Eliana
“Kalmaroth and I were boys together. Once, I even loved him. We brought back to our houses injured birds and nursed them to health before releasing them into the wild. We played in our mothers’ gardens, read books and practiced mathematics in his father’s study. Our houses crawled with happy, fat cats; Kal never met a stray he didn’t want to bring home and spoil. But whoever that boy was is gone. In his place is a man who burns with dissatisfaction, with unanswerable questions, with disdain for anyone whose mind cannot match his. His jealousy of humans and their power is consuming him. I no longer recognize him. I see in his eyes a cold gleam that freezes my blood. He must be stopped.”
—Writings of the angel Aryava, archived in the First Great Library of Quelbani
In a narrow alleyway near Elysium’s factory district, where massive buildings churned out smoke day and night, Eliana found her way back into the Deep.
Inside the factory walls, mechanized creations designed by angels and operated by human prisoners clanked and whirred, producing armor and weapons. The streets were slick with soot and oil, and still every stained cornice was exquisite.
Eliana knelt near one of the refuse pits, where those humans whose beauty the angels had tired of sorted through scraps and shoveled waste. The hot, acrid air stung her eyes. She tasted metal on her tongue. Behind her, violent cries rose throughout the white city. Vaera Bashta’s prisoners were sweeping through the streets on tides of blood, and Ostia—the great eye in the sky, rimmed in blue-white—shone its light upon all.
In this place of rot and ruin, Eliana raised her trembling, tired arms into the air and drew it apart. Her mind held fast to the image of the fissure she had already opened in the sky above Elysium. There. She sent the thought through the veins of her power, guiding it. She needed not only a door into the Deep, but a door that would lead her there, to the fissure waiting and widening and the air stretching thin within it. Her castings were fire in her palms; in her chest, the empirium turned in searing blades. It had guided her to this alleyway full of smoke, and she clung to it. A rope in a blizzard of ash, taut and tough.
Or perhaps it was you who guided the empirium, the Prophet had told her. You who told it what you needed and where to take you.
Eliana shivered, her skin soaked with sweat. Her ruined gown clung to her, its jewels winking cruelly.
Somewhere, Corien brooded, nearing the end of his amusement.
The Prophet’s voice was thin with strain. Hurry, Eliana. The world spins ever faster.
The moment the seam she had opened was wide enough, Eliana held her breath and stepped through it—and walked into a world at war.
She faltered at the sight before her, then set her jaw and moved through it. This world the Deep was showing her, this echo of a place that existed elsewhere, was different from the one she had seen before. Lavish sculptures of bronze and gold ornamented rooftops and shop fronts. Squat towers blanketed in ivy flanked a wide gray road down which armored soldiers marched in gleaming lines.
They held long spears with wicked points, swords polished to brilliance. The people they marched upon fled in screaming chaos, dragging their children and animals behind them. Some knelt with guns on their shoulders and fired, but when they hit their targets and the soldiers fell, only moments passed before they rose unsteadily to their feet again, their wounds closed, and resumed their inexorable forward march.
Eliana’s blood ran cold at the sight of them. Their eyes were not black, and yet…
What’s happening here? She tried to block out the echoes of screams tumbling down the road. What is this place?
My sight through your mind is dim just now, but if I see correctly, it is a world called Sath, the Prophet said, their voice so distant that it frightened Eliana. I recognize it. I have seen it myself. When your mother died, the shock resounded through the Deep. Holes opened into many worlds. Some angels lost faith in Kalmaroth long ago and have no desire to return to Avitas. They are making homes elsewhere.
Eliana’s bile rose. Why would any of them wait in the Deep to return to Avitas, then? When they could go to other worlds and escape the Deep’s torment?
The Prophet’s voice came quietly. Because Corien is a force unmatched, and has ingrained in so many angels a thirst for vengeance that cannot be slaked. Because some angels would endure a thousand more years of torment if it meant they could someday come home. A pause. Others despair at the devastating futility of war and want to protect humans from extermination. There are many reasons.
