“Yes.”
“To do what?” I’m fighting a scream so fiercely, my voice is barely audible at all. “Assert absolute planetary authority? Enslave them? Slaughter them all?”
“That will depend on how well they concede defeat,” Father says mildly, as though he were merely commenting on wind patterns or the current strength of the timekeeping torch. “Adria, the opportunity here cannot be understated. Surely you understand that.”
I shake my head, which does nothing to lessen my pounding skull, but he keeps talking.
“The dayfolk have further-reaching historical records than the nightfolk. Locked away to rot, useless, in their bunkers underground. We have a right to that knowledge, to fully understand where we came from—that we may fully embrace all we can now become. If they turn it over without heatshot-blazing resistance, then perhaps we can arrange something of a truce.” Two of Father’s hands curl into defiant fists. “But they will finally, fully, know their betters.”
My blood could freeze solid in my veins right now. Dayfolk haven’t interfered with nightfolk business in generations. They may be disgusted by our mutations, even terrified of us, but nobody could say they’ve aimed for armed conflict. Invading the Daylands would be an unprovoked act of war. If the dayfolk are unprepared, invading them will be an extinction-level event, wiping them out entirely. All in the name of asserting our superiority—and seizing the Daylands’ historical records for ourselves.
My tongue feels like a lump of sand in my mouth. I choke out a single dry word. “When?”
Father’s voice is venom. “When what?”
“When do we return to the Depths? Blaze a path through Elysium? Overcharge the army?”
“Soon” is all Mother says, through a smile that makes me want to keel over and be sick upon the stone underfoot.
“You’ll know.” Father’s voice, but I don’t look at him. Refuse to see what Isek’s body looks like now. So small held against my father’s bulk. Mangled, wasted. Tortured in his final moments, only to be tossed aside. “We will summon you, Adria. It would be a terrible shame,” he says, “to miss the final stage of our evolution.”
Father leaves us to dispose of Isek’s body—where and how, I am too horrified to ask. Mother and I leave him behind and complete our flight back to the fortress together, the distance between me and her nevertheless cavernous. When we arrive home, the torch has burned nearly to azure cinders, signaling the cycle’s end. Mother and I part ways to our respective chambers.
The fortress consists of layered rectangles, shrinking in size as the levels increase in height, with the torch burning at our home’s highest point, giving light to both the fortress and the civilian areas beneath it. My room is on the fourth highest of seven levels, so it would necessitate ascending multiple stairways, were it not for my wings.
The fortress also features towering cubic parapets at its four corners, with one additional parapet along each of the walls. As the current shift of guards knows my face and questions me not at all, I alight on the southmost parapet, the one directly above the building’s looming entrance gate. Then it’s only around three levels down and a turn west to reach my chambers; not too much of a difference, I suppose, but at least it’s downhill instead of uphill. My legs feel like lead, impossibly heavy to haul up and down, even with the help of my wings. I could roll like a stone down these stairways, if I allowed myself. Crash through the wall into my chamber, propelled by gravity alone, and simply lie there, waiting to disappear.
Eventually, I do reach my chambers, though not by careening into them like an avalanche. Where most nightfolk have just enough space to call a home, I could lay four or five of myself lengthwise in any direction around this jagged, unevenly circular room that houses my relentlessly racing thoughts. I hardly even register my surroundings, opulent as they are for the overlords’ only heir. Glimmering, ever-polished mirrors on the walls, perfectly reflecting how the blood has entirely drained from my face. Metal shelves installed cleanly, embedded in the otherwise-stone walls, but not strong enough to hold the weight I now carry.
I collapse onto a vast double bed and stare, eyes heavy, up at the domed ceiling, painted like a brilliant twilight where the Shadowlands meets the Passage: swaths of hand-brushed purples, blues, and emeralds, hues befitting honored royalty soon to violently subjugate their own people.
When she lays her head down, I suppose Mother dreams of victory this cycle—of blue light flooding her veins and her eyes. I see only Isek’s severed head, eyes wide and blind, spirit flayed clean of the flesh; but its mouth still moves, blue lips working, awful groans shuddering out.
It asks me why I did nothing.
I wake drenched from horns to toes in sweat, burdened with hideous knowledge: As the sole heir of my family’s dynasty, I am the only one who can stop this. The only nightfolk strong enough to resist my parents’ cruel rule. Likely the only one who even fully knows what’s coming.
The last person to resist my parents was my uncle Azarii. Somewhere in the Depths, behind a wall of freezeshot, in a solitary hovel of the larger, labyrinthine Elysian structure, he’s shriveling into nothing, imprisoned forever. Abandoned to the dauntless passage of time, which endures even beyond the old cycles of night and day. That could be my fate, too. A cell would be a mercy, really.
For Father’s brother to betray his authority was one thing—first by defecting to Elysium, then by staging an armed rebellion—but Father’sdaughter? His only offspring, bearer of both his legacy and his shame that I was not born a son? I could face public execution. I wouldn’t put it past him to tie me to the timekeeping torch and let all the Shadowlands hear my tormented screams as I burned down to memory and ash.
But if no one resists my parents, they’ll lead us headlong into senseless slaughter. Destroy the planet we all call home in a cursed quest to fully claim it. If I don’t act soon, it will be altogether too late. And the nightfolk will paint new borders for our kingdom with the blood of innocents.
I’m still struggling to breathe without escalating into a full-blown panic when there’s a knock at my electronic door.
“My lord,” says someone from the other side. “Your king has summoned you.”
You mean my father, I could say, but more than that, first and foremost, Father has always been my king.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes, groggy. “And who bears this message?”
“Isek.”
All the breath rushes out of me in a single gust.
GeneralIsek. The murdered child’s father, not the child risen from the grave to confront my inaction. His voice drips apathy, colder even than the ice and stone that comprises the Shadowlands. I wonder if, beneath it, he yet grieves. Where is Isek now? Did Father honor his sacrifice at all, or is the mangled body in a ditch somewhere, abandoned to the creep of ice, the decay of time?
I promise myself it will not be for nothing.
