Arwa turned the page. Her breath stopped.
In front of her was a lustrous image, so heavy with color and detail that it near breathed with its own life: a world carved into fragments by a great chariot wheel, spoked and lacquered in gold. Between the first set of spokes sat a familiar world, of lush forests and white-blue mountains and pale gold desert. Between the next set of spokes, tangled with the edges of the desert…
“It is—”
“A storm,” whispered Arwa. “Dreamfire.”
She propped the book against the table. She traced the pages with her eyes, hungry, her heart wild and seething in her chest. Flames burnished across a desert sky. Flames of rose and indigo and umber.
“I saw dreamfire in Irinah,” she murmured. “When I was a small girl.”
He looked startled for a moment. Then his expression smoothed.
“Of course. You grew up in Irinah.”
“Yes.”
She had watched the dreamfire from her bedroom window, once, as a girl of only nine. Not long before her mother had spirited her away to Hara.
But ah, she’d been soyoung. Her heart had turned so easily then, liquid, easily biddable. At first she’d been afraid of the dreamfire—terrified, in fact. But then she had stared at it, night long, through her window lattice. And those flames…
Well, to claim she had become less afraid would have been false. But the terror had alchemized with time: sharpened to a joy all the sweeter and deeper for the fear. She had felt something akin to it, when she had chased a daiva and embedded a bloodied dagger into its flesh. When she had offered herself up for this task, unknowing and uncaring about her unknowingness, the bitterness of blood on her tongue.
“I cannot describe it,” said Arwa.You would think me mad. Monstrous.“I am no poet, my lord. It was a sight that marked me, but I did not understand what it was. I still do not.” She stared, longer, at the image before her. “I have long considered it a part of the cursed nature of Irinah’s desert.”
“Cursed?”
She looked at him. His head was slightly tilted, his eyes intent.
Ah. It was a real question.
“Where else,” she said slowly, “has daiva and Amrithi both, and storms of fire—and is the site of the Maha’s death?”
“The Maha could only die in one place. But as to the rest…”
She had no time to consider whether he was calling her a fool—the Maha could only die in one place?Ah, Gods, how barbed this boy was—before he leaned forward, across the cups of steaming tea, and touched one long finger to the turn of the wheel.
“This wheel is a representation—one theory alone—of the shape of reality.” He touched a fingertip lightly to the forests and deserts, nestled between the spokes, emerald green and dusty gold. “Here lies the world in which we live. A world of flesh and blood.” His finger moved from the green and gold of the forest to the deep blue and rose of the storm. “And here, where you see the dreamfire, lies the realm of where the Gods sleep, dreaming our world into being.
“Dreamfire is a sign of Irinah’s nature, but not a sign that the desert is cursed, Lady Arwa. Instead, it reveals that Irinah is a threshold, a bridge where our two worlds touch. The world of their sleep and the world of our waking. The Gods dream…” He touched the spoke of the wheel that held their world and the one of the Gods apart. “And in Irinah, mortals have the honor of beholding it.”
“I did not know,” Arwa whispered. “Any of it.”
“You had no reason to know heresy.”
The illustration contained within the next spokes of the wheel was drab, a spill of gray-black ink. But…
Arwa looked at it more closely. Between clouds of gray and black were figures of whittled bone. She felt suddenly quite cold.
“And this?” she asked. She touched her own fingers lightly to the darkness, then drew them back. “What place is this?”
“The realm of ash,” he said. “And the locus of our study.”
He traced the place upon the page where the dreamfire and desert merged with a fingertip once more, voice soft and liquid with reverence. “Just as the Gods dream in another realm, so do mortals. We enter it naturally, in sleep. It is a shadow place. It lives in our dreams. In the quiet of our minds. It is a place both of flesh and beyond flesh.”
“And what lies in this place, this realm of ash?” Arwa asked.
“The dead,” he said.