Eliana felt trapped between a great sorrow and an anger pure as ice. Is there no end to the ruin my mother has wrought?
Eliana, you must hurry. Do not allow the Deep to distract you. Remember what you must do.
She obeyed. A dim blue-white glow on the horizon caught her eye. She fixed on it and ran, her feet slamming hard against the road that wasn’t there. As the world of distant Sath sped by, darkness flashed and fluttered at the corners of her eyes: the true Deep, cold and endless, choked with beasts and raw power. The sky was teeming with cruciata, close enough now that Eliana’s tongue tingled with the hot rank stench of their massive bodies. Wings fluttered against her skin; something sharp and thin cut her upper arm. As she ran, she felt the air surge behind her. If she looked back, she knew she would see horrors swarming fast on her heels.
The beasts had been waiting for her. They were ready.
So was she.
Ignoring the dark brimming sky, she kept her gaze on Ostia, its light growing brighter and nearer as she ran, until at last she reached the fissure she had made—a jagged glowing cut through the Deep, and into Avitas.
Eliana went to its sizzling edge and sank carefully to her knees. Her original small cut had expanded to an area some sixty yards square. Shocks of light and color bloomed across it. Beyond and below rippled the faint shapes of Elysium.
Eliana’s pulse beat fast in her throat. She unfocused her eyes and let the empirium wash over her. Waves of gold, surging at her fingers. She could see how thin the fabric of the Deep had become within Ostia’s jagged ring. Only a thin membrane of power remained. A brittle pane of glass, ready to be shattered.
She pressed her toes against the hard road beneath her and believed it was real. She said a silent prayer that this would be enough. She gathered her power into her mind, imagined it as spears, sharp and ready.
Then she plunged her hands into Ostia’s bright edge and let her power explode across it. White light crackled against her fingers and snaked up her arms, as if she were elbow-deep in frothing water. Her castings blazed so hot that her instinct was to rip them off, but she gritted her teeth and kept pushing her hands outward, the pain shooting up her arms so specific and supple that it approached pleasure. Her vision lost all colors but gold.
Then, at last, the fabric of the Deep stretching thinly across Ostia’s mouth gave way.
There was a great hot shudder beneath her hands as of a beast heaving its last breath. A bolt of energy shot up through Eliana’s arms, and she fell back onto the road, gasping. Quickly, she braced her palms against the illusion of stone. She had to keep hold of the lie, for the thing happening before her eyes was so unthinkable that her head spun in protest.
Ostia had been opened. Angry light crackled across its mouth. It had at last become what Eliana had hoped for from that first moment when she awoke in her white rooms and thought of carving a door in the sky.
Her mother had opened the Gate.
And she had opened Ostia. A hole in the Deep. A door leading out from the abyss. Through it, Elysium was clear as a spotless reflection.
You’ve done it, came the Prophet’s voice, dim but triumphant.
Then the cruciata dove.
They tore down from the sky, plunging out of the Deep and into Elysium, a monstrous river of fury. Their clamor was so great it was as if all the beasts in Avitas had lifted their heads to the sky and howled as one. They screamed and wailed, clawing at each other, hungry to be the first to fly through and feed. Some were immense and bulbous, hulking beasts with flat snouts and paws like bludgeons. Others were slender and serpentine, and still others were avian, their hides a mottled mix of scales and feathers.
Eliana’s blood iced over as she watched the raptors fly. She remembered them from the attack outside Karlaine. One had grabbed Patrik and flung him to the ground, breaking his leg. Eliana had killed another with her dagger. The light of Ostia scorched them as they passed through it, leaving their feathers charred, but they flew on uncaring, their fanged beaks open wide.
The cruciata had come from another world. Hosterah, the Prophet had called it. They were mighty enough to survive the Deep.
But Elysium would not survive them.
