His face was the last thing she saw before she fell into the abyss.
Into the darkness, she fell.
She could hear Six screeching, fighting against the shadows to get to her, and as the light from above faded, and the surface shrank …
Something dove in after her.
Two dark wings.
Six.
She felt the raphon swoop beneath her, and the feeling of falling disappeared as Six’s body caught hers.
There was no pain.
There was only warmth as her eyelids fluttered closed.
‘Ezer.’
She gasped at the voice.
Because it wasn’t Styerra.
She knew at once … it was the One.
It was ancient, and powerful, a voice that she felt rumble through her.
‘Please,’ she thought to it, while she clung to Six. She thought Six was flying up, but there was no surface in sight. They were lost in the darkness, so thick that not even Ezer’s scarred eye revealed a thing to her. ‘I’m not ready to die.’
She felt now that they were in some placeother.
A place not quite living and not quite dead.
‘Then you mustlisten to the last truths of the Shadow Tome … and believe.’
And as they tumbled through darkness … the One told her the rest of the story.
‘It was in the black mountains, a land of darkness and omens, that Wrenwyn discovered the whisper. It came from a crack in the stones, a fracture in which the One was able to peer through, for the belief in the Five had waned just enough that it was able to free its voice.
A single tendril of its soul.
A mere shadow.
‘I am the One,’ it told Wrenwyn, and the princess knelt there on the edge of the world as it promised her many things.
Power and freedom, a life without holds on her magic. A life without laws to keep, where no one could tell her what to do, or who she was, or what to believe.
She wept as she listened, for she’d never had a choice of her own.
It was always the will of the Five, and the Masters, who forced it upon her.
‘What must I do,’ Wrenwyn asked, ‘to hold on to this promise?’
The One had only a single request:
‘Become my Acolyte.’
A mortal representative, someone to go before and sow distrust in the Five.
