The silence, the emptiness, the raging storms… it was crushing their spirits. Especially since the mountain range still looked so distant.
But today, it seemed, they were given a bit of a reprieve.
Around midday, Ivayne returned from scouting ahead, her draconic wings unfurled, with a smile on her face. “There’s shelter up ahead, not very far. Some kind of ruins.”
The discovery couldn’t have come at a better time as hail started pelting them. The ruins in question were at the foot of a waterfall, half-submerged in the flooded river that wound through the desolate landscape. The site was impressive: great carved pillars and broken sculptures, what could have been some sort of shrine, part of a wall that still stood with carvings of winged horses and great peaks among the clouds.
“Looks like this might have been a temple,” Vera said with awe.
Emory could feel the ley line beneath them, corrupted as it was by Clover. It would have made sense to build a temple to the Celestials—this world’s version of the deity that was Atheia—atop such a source of power. Part of the ceiling was still there, protecting them from the hail. The howling wind seemed not to reach them here either. True silence reigned, making Emory realize the constant wind had become so normal to her ears that she hadn’t really heard it anymore. It was eerie. In her mind she heard those whispers from her nightmare, the souls of the dead calling her name.
Emory, Emory.
There was a sudden, earsplitting crack like the earth was splitting apart as a shaft of lightning hit the waterfall a mere few feet away from the temple. Ivayne already had her sword drawn in case the ash-umbrae showed up, despite it being useless against the monsters. Emory hurried to the draconic’s side, magic at the ready. Another fork of bluish lightning split the skies, but not a single ash-umbrae appeared.
Something else did.
Across the river, a man sat astride a horse of pure white. Emory’s first thought was that it was Clover, but the man’s stature was too bulky, the frame of a seasoned warrior. He wore a navy jacket embroidered with silver details of lightning bolts and wind gusts, and had a heavy cloak draped over his shoulders, the hood drawn over his head. Gloved hands gripped the reins of his steed, which had feathered wings just like the creatures carved on the temple ruins. As beautiful and ethereal as Emory would have imagined a winged horse to be.
Except for the eyes. They were gaping, dark hollows ringed by knotted veins of black that spread all along its face and neck, marred its beautiful wings, too. As if it were corrupted from within. A ghostly, tainted version of what it once might have been.
The man held a hand to the skies and caught a bolt of lightning that fashioned itself into a wicked lance. In one swift motion, he threw the lance at the temple. It whirred past Emory, so close she felt it singe her cheek, and embedded itself in one of the carved pillars, crackling and sparking until the lance disappeared in a wisp of smoke. From that smoke appeared another man dressed in a similar outfit, holding a sword of lightning and moving on silent feet. They hadn’t noticed him coming into the temple from the opposite side.
Vivyan threw herself at him with a battle cry, her metal sword meeting his lightning one in a thunderous clash. The man’s lightning sword pierced through Vivyan’s shoulder, making her scream. The smell of burning flesh filled the air. Before Emory could think of helping Vivyan with magic, before any of them could go after the man, a horde of ash-umbrae descended upon the temple swifter than the wind. The man disappeared among them, only to jump across the river with inhuman strength and settle behind the other warrior astride the winged horse.
As Ivayne and Vivyan swung their swords to no effect at the dozens of ash-umbrae that encircled their group, Emory opened herself up to the power of the ley line. Silver veins danced along her skin. She felt it burning inside her, power coursing through her like the cold burn of a distant star, and she unleashed herself to unmake the ash-umbrae.
She tried to reach farther still to the two men across the river, but she was burning out, depleting herself too quickly. Ash-umbrae fell around her, but more seemed to rise in their wake. Distantly, she felt the call of the pieces of Atheia, blood and bones and heart and soul, but they were too far away and felt shielded from her somehow.
The ley line tore through her. Ghosts sprung up around her. She tasted blood in her mouth, heard someone screaming in her ears—her own screams?—and felt her vision blur as unconsciousness pulled at her, seeking to plunge her into the dark.
Suddenly there was music.
A voice singing loud and clear, achingly beautiful. The dark skies above them split open, sunlight piercing through to chase away what was left of the ash-umbrae, which seemed to disintegrate to dust under the light.
Emory fell limp to the ground. Before darkness could claim her, she searched the riverbank, but the two men were no longer there, their infernal steed carrying them toward darker skies.
2BAZ
IT WAS IRONIC, BAZ THOUGHT, that time should lose all meaning here, in the very place where it was spun.
He was surrounded by more clocks than he’d ever seen in his life, time-measuring instruments of all sorts, shapes, and sizes, and yet it felt to Baz like time stood frozen. Days and years might have passed without him knowing, were it not for the incessant ticking of clocks, a constant hum that followed him even in sleep. But they indicated the passing of timeout there—in the four realms of the living where time flowed differently for each according to careful sets of rules.
In here, though, time was an endless loop.
Herewas the workshop of a god Baz had magically stumbled upon. Maybe he should have been used to it by now, being dragged unsuspectedly through strange doorways. He’d traveled back in time to an Aldryn College of the past, had spent a lifetime obsessing over a book about a scholar who went to other worlds through a portal on a page, and still it had come as a shock to fall into onesuch portal. To find himself here, at the center of all worlds, in the presence of divinity.
Assisting the god of balance was meticulous work, tedious and time-consuming—or so Baz assumed; he knew time passed in here only by the hunger that seized him and the sleep he would fall prey to. He woke, filled his belly with whatever the god conjured out of thin air for him—the endless supply of coffee and tea was nothing to complain about—then got to work. Filled his belly again. Slept again. And again, the loop went on.
There was always something for him to do, whether it was dusting astrolabes or marking the pace of pendulums of different clocks for comparison. Tasks that felt useless to Baz, though they seemed like the most crucial of things to the frazzled god of balance. (If he had a name, he would not divulge it to Baz, who thought of him simply asthe godand referred to him politely assir, like he would any other professor.)
The real work revolved around the giant loom in the center of the god’s workshop, which spun threads not only of time, Baz learned, but offate—working past, present, and future into a great big tapestry that was the universe itself.
“I’m here to ensure all things happen as they should,” the god had told Baz upon his arrival. There’d been an air of self-importance to his demeanor, a note of gravity to his voice that Baz would come to be familiar with. “Otherwise,” the god had continued in this dramatic way of his, “the tapestry of fate would be ripped to shreds, the worlds forever skewed off-balance. Thrown into chaos.”
Which was, understandably, the last thing a god who served balance wanted.
“But sir,” Baz had asked, running a nervous hand along the nape of his neck, “why amIhere?”