Her gut clenched with horror as she thought of the innocent lives below that would end in claws and teeth. How many beasts had she already loosed from the Deep, and how many more would fight their way through?
But she did not see another way to fight him, not without this distraction to help her. And if she did not fight him, they were all dead anyway.
Only once did she allow herself to imagine Remy, pursued down a blood-stained street by a monster with gaping jaws. Then, slowly, her hands trembling, she crouched at Ostia’s threshold, its ragged hem sizzling around her. The force emanating from it threatened to hurl her back into the Deep. She clung to Ostia’s bright rim, watching the churning stream of cruciata. Not all of them were able to escape the Deep’s pull. Some were tossed away from Ostia; others clawed at nothing, pinned immobile by a force they could not fight.
But the stronger among them were able to escape. Eliana saw a nearing raptor and liked the look of it. The Prophet said something, a warning, but Eliana ignored them and threw herself onto the raptor’s back as it passed her. She hit it hard, flung her arms around its meaty scaled neck, and braced herself for the fall.
A ring of heat burned past them as they dove, peeling scales and feathers from the raptor’s hide. But then they were through, the beast shrieking as it steadied its wings. It tried bucking Eliana off in midair. Its tail caught an angelic statue and sent it smashing to pieces on the road below.
Eliana, her eyes blurred with tears from the wind, saw a rooftop nearby. She tried to roll as she landed, but she was out of practice and fell badly. The impact jarred her knees, and she cut her arm on a jagged slate tile. She slid down the roof, grabbed on to the cornice and clung there, legs swinging, until she realized the ground below wasn’t far and let go. On the road, she stumbled forward, gritting her teeth against the starbursts of pain that lit up her legs. As the Dread, she could have jumped onto that roof and felt nothing. The thought came and went swiftly, an echo of her former life.
She raced through Elysium with no sense of where to go next, desperate to call for the Prophet. Ostia’s light had darkened, washing the city in an angry purple-red, as if every tower had been dashed with blood. The Prophet had told her that her friends would soon arrive and then they could act, they could meet at last. But when? And who?
But she asked the Prophet nothing and kept her mind firmly shut. Corien would be looking for her. Using her mind to seek the Prophet would light her up like a beacon.
Instead, she imagined her river, the cool satin currents of it carrying her swiftly into the city’s congested heart. She climbed a low wall, raced up a slowly winding staircase to one of the city’s higher levels. Cruciata streamed past her, their tails lashing, their wild calls a ravenous chorus. Some—feline, quick and yowling—darted over rooftops and up walls with ease. Shrieking flocks of raptors glided fast overhead. They dove and pounced, feasting upon anything that moved—the prisoners of Vaera Bashta, ripped from their own kills, and the citizens of Elysium in their shredded finery.
None of them touched Eliana, but she didn’t think their gratitude would last forever. She needed to find a safe hiding place before their mood changed.
Remembering the rooftop courtyard from earlier that night, she turned sharply left, then right, then up two broad flights of stained stone steps. She could have wept with relief to see the familiar narrow staircase, the apartment building with its yawning cruciata gargoyles.
Over her shoulder, she glimpsed the cruciata still flooding down from the sky. They spread fast across the city in rivers of darkness. Soon they would find the bridges, the tent cities sprawling across the rocky fields beyond.
She turned away from the sight, hands in fists as she ran. She would kill them once they had served their purpose. When the Emperor was defeated and the Empire had fallen, she would destroy any beast that still lived and close both Ostia and the Gate.
She only had to survive until then.
On the rooftop, on the terrace bordered with curling white stone, she found the ivy-draped arbor she had hidden beneath only hours before, and froze. Under the arbor, two small boys huddled in the arms of an old man and a woman plump with child.
The elder boy had his hand clamped over the younger one’s mouth. All of them stared at Eliana until she held up her hands, shook her head, and smiled. They relaxed, smiled back. The woman even scooted aside to make room for her.
Then Corien found her.
