“Saipha?” I whisper. No response. “Saipha!” Louder. The darkness swallows her name, not even giving me an echo in reply. I shuffle through the inky blackness in the direction she disappeared, breath and body trembling. “Saipha!” I shout.
I’m met with nothing but silence, and the feeling of danger looms over me like a predator.
Something catches my eye. I spin in place. A blue flame hovers in the distance, casting the dirt floor in an otherworldly glow. If I can see it, maybe Saipha can, too. I run toward it.
The blue fire darts away just as I’m about to step into its glow. I pivot hard, trying to keep up. It teases me through a seeminglyendless space that holds nothing but shadowed mists and dirt floors. All the while, I’m calling for Saipha.
Still, no response.
The ball of flame darts right, and I turn, then stop when a gust of warm air is accompanied by a low growl. Freezing in place, I notice a dagger-sharp talon the size of my leg curling by my foot. Mercy, I nearly tripped over—
My chest locks tight as my gaze drags upward to a thick, monstrous arm and across a broad, scaled chest. Up a neck that coils with terrible grace toward a face carved from every nightmare I’ve ever swallowed down.
Behind it, terror seizes my chest as wings unfurl, vast and silent, blotting out the dark with something darker still. I can’t move.
Then I see its eyes. Obsidian pools split by lilac slits—cold, unblinking, and locked on me.
The sound that leaves my throat isn’t a scream. It’s a whimper. Small. Broken.
And far too human.
17
I scream as something slams into me from the right, knocking me to the ground with a thud and forcing the air from my lungs. The dragon’s tail, maybe? With a groan, I roll and gain my feet, arms spread, ready to defend myself from talon and tooth and whatever else the beast has planned.
But I take a step back and trip on something.
“Isola,” Saipha rasps, and I almost cry at the sound of her voice coming from the dirt floor at my feet. I reach down, and her fingers find mine, gripping me almost painfully. “S-sorry I ran into you,” she whispers. It was my friend, not a dragon that knocked me down.
Saipha releases my hand, and I spin in a circle, expecting death for both of us at any moment. But there’s nothing. No purple glowing eyes. No hissing. And no dragon. Nothing. We’re alone.
“Did you see it?” I whisper.
“I saw a lot of things.” Her voice is thin and trembling. She sounds as shaken as me. “I don’t know what in the dragon-burned hells this place is, but I want out of it. Now.”
How could she not have seen it? The monster was right here. I scan the void. There’s not even enough light to see Saipha at my feet. It scares something primal in me, causing the fine hairs on the back of my neck to rise. Closing my eyes, I rely on my other senses, strain my ears and focus on feeling vibrations in the floor.
There are neither of those, but a certain sense still flares. When I was a little girl, Mum called me talented with Ether. Father even said he thought I had the senses of a future artificer. But everything changed after the attack. Their enthusiasm turned to worry. My body no longer felt safe, but like some dangerousobject I happened to inhabit.
Maybe…I should stop being afraid of it. Maybe my worst fears are true, and it’s not Etherlight but Ethershade I feel. Maybe my earlier hope was misplaced and these senses are further proof I’m cursed.
But, if being cursed is about to help my friend, then I’m going to use it.
I take a deep breath and focus as Mum taught me—just like I did last night under the dragon automaton, allowing my mind and body to relax and receive. Points of dense energy on each of the walls coalesce in my mind, and I can feel the invisible currents of Etherlight strung between them, forming a web. One we’re currently stuck in.
I know what this is. I read about it in one of Father’s journals years ago—it didn’t have any sketches of sigils but was full of theories on them. He might have even created the web and sigils himself. And then there’s the smell…
“It’s not real,” I whisper.
“What?”
“None of it is real.” I help Saipha to her feet. “No matter what it shows you, just hold on to me and keep walking.”
Slowly, I lead her to where I still envision one of the points of energy on the wall. But before I can reach it, she shrieks and jerks from my hold, her footfalls pounding over the stone in the darkness like she’s running for her life.
Instinct tells me to chase after my friend. But undoing this is what’ll really help her.
“Not real, Saipha!” I shout after her but continue heading to the point I’d been guiding us toward. I pull off my boot and use it to get enough height to smudge it across the stone where I sense the energy coming from, hoping that this sigil, like the others, is drawn in chalk and not anything more permanent.
