the cold stone passages with depictions of Saint Tameryn, daggers in her hands and shadows writhing in her curls. Prayer smoke sweetened the thick air. Scholars in blue-and-black robes conversed in low tones; commoners come down below the mountain to pray knelt before gleaming black statues of Saint Tameryn in combat, in meditation, in repose.
There were no idols of the Emperor here, as had dotted the streets of Orline—no razed temples, no shattered statues.
This was a world untouched by the Empire, and Eliana did not know how to exist inside it.
She averted her eyes from Saint Tameryn’s blank stares and placed her right hand on Arabeth at her hip to remind herself of who she was. She was not a coward, no matter what insinuations blazed in Simon’s eyes. Nor was she a queen, the lost heir to a dead kingdom.
She was Eliana Ferracora. Daughter of Rozen and Ioseph. Sister to Remy.
She was the Dread of Orline.
Her strength lay not in her blood and not in magic but in her muscle, in the agile way her feet lit upon the ground, in her skill with her blades.
She said it ten times, like working her way through her father’s prayer beads—words she didn’t really believe, but that brought her comfort nonetheless. Then she imagined her doubt as a small creature sniveling in a damp room, and closed it away behind an iron door.
She would have to ignore her doubt, swallow her resistance to the idea of magic in her blood. If she wanted to save Navi, she would have to satisfy Zahra. She would have to summon her power again, just as she had on the beach at Karajak Bay. Prove herself capable of wielding it, deft and deliberate, in defense of herself.
Somehow, she would have to control it, and be able to do so with ease and at will.
The thought left her stomach in knots.
“Remember, stay in my wake,” Zahra murmured, drifting just ahead of her. “Keep your voice low, and don’t fall behind. We must hurry. If my strength fails me, and you are left to fend for yourself without me to shield you from sight—”
“Fend for myself against these people whose home I saved from Empire invasion?” Eliana said. “I think I’ll be all right.”
“Not everyone in Astavar delights at the knowledge that you are in their palace, my queen. What you did on the beach frightened many.”
Including me, Eliana thought darkly.
As she followed Zahra for what felt like hours, down winding stairs and through stone passages, each one more unfinished than the last, she drew a map in her mind. But as the air grew colder, the weight of the mountain pressing upon her shoulders, her mental map disintegrated. Wherever they were, their route was too labyrinthine for her to find her way back alone.
When the shadows grew so thick that Zahra vanished within them, Eliana withdrew the small gas lamp from her cloak pocket and turned the catch on the base.
“Stop,” Zahra said quietly.
But Eliana had already stopped, the sight before her leaving her speechless.
The small flame in her lamp illuminated the edge of a black lake. High cavern walls rose around them, glittering with gemstones. Rocky crags jutted out from the walls, creating cliffs over the water. Small islands rose from the lake’s center like the humps of a beast. Eliana squinted through the dim lamplight.
“Don’t be afraid, my queen,” said Zahra, sounding amused. “This is not the dangerous place I spoke of.”
Eliana followed her along the lake’s edge. The ground was hard black stone, peppered with tiny amethyst flecks that glittered in the lamplight. “Where are we, then?”
“We are far below Dyrefal,” Zahra replied, “in a private retreat that your Saint Tameryn requested her companions help her construct for Saint Nerida. Once, when magic still thrived, this was a refuge of light and greenery.”
That sounded familiar to Eliana. She sifted through her memories for one of Remy’s many stories about the saints.
“They were lovers, weren’t they?” She caught sight of a shadowed structure tucked in a shallow cove. “Nerida and Tameryn?”
A low wall of stones connected the structure to the shore, and it was here that Zahra paused and looked back. The lamp’s flame could not fix upon her; she was a void of gloom in the dim amber light.
“They were,” she replied. “Come, my queen. Watch your step.”
Eliana hesitated, then followed Zahra across the slick stones to the structure. The lamplight slowly revealed it to be an elegant circular belvedere—the smooth stone pillars discolored and rank with slime, the tiled roof shimmering with shards of crystal. Water lapped gently against the steps, pushed by some faint subterranean breeze.
