Eliana
“Saint Ghovan the Fearless forged his casting on the high cliffs of western Ventera during a furious storm. The ocean was a far, wild thing, endless and terrible, and the forging fires were so great they burned his hands, but he held onto the pain, for it reminded him of the thing he was beginning to understand he must do. He had seen the darkness in his father’s eyes, the secrets in his father’s palace, and so he began to craft secrets of his own.”
—The Book of the Saints
Eliana dropped to the floor, drenched in sweat.
She lay flat on the carpet and gulped down ragged breaths. Her head pounded along the searing paths where Corien had just been, a swift, booming drum of pain.
He crouched beside her and smoothed the wet hair back from her face.
“Let’s try again,” he told her kindly. “You were going to kill yourself. Then you stopped. Why?”
It was difficult to find her voice. “I couldn’t leave Remy. He wouldn’t understand.”
“Liar. He would have. He’s not so changed that he no longer understands sacrifice for the greater good.” Corien’s voice twisted with mockery. “Tell me the truth.”
Eliana closed her eyes. Her body shook, seized by feverish chills. “I can’t,” she whispered, which was the truth. Whenever she tried to think about what had happened, a confusion of shadows blocked her way. She reached for her thoughts, ready to arrange them so Corien could see, for if she had to face another day of this—his mind raging through hers, his black gaze relentless as she thrashed in pain on the floor—she would die.
If only he would let her.
But as always, the memories slipped from her grasp.
“I can’t tell you,” she said again, and forced open her eyes to glare at him. A spark of defiance snapped inside her. She pressed her cold castings against the floor and relished the bite of their chains. “And even if I could, I wouldn’t. You can tear at me all you want. You’ll never find what you seek, and you’ll never see my mother again. She’s dead. I’m all you’ve got now, and I’ll fight you until one day you lose your temper and kill me. Then you’ll be alone forever.”
She smiled, exhausted laughter bubbling in her throat. “An eternity trapped behind black eyes in a gray world full of broken magic you can’t touch, eating food you can’t taste and drinking wine that turns to ash on your tongue. Wondering every morning if this will be the day that finally tears you out of the body you stole and leaves you stranded, unable to take another. I don’t envy you. Poor thing.”
Corien watched her for a long moment. The silence filled Eliana with a slowly climbing dread.
“Please don’t,” she whispered, full of regret. “I didn’t mean it.”
“You did, you awful bitch,” Corien said. “I hope it was satisfying.”
Then he came for her again, his will hard and cold as a knife kept sharp for the hunt. It sliced through her skull and everything that lived there. It peeled her back, layer by layer, until she forgot her determination to fight and went rigid with animal screams.
• • •
At night, Eliana wept or lay in knots of pain. She sometimes slept, but sleep often brought visions from Corien, indescribable nightmares that left her convinced she had died, that the agony of her mind had at last killed her. Then she would realize she was still alive and feel frantic with despair.
But her guard watched her closely, and Jessamyn—red-eyed, her skin strangely wan, as if she too were finding sleep elusive—no longer carried her knives. They were all careful to present her with nothing she could make into a weapon. She ate every meal with her hands.
Occasionally, a faint whisper of thought brushed against her, and she remembered that a voice had spoken to her kindly, that a gentle mind had stayed her hand that day.
She dismissed it as delusion.
There was nothing kind or gentle left in her world.
• • •
Awaken, said the voice in Eliana’s dreams, but slowly.
She walked along a flat gray beach, scattering sheets of sea foam. Carefully she edged into the water until it closed over her head.
Her eyes opened.
She was in her rooms in Corien’s palace, but there was a new stillness to them, a thick hush, and with it came a single tentative memory.
Afraid to even think the word in case he should hear, she sent out the question nevertheless: Prophet?
I am here, answered the voice, the very same one as before. We must move quietly, Eliana. I cannot be with you for long. Not yet.
Eliana lay like a stone in her bed; the damp sheets clung to her. The morning sun drenched the room, suffusing it with heat, but if she moved, he would find her.
Where have you been? Living in Corien’s palace, his presence never far from her and her days filled with the tireless wrath of his mind, she now understood well the focus required for mind-speak. You stopped me from killing myself. You said we had things to do. Then you left me.
