My voice. Except, it wasn’t me who had spoken the words. I wasn’t sure they’d even been spoken out loud. They seemed to echo through my head, like something from a nightmare.
And no matter how hard I fought, I could not wake up.
TWO
Nova
The floorboards creaked and groaned beneath my boots as I picked my way through the wreckage of what looked like it had once been a grand library. Dust coated nearly every surface. The sweltering air was thick with a mixture of memory and melancholy, clinging to my body and making each of my steps feel heavier than the last; its embrace was an odd combination of comforting and suffocating.
Thalia, my near-constant companion as of late, stepped through the crumbling doorway behind me, knocking cobwebs aside as she came. She breathed out a slow, astonished breath. Her amethyst eyes widened slightly as she walked to the center of the vast room, taking in the shelves rising all around us. A thin sheen of sweat coated her brown skin, and her chest rose and fell with labored effort, despite her fitness—more signs of the strange weight this place possessed…
And more reminders that my magic wasn’t enough to insulate us from the heaviness, despite how hard I’d been trying to expand my abilities over the past month.
“Your brother is going to be incredibly jealous when he realizes what we’ve been up to,” Thalia said, making her way to the nearest shelf and reaching for a leather-bound book. Its cover was cracked, barely holding it together. Its brittle pages whispered like wind through dry leaves as she carefully flipped through them.
“No doubt,” I agreed. Bastian would have been beside himself just to get his hands on that single tome she held, let alone to bestandinghere, surrounded by a thousand other books that looked equally ancient and interesting. “Eamon will be, too. But they’ll forgive us as long as we bring back plenty of material for them to obsess over, I suspect.”
Nodding, she placed the book gently back on the shelf and proceeded down the row, running her fingers over warped spines, trying to decide which ones to pluck from the hoard.
It was hard to know where to start.
This was my fifth trip to the ruined realm of Nerithys, and its center kingdom of Midna, in the past month—not counting the first, disastrous trip where we’d faced off with a monster known as Lorien Blackvale while vying for control of the life-giving magic found here.
The palace we were currently crawling our way through had been in rough shape before. Now, after having served as our arena during that battle with Lorien, it was worse, each creak of wood, and every shift of light and shadow making us tense for fear it all might give way at any moment.
But at least it was still here.
At least I’d been able to come back.
After our narrow escape from Lorien, the portal into this ruined kingdom had seemingly snapped shut behind us. A violent end to a violent duel.
Except, it hadn’t been the end. Not really.
Days later—while back within my own realm of Noctaris—I’d felt the magic in the middle realm stirring again. Beckoning, almost. Telling me there was more power, more history, to discover here. More to make sense of.
I’d returned alone the first time. Reckless, in hindsight. But, truth be told, I hadn’t expected to actually be able to pass through on my own. I’d only been experimenting with my shadowy magic when it had latched onto…something…andmanaged to pull me through the veil that separated the realms.
My first visit had been brief. Just long enough to grasp the fact that it could be done, even ifdoingit left me feeling like I was ripping apart at the seams—a feeling that persisted, even now.
I felt Thalia’s eyes shift to me. “Are you sure you’re okay to keep going?”
“Never better.”
She gave me a long, appraising look.
“Liar,” she concluded, in her characteristically blunt tone.
Maybe I was, but I was going to keep going anyway.
There wasn’t really another option.
As one of the Vaelora—a being responsible for controlling cycles of life and magic between the realms—I was the only one able to carry us into Midna. This place had once been the center kingdom when the realms of Noctaris and Soltaris were still united, and legends said that the last king and queen who ruled over it had been responsible for creating the Aetherstone, along with the other apparatuses that allowed the Vaelora to more precisely control the world’s cycles of life and magic.
Of course, there had always been two Vaelora. Light and Shadow. Life and Death. Both working in agreement—in tandem. Alternating where the power was directed to. But now…
Now, I was alone here.
And I wouldn’t—couldn’t—think about the Light missing from the equation. Never-mind how unsure or off-balance I felt.