“I believe it important for you to have a place of your own to practice your magic,” Zahra said, at last coming to a halt between two of the pillars. “A place far from prying eyes, with ties to the Old World in which your mother lived. That is why I have brought you here.”
Eliana moved gingerly around the belvedere, inspecting its pillars, the flecks of stones glimmering across its floor. A childish impulse told her that if she trod too heavily, she would awaken ghosts.
An even more childish impulse made her want to run from this place—from Vintervok, from Simon, even from the responsibility of Navi—and never look back.
Then a thought occurred to her, and she grabbed hold of it eagerly. Anything to delay the inevitable moment of sitting there, before Zahra’s expectant gaze, and trying to work magic she did not understand.
“This was a retreat built for Saint Nerida,” Eliana said slowly, dragging her fingers along the smooth stone of the nearest pillar. “Given to her by Saint Tameryn.”
“Yes, my queen,” Zahra replied.
“And how does it feel to exist in a space constructed by those who condemned your kind to the Deep?”
The silence that followed her question expanded to fill the entire cave. She took three measured breaths before turning to meet Zahra’s gaze.
The wraith shivered blackly. She seemed to take on a texture, as if she had recently emerged, soil-rich, from the earth. The lamplight carved strange shadows into the air around her, creating dark slopes of nothingness.
“How it feels is irrelevant,” she said at last, her voice as even and cool as the stone beneath Eliana’s feet. “Being here is the best way I know how to help you, and helping you is what I have resolved to do since emerging from the Gate.”
“But why? Why wouldn’t you resolve to hurt me? To hurt all of us?” Eliana’s heart pounded, but she had gone too far to relent. “Why help me when I should be your enemy?”
A ripple of emotion shifted across Zahra’s face and then was gone.
“Because the Emperor is insatiable in his quest to find you,” Zahra replied evenly, “and if he does, he may accomplish with you what he failed to with your mother. If that happens, it may spell doom for us all, in this world and in others.”
That startled Eliana. “In others?”
Zahra was still for a moment. Then she sighed, drifting to the ground as if deflated.
“It would be easier, my queen, if I could show you, as I did in your Fidelia cell. My words are inadequate. I lose myself in them. Would you allow me this?”
Eliana hesitated, then settled across from Zahra on the stone floor and placed the lamp beside her. She squared her shoulders, willing herself not to be afraid. She had started this; she would finish it.
“Yes,” she said. “I will allow this.”
“I shall be brief, my queen. What you will see may shock you.”
Eliana nodded once. “I understand.” She gripped her knees hard, barely managing to swallow.
Then, as before, Zahra moved swiftly toward her, like the rush of exhaled smoke, and disappeared.
• • •
Eliana opened her eyes to a vast green world at sunrise: cheerful woodlands, fields of quivering wildflowers, a quilt of slim silver rivers.
Above, in a cloudless blue sky, swirled a bruise. As Eliana watched, furious veins sprouted from its heart and raced across the sky, multiplying like cracks in glass.
She stepped back. “What is it? Zahra?”
Zahra appeared beside her, tall and whole, ebony-skinned. White hair to her waist, resplendent in gleaming platinum armor. Wings of light and shadow trailed from her back, flickering as she moved—smoky and dark one moment, brilliant the next.
“It is the Gate, my queen,” Zahra answered, her voice thin and tired. “And on the other side of it is Avitas and your beloved saints.”
“Then that means…”
“Yes. We are in the Deep.”
Eliana gazed wonderingly upon the idyllic green world around her. “But this is no prison. It’s an entire other world. Zahra, is this what you meant?” Her skin tingled, as if her body were stretching to accommodate this new information. “The Deep is another world like our own?”
“So we were led to believe during treaty negotiations,” said Zahra. “Never mind that we were first to live in the world of Avitas, and that humans evolved later. Humans were weaker, they told us—the saints, and our own leaders. Humans could not survive outside the world in which they came to exist. But we angels were older, more advanced forms of life. We could adjust to existence in another world, and our departure would bring an end to the war. Both sides had lost many. Both sides were eager for peace. This seemed the easiest way to achieve it. So we were led to believe.”