I know. The Prophet’s voice was neither masculine nor feminine. Soft but steady, it came to Eliana through layers of heavy silt. She sensed the Prophet was trying to hide. I am sorry for that. I had to stay away until his anger faded. I knew he would be looking for me after what happened that day.
Corien’s name rose to the top of Eliana’s thoughts on a dull wave of fear.
Careful, the Prophet cautioned. Do not think too closely of him when we speak. You may alert him to my presence if you do. If you must think of him at all, allow your thoughts to slide over the idea of him like water over rocks.
But it was too late for sliding water. A drum of panic beat against Eliana’s ears, and all she could think of was his name. Corien. His thoughts squeezing like hard fingers inside her skull. Corien. His presence invading her dreams with flashing teeth and hands slick as snakes. Corien.
He’s coming. The Prophet’s voice was already fading. I’m sorry. I will return, little one.
Eliana felt the Prophet leave like a needle sliding free of its cushion. When Corien came, it wasn’t to hurt her. Silently, he crawled into her bed, wrapped her in his arms as a lover might, curled his body around hers.
He held her for hours, crooning angelic lullabies against her neck. She resisted the urge to break away from him and fought the pull of sleep, thinking instead of a soft-water river flowing quietly across a bed of smooth gray stones. Soon, fuzzy and limp, she hardly noticed the black eyes burrowing into her skull from behind, like nesting beetles plump with eggs.
• • •
Awaken, but slowly.
Eliana opened her eyes to see her rooms washed silver with moonlight.
Will you show me your face, angel? It had been twelve days since she had last heard from the Prophet. She had made sure to keep count, a thing she had long ago given up, for each day had seemed an impossible burden.
Now, each moment buzzed with anticipation as she waited for the Prophet to return, and the endless days felt lighter.
Not yet, said the Prophet, voice full of regret. Let’s have a conversation, you and I. How long can we talk before he stirs, I wonder?
What would you like to talk about? Eliana glanced at the adatrox flanking her door. Jessamyn was not there, but she would come in the morning. How each day I live on is a torment? How worn thin I have become in body and mind? How far my power feels from me now?
I already know all of these things, said the Prophet gently. But if it would help you to tell me, please do.
Eliana breathed in silence for several minutes. She imagined her little river running soft across its stones.
Every day I imagine ending my life. She let the thought flow along the river’s calm current. You should have let me. You claim to be a friend of humans, but in fact you’ve doomed us all.
It feels cruel to beg your patience, but I beg it nevertheless. The Prophet sent a feeling upstream, where it lapped against Eliana’s toes. It was too subtle to read clearly, but it warmed Eliana, and she imagined hiding forever inside it.
What am I waiting for? What will we do?
Unfortunately, we must move slowly. We must glide through the water between us and guard against any ripples that might wake the beast lying in the depths. Do you understand?
Eliana settled carefully against her pillows, pretending sleep. And then? We move slowly, you said. Toward what?
A beat of silence, and then the Prophet’s thoughts darted swift as silver minnows into the cracks of Eliana’s mind.
A second chance.
A shiver slipped down Eliana’s body. I don’t know what you mean.
Tell me about home, the Prophet suggested. About Orline.
I cannot. It hurts me. Too much death, too much sadness.
But what about the good things? Tell me about Remy. About Harkan. Past the grief, there is light still, even if only in memory. Tell me about that light.
Eliana waited several minutes before she could form a steady thought.
When Remy was very small, she began, he was terrified of storms. I would wake to find him shivering beside me in my bed. Sometimes not even stories were enough, not even songs. One night we made a tent out of my quilt, strung it across a corner of the room with lengths of twine. Inside it, we piled blankets and pillows, his books, the shells Harkan had gathered for me when his father took him to the sea. It was a fortress, and inside it, no storm could touch us.
As Eliana spoke, she settled into the embrace of the Prophet’s presence. So unlike Corien’s—firm, but never invasive. A froth brewing gently at the edges of her mind.
Very good, said the Prophet, once Eliana fell into silence. Fifteen minutes. He is coming, but this was an excellent beginning. I will return, Eliana, when it’s safe. Trust me.
How can I? Eliana whispered.
But the Prophet had already gone.
• • •
The days between the Prophet’s visits stretched on like dark roads with no end. For weeks, they met in secret, and the carefully hidden memories of their conversations gave Eliana something to hold on to as Corien wrenched apart her thoughts, searching for a thing he could not find, trying to force from her a power she refused to touch.
