2
Just a girl, her horse, and the endless Void
The Curtain had no weight—less like cloth, more like a tear. A thin spot in the fabric of the Autumn Plane. Normal humans couldn’t see the doorways sprinkled throughout their worlds, would only note a chill in the air as they passed.
Ever since giving death a solid “not today, thanks” on that riverbank as a kid, Fi saw Curtains clear as the hand in front of her.
She reached for the translucent shroud, clinging to the back of her Void horse, cart slowed by the mud. Cold rippled goosebumps down her arms. Fi pushed back. She drew energy out of forearm muscles, Shaped it into a pulse of glowing silver at her fingertips. Like slicing a hand through thick mist. The veil consumed her, crimson leaves and birch trunks fading to black as she left the Autum Plane.
They emerged onto tundra. Dense forest snapped into peat and lichen-crusted stone, firm ground beneath hooves, day turned to night. Moonlight swathed the open expanse, though no moon appeared in the sky. Not a single star.
This wasn’t Autumn. Not any Plane, but rather a Bridge, a narrow path connecting worlds like a log felled across a river.
And that starless sky overhead, that maw of black emptiness:a view straight into the Void, the endless liminal space that stretched between realities.
Fi scanned the hillocks, alert for pursuers. Only Voidwalkers, brushed by death, couldseeCurtains, but other humans could step through one if they knew its location.
Beneath her, Aisinay’s nostrils flared at the change in the air, the scent of ozone and eternity from the Void. This was her native land. Millennia ago, horses from some Plane had wandered onto a Bridge, adapting to the barren landscape. The blind beast lurched to a full gallop, guided by currents of energy even Fi couldn’t sense, hooves flying over tundra.
Fi breathed deep of the starless sky. The frigid rock underfoot that cracked with the dust of infinity. She may have been born upon a Plane, but she understood the lift in Aisinay’s strides. Her greatest freedom had always come from fleeing into nothingness. A second home, ever since that river tried—and failed—to claim her.
Fi steered Aisinay past glassy tundra pools, over heather with ghostly silver leaves, to the base of a ridge. She slipped off the horse’s bare back, crouching as she climbed to higher ground. A breeze brushed the Void-and-rainbow curls of her hair, air crisp like after a lightning strike.
Nothing moved upon the tundra. No shouts of pursuing trade wardens.
Fi grinned. Amateurs, thinking they could haul her in for five measly energy chips.
In the valley below, train tracks glinted in phantom moonlight. Trans-Plane trains crossed all the major Bridges, the lifeblood of commerce between the four Season-Locked worlds, but Fi steered clear of the major thoroughfares. After ensuring her crate and cargo remained intact, she swung onto Aisinay’s scaled back, urging the horse forward at a more leisurely pace.
Over the next ridge, the ground fell away into black.
While Planes spanned wide enough to encompass great cities, vast territories, Bridges were significantly smaller, mere slivers of reality within the Void. At the border, rock came to a jagged halt, only empty black beyond. Since Fi was a little girl, she could never resist peering over the edge of existence, wondering what it would feel like to just… jump in.
Certain death, of course. Bridges offered paths to walk through the Void separating Planes, but no one ever came back after stepping into the abyss itself.
Except for the daeyari.
Legend said the beasts were flesh and blood once. All living creatures passed their energy to the Void when they died. But unlike all other living creatures, the daeyari had refused death, somehow clawing their energy back onto the material Planes, returning as immortal.
Uninterested in a horrific demise on this—and all—occasions, Fi guided Aisinay along the ridgeline, a safe distance from the plummet into doom. Bridges had more than one exit Curtain to the Planes they linked. She’d spent her life poking through hundreds of Curtains, testing where they led, cataloguing useful connections. Some were innocuous: a rural clearing on the Autumn Plane, useful for covert meetings. Her cart rumbled over rocky ground, passing several more Curtains that smelled of tree tannin and loamy soil.
Then, a shift to pine and ice.
Fi steered Aisinay through a familiar Curtain, palm raised to part reality one more time.
Towering pine trees greeted them, a night-shrouded forest quiet with snow and a breeze through dark needles. Frigid air curled Fi’s breath, a scent of cold and conifers. The sky of the Winter Plane swam with stars, framed by jagged mountainsand a green aurora—the lingering energy of dead souls gone to the Void, a hum of almost-voices on the wind.
Home. No matter how far she wandered.
Fi slipped off Aisinay’s back, landing with a crunch of snow beneath her boots. She patted the horse’s neck. Then, a shout to the sky.
“FuckCardigan,” she told the looming shiverpines, the weeping firs bent with ice. “Void-damned asshole.”
Aisinay snorted, her finned tail brushing snow.
“Right?” Fi agreed with matching indignation.
The horse pawed the ground, ears tilted toward the cart. Fi stroked her muzzle.