Then she pointed at the sky’s bruise. Her voice lowered, thick and bitter. “We arrive.”
In the next moment, something ruptured—something deep within the fiber of the ground Eliana stood upon, within the air she breathed. The sky rippled as if struck, and its bruise darkened, rushing across the canvas of morning sunlight like the flood of an angry sea.
“Look, my queen,” said Zahra gently, and Eliana obeyed, not realizing until that moment that she was clinging to the angel’s arm like a child gone to its mother after a bad dream.
She looked up at the sky and watched it open.
Out of it poured a great black cloud, thick and streaming, the fall of a dark river. It expanded in the open air—blooming, magnifying—and from within it came sounds like none Eliana had ever heard. Angrier than war cries, more unbearably lonesome than the howl of wolves.
And the world itself, green and verdant, waiting for a race of angels to build a new home upon its rolling hills, quaked and collapsed.
It happened quickly, as if the structure of the world had been hastily constructed and the arrival of the angels had triggered its demise. The sky shrank, no longer a luxurious expanse but instead a mere pinprick of light, retreating to an unreachable horizon. Green meadows and silver rivers faded abruptly to blackness.
The terrible cries in the air burrowed into Eliana’s skull. She sank to her knees, gasping for breath, but her efforts were futile. She couldn’t breathe in this place. There was no air, no water, no sense of depth or distance. She clawed at her chest and realized it no longer existed. She had no chest, no lungs. She was still alive. She had thoughts, and she knew her name.
But as she groped through the air, she found nothing—no legs, no hips or hands. She searched with her mind, which seemed the only thing left to her. She wanted to sob, but the idea of crying remained trapped in her mind.
It was then that the pain slammed into her.
Even without a body, she could register it. Her body hadn’t simply disappeared. It had been taken from her, ripped away by this place in which she now found herself—not a fresh, green world, ready to be remade into a new homeland, but rather a void, a nothing space between the world of Avitas and whatever lay beyond.
The human saints had lied.
Eliana added her own furious voice to the millions around her, all of them crammed into a space both endless and caged. She wanted to beat against the walls that held her. She would tear them apart, burst back into Avitas, and destroy the saints from the inside out.
Except…she was nothing but a mind. A consciousness, bodiless and impotent.
She howled and wailed. She raged for centuries, and then—
The world changed. She was herself again. She was Eliana.
She gasped, clutching her own arms, her stomach. She touched her face. She was alive. She was whole.
“Zahra?” she sobbed.
“I’m here, my queen,” came Zahra’s voice, soft and regretful. “Watch.”
Seven brilliant figures looked down upon that same vast green world, untouched and peaceful. A false world, a lie constructed to deceive the angels into submission.
And a good lie it was, a skillfully crafted one. Otherwise, the angels, with their powerful minds, would have never believed it.
Eliana reached for Zahra’s hand; she grasped it gently.
“How did they deceive you?” she breathed. “Why did you believe them?”
“They were excellent liars,” Zahra replied. “And they had help.”
She gestured at the seven figures, standing at a ripped-open seam in the fabric of the world. Eliana’s mind cleared, her heart still racing, for now she recognized them, from long years of Remy’s stories: Tameryn, dark-haired and golden-skinned, her daggers trailing shadows. Pale, white-haired Marzana, her shield wreathed in flame.
The saints.
Eliana would have fallen to her knees once more if Zahra had not been there to hold her up. There were Saint Ghovan and his quiver of arrows, Saint Nerida and her trident, Saint Grimvald and his hammer, Saint Tokazi and his staff.
Saint Katell, the sunspinner, her skin a rich, dark brown, her black hair coiled in a tight braided knot, carrying a blazing sunlit sword.
And beside her, tall and lithe, dazzlingly beautiful, was an angel—warm brown skin, wings of light and shadow framing his body.