Forty-five minutes. An hour. Two hours, they managed, and then three, with no interference from Corien and her guards noticing nothing, until finally, one day, the Prophet said, Good. Now we move.
• • •
The first time, Eliana crept from one side of her room to the other, then bathed on her own for the first time since arriving in Elysium. She opened the doors to her rooms, her heart pounding, and peered out into the broad shadowed corridor that ran left to right. Arched white rafters soared over gleaming marble floors lined with pale carpets.
During all of this, the adatrox remained motionless and quiet. Even Jessamyn seemed oblivious. Eliana stepped outside her rooms, barefoot, and waved her hand before Jessamyn’s face. Nothing.
The Prophet guided her to an unused sitting room not far from hers, draped in fineries and hung with gold-framed paintings of angelic glory.
Inside it, shielded by the Prophet’s calm presence, her heart a frantic bird in her chest, Eliana reached for her power with deliberate intent—not letting it erupt due to anger, not allowing her fear to overtake her reason and force out her power without her permission. It was the first time she had done so since arriving in Elysium, and her mind felt clumsy as it stretched and fumbled. She concentrated on the familiar lines of her castings, slender and cool around her hands and wrists. She pushed her thoughts out along the stone floor and into the air.
A simple goal: move the air, command it to knock over the golden candlestick standing proud on its table.
Simple, and yet she could not do it. The air remained still. Her power was used to hiding and felt reluctant to emerge from that deep place into which she had shoved it. A faint hum at the back of her mind, a slow tingle along the lines of her palms—nothing more. She looked over her shoulder, mouth dry with fear, expecting Corien to come slamming through the door, but the room remained only their own.
Good, said the Prophet. Now try again. Never step out of that little river. Keep your feet cool and grounded, even as your hands begin to blaze. He cannot find you here, little one, not in these waters.
Eliana obeyed, but it was the same. Clumsy and distant, her power. Her hands itched, and there was no way to scratch them.
Quickly, now. Back to your rooms. The Prophet’s voice was urgent, but never frightened. As if they could see a hopeful future Eliana could not.
She obeyed, slipping back down the hallway and into her bed. Her blood punched through her veins even as she focused hard on the calm flow of her river. It was a more challenging exercise than anything she had ever done as the Dread—to balance the Eliana who was a prisoner steeped in pain and despair and the new Eliana, who was beginning to dip her fingers into the pool of her power once more. Its texture and rhythm—how she had missed it.
How terrified she was to awaken it again.
A film of sweat painted her skin as she settled back in her bed. What did my guards see while I was gone?
Your rooms as they should be, the Prophet replied. You, sleeping fitfully in your bed, as they would expect. Now, though, I must go. Sleep, Eliana. You will need it.
Wait. What are we working toward? What is it we’re going to do? Tell me.
Not yet, the Prophet replied after a moment. It’s not safe yet. You’re not strong enough. But you will be.
• • •
Occasionally, Corien would visit the Sunderlands, where mammoth mechanized pieces of weaponry called vaecordia kept the cruciata at bay.
Sometimes the palace would erupt in raucous revels that lasted for days. Corien would drag Eliana to them, ply her with food and drink, dance with her beneath a ceiling glittering with buzzing chandeliers until she collapsed dizzily into his arms. He drugged everything she consumed, she knew, hoping some combination of ingredients would draw out her power.
But they never did.
With each new failure, he would rage, and those were the worst days, when he would strap her to a chair and pummel her mind with his or chase her through the palace with horrific illusions that left her feeling mad and violent, her vision black, her ears buzzing as if clogged with angry bees. What she did in those moments, she never knew. She would wake later in her rooms with her throat raw, blood caked under her fingernails, and vague memories of someone begging her for mercy. She would stumble to her bathing room and scrub herself with scalding water as her guards watched, ever vigilant. And Jessamyn too, sharp-eyed and strangely restless in a way Eliana had never seen from her.
Sometimes luck would bend in her favor, and the revels would take place without her, or Corien would shut himself up in his rooms, reaching out to generals across the world or gorging himself in the mezzanine of his concert hall as the harried orchestra played furiously below.
And these were the hours when the Prophet came and Eliana practiced escape.