He appeared suddenly, striding across the terrace. His coat was pristine—long and black, pressed and embroidered, buttoned at his shoulder with a set of gold wings.
One of the little boys cried out. Corien snarled under his breath, flung out his arm. The next moment, everyone hiding beneath the arbor crumpled to the ground, their eyes empty.
Eliana knew it was futile to run but tried it anyway. Corien kicked her legs, sent her crashing to the roof. Her castings, dull and dark, clattered against the stone.
He grabbed her hair, wrenched her hard to her feet. She cried out, scalp stinging and eyes watering, and tried to whirl and punch him. Her exhausted mind remembered too late the knives strapped to her waist.
Corien found them first and ripped her belt from her. Arabeth skidded across the stone and into the shadows. He tossed the other knives over the side of the roof. He said nothing, which terrified her. He loved to hear himself talk, loved how he could make people squirm with his words. But even his mind-speak had vanished. His face was a beautiful white mask of fury.
He dragged her toward the steps, one hand in her hair and the other clutching a handful of her gown. The simple, primal part of her mind that knew only that she was prey pounded on her skull, begging her to scream for help. But any scream would go unnoticed in the demented arena Elysium had become, and if she screamed with her mind, Corien could find the Prophet.
She gasped for breath as he pulled her down the stairs, his iron grip sending hot spikes of pain down her spine. But she would not allow her power to rise and defend her. She could feel its anger; it had not been long since she had used it. It would be so easy, it told her, to let it out.
WE RISE
The empirium roared at her, its blazing fists punching through her veins.
“No,” she whispered, begging it to quiet. “No, no, no.”
Corien paid no attention to her, his pace relentless. She had never prayed harder in her life. A single, simple word: No. No power, no fire, no light. She pushed her entire body into the word. Her castings stayed cold in her palms.
A cloud of black bloomed before her eyes, lifting only when Corien threw her to the ground.
She blinked, the wind knocked out of her. Rielle’s flat, brass eyes stared down at her. They were back in the palace, in the gallery of her mother. Eliana lay inert as Corien swung a sword through a spun-glass rendering of Rielle, slashed an oil painting with the blade’s tip. He seized the brass statue perched on its pedestal above Eliana and flung it into the shadows. The noise was deafening, all the more so for his silence.
Eliana panted, sweat burning her eyes. She couldn’t move much, but she could see he had cleared a space around where she lay, a circle of destruction.
At last, he spoke.
“This is it, Eliana,” he said, his voice vibrating with something she couldn’t name. Appetite, or fury, or maybe exhaustion. “This is the end of our game.”
She strained to look at him. If she saw his face, would she know what he felt? She could sense nothing of him in her mind. He was keeping himself away from her.
Then his wide grin appeared. He was not alone.
Simon stood rigid at his side, Corien’s hand tight around his wrist. Simon’s lip was swollen and bloody from Corien’s backhand hours earlier. For a fleeting moment, Simon’s eyes locked with hers. Blue of ice, blue of fire. The look shook her, unraveling what was left of her fraying calm.
“Simon?” she whispered.
“Yes, Simon’s here too,” said Corien. “I assume you remember what he can do? He’s going to do it for me, here, now. I’m going to tear your goddamned power out of your veins once and for all. I’m going to batter open your mind and dig until I can twist everything you are around my fingers.”
She stared at Corien, her mouth dry, her heart beating so fast it left her buzzing. There was a twitchiness to him that she had never seen before, his face pulsing at the temple, at the corner of his upper lip.
She dared to look hard at his black eyes and wondered how many minds they held inside them—and how close they were to slipping from his grasp.
“I’ll die,” she told him. “Then you’ll have nothing.”
He crouched to stroke her cheek. “What do I care, once Simon has sent me back to her? I’ll have your mother. I can be rid of you at last.”
Frantic, she tried to rise. “You don’t want to see her. You failed her once—you lost her once. You’ll do it again.”