“Aryava was a great leader of my people,” Zahra said quietly, “and had many who were blindly faithful to him.”
Eliana remembered Remy telling her the story of Aryava and Katell: an angel and a human saint, bound by a forbidden love.
“He died in her arms,” Eliana murmured, recalling Remy’s voice. “He died in the final days of the war.”
Zahra nodded. “He died fighting angels who understood his betrayal and the deception of the saints, and who led a final insurgency in an attempt to save us.” A beat of silence. Zahra’s voice was careful, deliberate. “This rebellion did not succeed. They were cast into the Deep, along with the rest of us.”
“And Aryava’s last words…”
“‘Two Queens will rise,’” Zahra said. “‘One of blood, and one of light.’”
Saint Grimvald stepped forward, looking out over what Eliana now knew was the Deep, disguised to seem otherwise. “If we send them here, we doom them. They cannot survive here, not as they are.”
Saint Katell nodded, her expression unreadable. “And if we do not, then they will destroy us.” She glanced at Aryava, a flicker of doubt on her face.
He took his hand in hers, his eyes soft. “This is the only hope for you,” he told her, quietly, “and for us.”
Then the saints and the false green world of the Deep disappeared into a swift, dark fog.
Eliana returned to herself, gulping for air as tears streamed down her face. On her hands and knees in Saint Tameryn’s cavern, she fumbled for Zahra’s hand and found nothing there. The loss of Zahra’s body struck her hard in the chest.
“My queen, please breathe,” came Zahra’s worried voice. “I know it is a great deal to understand. Perhaps I should not have shown you—”
“No, you should have.” Eliana breathed for a few moments, then sat back against one of the stone pillars, trembling and nauseated. “Humans were losing the war against the angels, and they discovered how to open a doorway into another world.”
“Not another world,” Zahra corrected gently. “Not even the saints were powerful enough for that.”
“So other worlds do exist?”
“Yes, my queen. They lie beyond the fabric of this one, beyond the reach of any being that has yet lived.” She paused. “Except—”
“Except for my mother,” Eliana said flatly. “And perhaps for me.”
Zahra inclined her head. “The Deep, however, is the farthest your saints could manage to delve beyond our world. They used their elemental powers to craft a lie, a false promise of a new world for my kind to inhabit and mold into a land of our choosing.”
“And then they forced you into this false world, where you were…” Remembering, she had to swallow against a surge of sickness. “You were stripped of your bodies.”
“The realm between worlds is a mere liminal space,” Zahra said. “The empirium functions differently there. It is distant, cold. It leaves a void in its wake. No physicality, no sensation. No sight or sound.”
“A prison. Just as we’ve always been taught. But you thought it would be a new home.” She looked up at Zahra through a film of tears. “You were willing to give up your own home in order to create peace between us.”
Zahra said nothing, her dark eyes full of a sadness so immense that Eliana could no longer look at her. Instead, she gazed beyond the small circle of light her lamp provided, over the black lake she could hardly see.
“How could you want to help us after we did such a thing?” Eliana whispered. “You fight for Red Crown. You fight against your own kind for us, who lied to you, who banished you into this terrible place where your body was taken from you.”
She closed her eyes. It was a monstrous act, too horrific to be believed.
And yet she had seen it. She had lived it.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you fought at the Emperor’s side to destroy us,” she said.
“And I don’t blame your saints for doing what they did,” Zahra replied. “They drove us into the Deep to save their people. It was the only option left to them. And you…”
Zahra cupped Eliana’s cheek, creating a pocket of soft, cool air against her skin. “For all your power, you are fragile creatures. We would have won, had the war continued. If your saints had not created the Gate, had not forced us into the Deep, then it is probable that you, and Remy, and Simon, and the Lightbringer and the Blood Queen would never have been born. The human race would have been crushed into oblivion.”
Eliana shook her head, fresh tears gathering angrily. “But they deceived you. They murdered you, all of you.”