• • •
The corridor just outside her rooms, at first, and the little sitting room. Then the stairs at the corridor’s northern end. The music room downstairs, where Corien liked to pound away on a massive piano. A ballroom of rose, midnight blue, and ochre. The dormitories where the palace servants slept. The horrible dark gallery full of Rielle’s likenesses.
Days passed, and then weeks, and with each journey outside her rooms, Eliana’s muscles began to remember their former strength. She had not yet managed to knock over the candlestick, but she had learned much about the massive palace, its twists and turns, and was beginning to feel steadier in body as well as in mind.
Good, said the Prophet. When the day comes for you to leave this place, you will know how to do it well and will be able to defend yourself.
Eliana bit her tongue. Dozens of times, she had asked the Prophet the reason for this work, what day they were waiting for, what schemes the Prophet had designed.
But each time, the Prophet refused to answer. Not yet. Not until you’re stronger and I can be sure every new corner of your mind is well shielded from him.
How am I to know this isn’t some demented game? Eliana asked, bristling. You lead me through the palace night after night; you push me through these exercises of my mind and my power. And for what?
The Prophet sent her a gentle plea, followed by that fondness Eliana so craved, its warmth sweeter than any wine.
Please, trust me, little one, the Prophet said. I have deceived many in my life, but not you. Never you.
And Eliana had no choice but to believe this strange friend whose face she still did not know and hope she wasn’t a fool for daring, yet again, to trust someone who lived behind a mask.
• • •
Then, one night, when the Prophet’s familiar greeting came, it pulled Eliana from a dream so vivid it followed her into waking.
Like trying to recall a word only just beyond her reach, a tightness bent in her chest, pulling her onward. Her fingers tingled. If she closed her eyes, she could hear a thin black rumble, as from a nearing storm. If she opened her eyes and unfocused them, ripples of gold danced at the edges of her vision.
I know where we’ll go tonight, she said, slipping from her bed.
The Prophet’s curiosity curled. Where?
I saw it in my dream.
Will you tell me?
Look for yourself.
You know I don’t like to do that, the Prophet said gently. Not if I don’t have to.
I’ll show you, then.
Tell me first. Please. I must know where we’re going. There was a pause. I don’t want to invade your mind, Eliana. I’m not like him.
I’ll tell you if you tell me what it is we’re working toward. What plans you have for me. Where you are, and if I can come to you.
The Prophet fell silent.
Eliana smiled grimly as she crept into the corridor, past Jessamyn’s frowning figure. For weeks, we’ve been working together. My mind is stronger than it’s ever been. We can talk without him noticing. You can hide me for, what, five hours now, as I move about the palace?
That’s true, the Prophet said, thoughts carefully blank.
Eliana turned a corner, hurried unseen past a patrolling pair of guards. You made me drop that knife for a reason, all those weeks ago. I think I deserve to know it. What is the purpose of this work we’ve been doing? Is it merely a diversion to pass the time?
Not a diversion.
Then what?
The silence continued.
Eliana darted like a shadow across the palace’s second floor, the strange memory of her dream guiding her through a maze of tiled rooms and curtained hallways until she emerged at last into a soft world of green.
It was a vast courtyard, as large as one of Corien’s grandest ballrooms. Walls heaped with flowers, vines spilling down iron trellises, bushes painted bright with berries. Rows of red blooms, oiled wooden tables of seedlings growing roots in glass vials. Enormous shivering ferns, glossy-leaved trees heavy with fruit. Eliana looked up at a ceiling of colored glass. Crimson and gold panes. Vents open to let in the nighttime air.
She cradled the nearest red flower in her hands, caught the familiar sweet scent from her rooms. So this is where he grows these flowers.
The Prophet felt tense and a little befuddled. Your dream showed you this?
Yes, this exactly. Every last detail. And…over here. It showed me this too.
She crawled beneath the seedling tables and disappeared into the courtyard’s thick green gloom. It was absurd, what she was doing, as if she were playing a child’s game. But a strange tension bloomed in her chest, tugging her on, and she had to follow it or she would burst. A strange vibration rattled her teeth, and she remembered forging her castings, plunging her hands into Remy’s wound. This felt the same—the same vitality, the same urgent thread of power growing taut and golden inside her bones.
I think it’s the empirium, she thought. I think it’s trying to show me something.
