1
CARMILLA
Moonlight never reaches this high.
The observatory crowns the highest fang of the Moonstone range, wrapped in air so thin the stars feel close enough to bruise my cheek. Frost coats the stone balustrades in mirrored scales, and each exhale drifts upward, eager to join constellations I have named and feared for centuries.
I stand barefoot in the central chamber, silk shift pasted to skin by sweat that should have frozen, bracing myself on the bronze rail that rings the hollow floor. Quiet reigns—too quiet. The ward-crystals embedded in the dome’s ribs are supposed to murmur like sleepy doves, but tonight they brood in silence, as if the entire room is holding its breath with me.
My fingertips ache. Pale skin splits again, and tiny shards push through; opal slivers catch starlight before dropping, ringing on the copper grate below like the first chime of a passing bell. The cracking has marched from wrists to elbow and now climbs the inner curve of my ribs. A reminder: every vision devours a little more of what is mortal in me.
I breathe through the pain, align shoulders with northern axis, and direct my gaze at the armillary suspended over the pit. Hundreds of interlocking rings revolve in elegant contrapuntal orbits. Tonight those rings grind against one another, grinding like teeth in nightmare.
“Show me,” I whisper. The words leave small clouds that twist into runes and drift away.
The stars answer.
A filament of silver threads between the iron bands and stabs into my sternum. Sight folds outward.
First, sound: a roar—not from a throat, but from a horizon cracking down its middle. Then heat, tidal and vicious, turns the marrow in my legs to steam. I glimpse three skies, stacked like plates: emerald thunder, amber dusk, amethyst noon, rotating around a monstrous eye carved from ash. All the familiar continents crumple inward, dragged as if by invisible chains toward that pupil. Mountains kneel. Oceans straighten like spears.
I try to count how long the collapse takes, but numbers scorch away the instant I reach for them.
Lightning strikes the eye. No—worse. The lightning enters the eye and never emerges.
My sternum buckles. Crystal blooms across the left rib, each petal stabbing nerve and memory alike. I reach to touch the spreading lattice, but my hand swims through after-image smoke, and the vision tilts again.
Now I stand over a bone-white valley. Frozen wolves lie in concentric rings around a dark altar, their blood tracing a spiral that spins faster, deeper—becoming the pupil again. At that altar kneels— Kylan? No, a silhouette only, but the outline of shoulders is unmistakable: built the way the northern alphas are built, carved for burden. He lifts his face, and the eye behind him opens wider.
I lunge forward—this is mindspace, I should be able to move—but the landscape fractures. The altar becomes the Moonstone shrine, fissured and weeping magma. My apprenticed star-scribe, Laurel, stands inside the doorway, a map glowing in her hands like an accusation.
She mouths a word. I read it on her lips, though she is leagues away and days ahead in time:hurry.
The ground drops.
I slam back into my body with enough force to bruise my lungs. The rail shrieks under my grip; brassy tang fills my mouth. The vision lingers in echo—a sensation of falling even while standing still.
Across the chamber the dome’s keystone crystal erupts in violet sparks. Runes scorched into the copper struts hiss and peel, releasing curls of molten lettering that float down like burning parchment. Wards collapsing—first time in two hundred years. The sanctuary no longer deems itself safe for me.
“Steady,” I croak, though no one is here to obey. I bring shaking hands to heart, feel the fresh lattice. Four new facets, serrated and tender, climb from sternum to collar. Cracks radiate, fine silver lines beneath skin.
This has never spread so quickly. Even the night Vorren fell and half the dragon seers bled out on their crystals, the change moved slower than a vine. The prophecy’s weight has doubled my sentence in a single breath.
I stagger to the star-map table at the chamber’s eastern verge. Thin glass panes hover above a basalt slab, each pane a floating chart of one realm. Tonight all three swirl, lines of longitude spiraling toward a single crimson dot pulsing in synchrony. I squint, forcing the glyphs to steady.
“Shrine coordinates,” I whisper. Of course. The map saw what I did: the altar, the fracture, the convergence of skies. The dot throbs again, brighter, demanding. I have been avoidingthat place for decades, hoping the Convergence would choose another fulcrum. It will not.
My vow of isolation was a naïve luxury. It dies tonight.
I turn from the table. A line of crystal dust marks my earlier stumbling path, each shard half moonlit, half stained with the darker hue of my blood. I follow that glittering breadcrumb trail down the curved stair into my private quarters.
The change in air is immediate: colder, carrying the musk of parchment, ink, and something older—my own fear. Bookshelves cling to limestone walls. A single iron heater stands idle in one corner; I never needed warmth, but suddenly I want it.
I draw a quick breath and use it to speak the room’s name. “Aethel.” Thin blue flames bloom inside the heater in answer. Obedient, but the blue is too pale; the spirit metal senses my weakness.
I move to the travel trunk against the south wall, flip brass latches, and throw the lid. Inside waits the pack I assembled after my last near-fatal vision, when the idea of fleeing first occurred to me though I lacked the will. Compasses carved from dragon tooth, weather-tight spellbooks, stitch-powders, a coil of silver thread that Laurel spun under a blood moon.
I shrug into a dark wool tunic, runes stitched along the seams to accommodate crystal growth. Boots next—knee-high, soft enough to feel ward pulse beneath every step. Every motion slices pain along the new fractures, but pain is merely data, my mentor used to say. Data forces precision.