“And yet here we still exist, even if differently than we did before. And I shall not blame an entire race of beings for the crimes of a few.” Zahra’s fingers caressed Eliana’s forehead. “So frail, and so dear. Your lives blink in and out of this world like the lights of fireflies. And I will do what I can to see that you continue to.”
“How can you bear it? How can you even look at me, much less fight for me?”
In the lamplight, Zahra’s smile was soft. “I bear the life I have been given because it is the only one I have. And I fight for you, my queen, gladly, because the things that have been done to your people since your mother tore down the Gate and released my own are equally as atrocious as what your saints did to us, if not more so. The debt has been repaid, and yet still the Emperor kills. Still he terrorizes and destroys. And I do not believe he will stop at the destruction of humanity. I believe he will venture beyond Avitas, beyond the Deep, to the worlds that lie past the farthest reaches of what we now know to be true.” She paused. “If, that is, he obtains the power to do it.”
The clammy air had cooled Eliana’s sweating skin. She shivered, crossed her arms over her chest. “You mean, if he finds me.”
Zahra’s silence was all the answer she needed.
“Why does he do this?”
“Because he wants answers he has not yet found.”
“What answers? And to what questions?”
Zahra hesitated, then said slowly, “Will you forgive me if I delay that particular discussion? It is not a light one, and you look rather drained of color just now.”
Eliana gave her a wan smile. A profound weariness sank into her bones. She touched the scabbing wound from Navi’s attack.
“You’ll help me practice?” Her voice sounded small and foreign to her own ears, as if Zahra’s vision had remade it.
“I will, my queen.”
“I’d prefer to practice with you, rather than Simon.”
Zahra’s mouth twitched. “I can’t imagine why. He’s such a pleasant person, after all.”
Eliana laughed a little, rising unsteadily to her feet.
“However,” Zahra continued, hesitant, “I do encourage you to consider forging a casting for yourself. And that I know very little about.”
“And Simon might know much more. Is that what you think?”
“It is.”
Eliana sighed, scrubbed a hand over her face. “The moment I’m ready, you’ll take me to the Nest? You won’t delay?”
“No, my queen. I pledge this to you.” Then she paused. “And might I suggest we return to your rooms for now? I know you are eager to begin practicing, but after what you’ve just experienced, perhaps a few hours of rest would be of more benefit.”
Eliana nodded unhappily. “Very well.”
They crossed the narrow bridge back to the shore. Eliana watched her boots cross the slick stones.
Gently, Zahra answered her unspoken thoughts. “You asked me why I fight for you—for you, specifically. I do so, my queen, because in your mother’s veins lived the power to save not just one world, but many. Not just humans or angels, but both, and perhaps other races we do not yet know about, in worlds we have not yet found. She had this power, but so do you. And I believe you will triumph where she could not.”
Eliana let Zahra’s words ring in silence. She bore the weight of them back through Tameryn’s cave and up into the palace, as if they were a pack of stones bound to her body, slowly pressing deeper and deeper into her skin.
• • •
When Eliana returned to her room, Remy was waiting for her.
He whirled as she entered the room, his flushed face streaked with tears.
Eliana froze, ice flooding her limbs. He knows. Someone told him.
“El, you’ll never believe it,” he said breathlessly. “You’ve got to come. Come now. They won’t listen to me or Simon. They’ll only listen to you.”
He grabbed her hand, tugged her desperately out the door and down the hall. She allowed him this—dumbstruck, her relief making her stumble—and didn’t recover her voice until they’d reached a suite of rooms on the palace’s first floor, outside of which stood two guards. They bowed at her approach and opened the doors at once.
Behind her, having followed them downstairs, Zahra drew a sharp breath of surprise.
Eliana stepped inside the room, where several people had gathered—King Eri, King Tavik, Lady Ama. Hob, and a passel of royal guards. A woman in healer’s robes, tending to the leg of someone hidden from view.
Simon turned at Eliana’s entrance, an unreadable expression on his face, and then stepped aside.
Beyond him, filthy and battered, sat a ghost.
Eliana’s shock rooted her to the floor.
Harkan.