A slight ripple of alarm from the Prophet. Why do you say that?
Eliana pushed past a tangle of vines. She was deep in the courtyard now, a thick silence all around her. Moss soft under her hands and the air green in her lungs.
Then she saw it, the place from her dream—a tiny dark thicket formed of joined ferns and vines, bordered by the roots of a flowering tree with weeping branches and rough black bark. Hardly large enough for her to curl up in, and yet she pushed her way through the wild growth until she sat hunched in the middle of it, shivering.
“The air feels thin here,” she whispered, slowly moving her fingers through it. “Like I could push it aside and find something else behind it.”
The Prophet had grown very quiet. Would you like to try?
Yes, Eliana replied, trembling. Her castings warmed against her skin. But I don’t think I can.
Maybe something small, first. Something natural. Not a candlestick, but a tree. Can you coax its roots from the earth?
Eliana tried, her skin soon slick with sweat. The roots remained wedged in the black soil, but the air changed, vitalized with a humming hot charge. Eliana reached out with her power, guiding it to hold on to the feeling. The world buzzed with heat, as did her skin, and she felt herself lifting up off the ground to follow the air’s new current.
Then she lost her grip and sank back to the dirt, exhausted and cold. Castings dark, head aching.
You’re doing so well, little one, said the Prophet, and Eliana clung to the warmth of those words.
They returned to the garden again and again, and each time Eliana crept on her hands and knees into her quiet, dark thicket, she felt a tiny piece of her old strength return to her. It was slow progress, for Corien’s punishments continued, even more vicious than before. He could sense the change in her but couldn’t discover its source, and he threw his fury at her with his fists and his mind. After these torments, body and mind battered, Eliana moved slowly, and her thoughts were sometimes too scattered to focus properly.
Some nights, she could not move from her bed at all, and the Prophet simply comforted her, whispering words Eliana’s sluggish mind couldn’t understand, sending the illusion of soft hands on her back.
Once, Corien spent twenty hours straight in her mind, searching through its every crevice for the answer to what was happening, somehow, right beneath his nose. And Eliana lost all sense of pride and self as those jagged spikes of pain split open her skull. She sobbed on the floor, twisting and jerking in Corien’s grip, and mired in that black agony, the only word she could summon was Simon.
She screamed it over and over, reaching for the door as if he stood just beyond it. If she screamed loudly enough, he would come for her. If she begged him, he would save her.
And then the door did open, and Simon strode toward her, picked her up from the floor, brushed his lips against her forehead. She knew he was not there. Corien’s wicked glee carved down her back like an ax’s blade. And yet Simon felt so real, so familiar, that she pressed her face against his chest and clung to him.
He brought her to the little bed at Willow, underneath the slanted ceiling. The glowing brazier in the corner, the rain pattering against the windows. Safe in his arms, warm in their bed, she allowed herself a moment to enjoy the lie.
Then she wrenched herself away, kicked him when he reached for her, scooped hot coals from the brazier and flung them at his face.
Blackness, then, and Corien’s voice mocking her as she fell.
For days, she tossed in the grip of cackling dreams, and when she next woke, her rooms were hushed.
She sat up, donned one of her nightgowns, walked unsteadily toward the door.
I’m so sorry, little one, the Prophet said, their voice thick with anguish. If I could take all of this from you, I would.
I don’t need your apologies, Eliana said sharply. I need you to hide me.
And in the garden, wrapped in the Prophet’s fierce cloak, Eliana cracked open the earth and pulled roots from it with only her power. She reached for the air, used it to push a path clear through the ferns, deeper into the garden. Delving down into the soil, she coaxed up water until it pooled around her in cool gurgling puddles.
Her castings glowed faintly, washing the thicket in pale gold.
He tries to break you, the Prophet said, voice warm with pride, and he fails utterly. Well done.
Simon’s echo whispered through her hair. Eliana shook it free, set her jaw.
I’d like to try something new, she thought. Ribbons of pale light streamed unbroken through her veins. Her power mirrored the new strength of her mind. They were connected, her mind and her body, and they in turn were connected to the water at her toes, and the roots she tucked back down into the earth so the tree could drink.
She heard the roots guzzle, ripples of the empirium betraying their primal, unthinking appetite, and she understood the feeling.
Her power was ready and coated in steel. It was hungry. And she ached to feed it.