Corien stood, looking down upon her coldly. A madness lit his eyes. “No, Eliana. I see now the mistakes I made. I won’t make them this time.”
Then he plunged inside her. An inferno flaying open every fold of her mind, scorching clean every corner she had worked so desperately to hide. Everything he had done in her months at the palace was nothing compared to this. The pain sucked her breath from her, left her writhing soundlessly. She clawed at the slick floor, her gasps choked and hoarse. She tried to say a single word, to focus on a single image. Blue eyes, locked with her own. Instead of No, her prayer shifted.
Simon. Her mind screamed it, and every image of him her mind had ever stored away flew at her. She reached for them, tried to grab hold of one and press it close. Simon!
“Come, Simon!” Corien howled, jubilant. “How long can you stand to watch her like this? Hours? Days? Weeks? I am ageless. I am infinite. I can burn her until the world falls apart around us!”
“I will watch for however long it takes you to succeed, my lord,” came Simon’s flat voice.
“Such a loyal pup you are, such a beautiful crag of a man. But even you, ice-cold as you are, will tire of her screams. The human mind can only stand to witness so much pain.” He shoved Simon. “Put up your hands! Find me a thread, Simon! Do it!”
Simon obeyed, his arms rising stiffly.
Corien’s fingers, wedged deep in Eliana’s thoughts, twisted savagely. A scream did burst from her then. She was hidden in her thicket in that lush courtyard garden. In the Blue Room on the admiral’s ship. At the glittering masked ball in Festival, in her warm candlelit room at Willow. She was in Orline, black and lithe, leaping from rooftop to rooftop with Harkan at her side. She was in her bedroom, listening to Remy read her a story about the saints.
She was in Ioseph Ferracora’s arms, watching the sun rise, looking shyly up at the crumbling statue of the Lightbringer, noble and tireless on his winged horse.
Her scream found a word. “Simon!” Her fingers were rigid; her bones would soon pop from her skin. “Simon, please!”
“Simon, please! Simon, please!” Corien burst into wild laughter. “Can you feel the threads, Simon? Can you sense them coming? She won’t last long. I can feel her every shield cracking. Poor little Eliana.” He leaned close, shouted in her ear. “Poor little Eliana! So brave, so noble, so needlessly fucking stupid! You could have been happy, you idiot girl. You could have had everything you wanted, and instead you wriggle on the ground like a caught worm, soaked in your own piss!”
Eliana sucked down air like a child newly born, but it wasn’t enough. Her lungs were burning, her mind a shrieking white storm. Her castings began to warm; her power had tolerated this indignity for long enough. It swelled fast inside her, a boiling sea rushing for the shore.
She couldn’t clench her fingers; instead, she slammed her palms against the floor, willing her castings dark. A vision came: herself smashing her head on the tile until it split. Corien’s delight slithered inside her. He would allow her that after she had given him what he wanted. She could bash her head open to her heart’s content.
Soon, her mind would slip altogether. Her power would burst out and awaken Simon’s marque blood, and that would be the end. It would all have been for nothing.
The breath she drew rattled in her chest, an inward wail. “Simon!”
Then Corien flew back from Eliana, and his mind tore free of her. Something had come between them; some cold door of stone had shut on the reaching crawl of his fingers. He stumbled into a toppled statue, crashed inelegantly to the floor.
“It’s her,” he breathed. “She’s here.” And then laughter shook him, bubbling up until it became a cackle, shrill and beastly. Where Simon was, Eliana didn’t know. She reached feebly across the floor, hot red-black pain surging up to drown her.
Corien’s wild howl hurt her bleeding ears. “Show your face to me, you snake! Where are you? What have you done?”
And then, another voice, quiet and thin, only for Eliana to hear: Stay with us, little one. Just a little longer. Help is coming. Help is close.
The Prophet. The last two words Eliana’s mind formed before a gentle hand, a familiar tenderness, guided her into blissful oblivion.