She went up the stairs, her walk and her scent—the faint smell of medicine—exactly as they were in his memory. The past unfurled in his mind: the dense dust wind of the wastelands of Mersia; the moldy inn where the floods had stranded them in Elvania; the hot, crystalline sands of the Kalikan coast; the Ebrian prayer Rakel would recite before the wooden statue she had always carried with her…
When Rakel came back down with a blanket, she had changed from her bloodied surgical garment to a yellow dress. Emere wasstill sitting on the edge of the bed, and she wrapped his shoulders in the blanket and sat down at his right. Emere hesitantly put his arm around her shoulders and Rakel relaxed against him. He imagined a younger version of himself with Rakel in a framed picture, hanging in a corner of their minds. They could never go back in time to the way they were, but the memory would live forever. They sat like this in silence for a while before Emere finally lay down to sleep.
He dreamed of the wastelands of Mersia. From a distance, like a mirage, came a person. A small person, covering their face to block the dust. Emere approached. He couldn’t see anyone else besides this figure, but he could feel the presence of others. The same feeling he had over a decade ago when he had briefly visited Mersia in person with Rakel.
“Prince Emere.”
The dusty traveler with the concealed face had vanished, and in their place was a young woman in the neat blue dress of Arland, her hair cut to just under her earlobes. It was the sorcerer who had freed the dragon in the volcano during the Arlander rebellion—Arienne. She was holding a baby in a blanket that was embroidered with a flower design he did not recognize. Emere felt a vague familiarity at the sight of the infant.
“I’ve been here before,” said Emere, not returning the greeting.
“You have? What was your purpose here?”
“I wanted to know what the ‘Star’ was that ended Mersia.”
A sandstorm as large as a mountain brewed behind Arienne, looking strong enough to not only tear their clothes from their bodies but their flesh from their bones. Emere grew nervous. They had to get out of there. His feet, however, refused to move.
“Did you find out?” Arienne asked.
Emere shook his head. They had found nothing except red lifeless ground, and a feeling of despair so overwhelming that he couldn’t breathe. If it hadn’t been for Rakel, he would’ve died there.
“If that is also your purpose in Mersia, good sorcerer, I bid you to leave at once.”
“But where must I go instead?”
The storm wailed. Arienne seemed oblivious to the impending wall of dust as it came upon them. Emere covered his face with his arms as sharp fragments ripped at his flesh. He tried to scream, but when he opened his mouth, it filled with dust.
The winds ceased. His pain disappeared. When he lowered his arm, he was in the Capital, on the busy streets below the hill where the Senate stood. The night air was hot, and everywhere it burned with red-and-yellow flames. Emere’s eyes were drawn to a young man who was walking up the hill, heading for the Senate. The man reminded Emere of Loran.
Emere followed the young man. He seemed to be wearing a pair of spectacles. Just as the young man’s walk was about to change into a run, Emere noticed a man he didn’t know lying in the middle of the street, charred and motionless. Rakel was kneeling next to him, sobbing. Emere still had an urge to follow the young man, but Rakel caught his attention and he could not leave her behind. Not again.
Then, he opened his eyes. The candle on the small surgical table had burned down to half its size. Rakel dozed on the chair near the head of his bed. Emere gazed at her for a while, then glanced at the table where the assassin’s sword lay gleaming in the candlelight, before he closed his eyes once more.
5
ARIENNE
Danras, from up on a nearby hill, looked utterly warped.
Each log that had constituted the city walls was bent, like iron bars a blacksmith had forgotten to finish forging. The buttresses and pillars of the wooden buildings had been crushed under their own weight. Only a single stone building in the Imperial style, erected in the middle of the city, had the proper look of a man-made structure weathered only by time. The ground was paved with stone blocks, but they were covered with red dust blown by the wind from the wasteland that surrounded it.
The city had the look of a tableau created by a mad painter. Arienne gulped. A fear that was different from what she felt when she had faced the mountainous wall of dust for the first time, or when she had faced the ghosts wandering the wastelands, was creeping up from within.
“Not even a dozen legions with Powered weapons could ever do this,” Arienne muttered. But what could kill a whole country,murder everything down to the grass, and still feel the need to corrode and distort what remained, a curse so hateful that it wouldn’t be satisfied with a simple massacre?
To find Danras, she had envisioned ancient ruins—it hadn’t mattered if what she imagined looked like the real Danras or not. Sorcery, especially Arienne’s sorcery, was about imposing one’s will on what was real. But there was always a price to pay for one’s imagination clashing with reality, and now the imagined Danras in her mind shattered to pieces at the sight of the real Danras before her. A dizziness followed, as if the world were turning upside down.
It would’ve been better if she’d done more research on what Danras looked like as she embarked on her travels. The fallout from the discrepancy between the imagined and the real could very well drive her mad.
But her imagination was all Arienne had. Without it, she would still be eating the food the Imperial Academy fed her and doing the “studies” they insisted she do. She would have been a living corpse, doing nothing meaningful, with nobody expecting her to do anything besides die and become a Power generator.
She sat down on the ground, crossing her legs and sitting up straight. Who knew what other strange scenes were waiting below her. If she didn’t prepare for them, the shock would be even greater than what she had just experienced. As she pressed down on the urge to avert her gaze from the ruined city, the reality of Danras entered fully into Arienne’s sight. Each melted building engraved itself into her memory.
But at the same time, there was something she couldn’t prevent herself from imagining—what Danras must’ve looked like beforethe Star of Mersia had destroyed it. That tower, twisted now like a reed bending in the storm, must’ve once been a commanding watchtower that rose above the city walls. An old watcher in a wide-brimmed hat would have looked out at the sea of tall grass.
The ruins below that, where the roofs had rotted away but sections of the walls remained, creating a shape like the sun-dried bones of a dead animal, had once been a market. The roofs would’ve been made of orox leather, the neatly displayed rows of goods coming from both Mersia and beyond the mountains. And people as various as the goods had bought and sold things there.
The sunken, dry groove next to the walls had once been a river that had flowed from the northern part of the Rook Mountains. There had been a busy dock. The hunk of wood that looked like melted, stretched molasses had once been a boat that traversed this river, carrying the leather of Danras to the north or bringing timber from the Rook Mountains.