The Prophet was wary. What will you do? Tell me.
It’s like I said before, Eliana replied. The world is so thin here. The air feels fragile.
Her fingers buzzing and hot, her castings like little stars relearning their light, she thrust her hands forward, then pushed them apart, palms out. A wave of energy detonated, but she stopped it, absorbing it with her own flesh and blood so it would not shake the palace.
The Prophet marveled. Oh, Eliana. Watching you work is a joy I have not felt in an age.
Eliana only half listened, her hands still buried in the air. Gold veins of the empirium crackled around her fingers. Each grain of light painting the thicket gold whispered to her, and she listened closely, staring at the impossible thing before her.
A shape floated in the air, dark and thin, like the pupil of a cat’s eye. Its insides roiled with stormy color—indigo and violet, a blue so brilliant it was nearly white. At once, Eliana felt pulled toward it, as if it were a mouth greedy to swallow her.
She dug in her toes, braced her hands against the earth. In her mind, the Prophet’s surprise hummed like a struck bell.
What is this? Eliana asked.
A seam, the Prophet said carefully. You have opened many across the world without knowing it in those moments when you called upon your power in fear and anger. This, though—look how even it is, how precise. It was your focused will, Eliana, that opened this door.
Eliana stared at it. Something pulled at her shoulders, beckoning her forward. She searched the darkness, the angry light shifting inside it, and saw a faint vista of low hills, scattered pine woodlands, a sky purple with twilight.
A door to where? she wondered, her heart pounding, and before the Prophet could answer, Eliana’s hands flew to the seam. She gripped the edges and pried them open wider until it was possible for her to slip inside.
The Prophet flew into a panic. Eliana, wait!
But the empirium had pulled her to this place, and now golden whispers tugged her forward.
here
HERE
come see
they are everywhere
hurry
Before the Prophet could stop her, Eliana held her breath, shut her eyes, and stepped through the fissure into what lay beyond.
Her feet hit solid ground. She opened her eyes and saw gray clouds moving fast across a violet sky. The hills were shallow and rolling, furred in downy green grass, and there was not another living thing in sight. No animals, no people. There was not even wind. Only a quiet that felt unnatural. An eerie, pale light suffused it all, like a dusk tinged with storms. Black clouds edged every horizon, and below her feet, past the green of the grass, shifted a vast darkness, as if the meadow and hills were only a thin veil cloaking something terrible and lightless.
Then a bird called out, and when Eliana looked up to find it, she saw far above her the shifting faint shape of an enormous winged beast. It fluttered past, sending darkness rippling across the sky, and was gone, but another followed in its wake, and then another, and three more, slithering and serpentine, each of them a behemoth.
Eliana stepped back, staring in horror. What she had thought were gray clouds were in fact the shadows of these creatures, swarming from horizon to horizon.
A sickening heat blossomed at her breastbone and flooded her fingers. She ducked low, searching in vain for something to hide beneath. But the unnatural quiet remained, and when Eliana looked back at the sky, she saw that it looked just the same as before. The monstrous shapes were no nearer to her. It was as if she and this strange green world existed within a bubble beyond which writhed gargantuan beasts—but whether they were far away or very near, she could not guess. At least, it seemed, they could not reach her.
She slowly straightened, forcing her breathing to calm. Cold sweat prickled the back of her neck.
Then, a glottal cry split the air, puncturing the eerie quiet. On the horizon, something long and dark and twisting dropped out of the clouds and began to fly. This was no distant gray shape. This was clear and sharp, long-tailed with broad black wings, and approaching fast.
Eliana spun around and ran for the thin vertical slice of lush green marking her path back to Corien’s palace. Long minutes passed before she managed to push through it, for a great force was shoving back against her.
But with a last controlled burst of power, she managed it, tumbling out into the garden courtyard. She whirled to grab the seam’s edges. Her fingers tingled as if she had plunged them into water hot enough to burn. The seam sucked at her; that place, whatever it was, wanted her back. But she fought its force, wrenched the sizzling edges back together, and used her power to seal shut the fissure. Only a faint glimmer remained in the air, and then it was gone.
Breathless in the dirt, clammy with sweat, Eliana reached for the Prophet. What was that place? What did I see?
The Prophet’s voice was breathless with relief and wonder.
You saw the cruciata, they replied. And you were in the Deep.