“Beware you would-be, God-Summoners! Take heed, all you who would call the Elsar to our plane! For when the infinite touches the finite, the latter does not emerge unscathed. A scar forms at the point of the meeting. And from it, what blood will spill? Who else will part the seams of our world as a sword does flesh and enter?
Aim not for the lofty. Restrict yourselves to prayer and relinquish the selfishness of seeking out a personal boon. Let us worship as a hand does by the hearth. Plunge not into the fire!”
—excerpt fromThe Teachings of Inquisitor Caminus of Ur Dinyé
The collapse of a country was a quiet affair.
Few historians would agree. They preferred to point to crushing defeats in battle, assassinations, or civil unrest to explain the peaks and troughs of political chaos. Yet, those were merely the symptoms of a rotting land’s disintegration. Its cause would have snuck in earlier, quiet enough that no academic would entirely pin it down and capable enough to reach gnarled fingers through history to throttle the present.
Countries died in silence. As Ur Dinyé would today. Its current iteration, at least.
Her lips lifted in a smile. Squinting against the wind hurling orange sand across the Xaromand Desert, she urged her mare toward one of the imposing mountains ahead. Thousands of miles long, the Kaycakh Range’s jagged terra-cotta peaks formed a land border separating UrDinyé’s inhospitable Xaromand from the neighboring land of Errigal—with whom they’d been at war centuries prior.
But these rocky giants had seen more than history. They had once held the future.
A millennium ago, in the heart of one of these mountains had existed a temple of such renown that only Ur Dinyé’s monarchs had been permitted to know its location. Within its cavernous halls, devotees of Lord Time had meditated upon the past and present and been blessed with brief glimpses into potential futures. The Seers’ prophecies had steered Ur Dinyé from devastation for centuries, until they’d been massacred by a king who had taken umbrage at what would become the Head Seer’s final prophecy.
Oh, the powerful and their fear.She cast a bitter look in the direction of Ur Dinyé’s capital of Edessa, thousands of miles to the south. She wouldn’t be freezing her ass off in the fucking Xaromand if it weren’t for them.
Temperatures dipped lower under the slow wash of night. Above, Praefa and Silun surveyed her nightly routine of the past three months. Time and time again, she halted before the sheer face of a mountain and listened. The desert graced her with a wail of wind and spit sand across her cheeks.
Another night without hope. It had ceased to cut. For ninety nights, she’d ridden through half the Kaycakh Range in search of the Lost Temple’s entrance. The records she’d dug up from the Scourgemaster’s time had spoken to the temple’s rediscovery some five and a half centuries back but had neglected to mention the location after the unexplained deaths of those scholars and treasure-seekers who’d ventured within.
No matter. It was the nature of history to be lost and found again.
She steered her mare toward another peak. Her mare balked, whinnying in fear as they neared the base. Sand gave way to barren soil littered with chunks of limestone. No sooner had her lips shaped a frown than she felt it, soft as gossamer. A hum of otherness like the scrape of jaws over skin. Magic. Hunger.
Hatred.
The reins slipped from her trembling hands, elation heating her blood.It’s here.Dismounting, she tethered her recalcitrant mare to one of the boulders fencing the mountain like teeth. Nothing in the rock face ahead indicated the presence of a door, yet the desert’s fearful thrum under her feet spoke otherwise. A warning. A proclamation of recognition.
“We know your blood,” the wind seemed to hiss. “It has spilled here before.”
“Go.” Sand curled around her ankles when she continued up the incline. “You are not wanted.”
Cursed land. Soiled with the innocent blood of thousands of Seers and sundered by even uglier secrets the Lost Temple had witnessed. The laws of the mortal world applied loosely here.
Her smile broadened.At last.
The mountain’s base vied with the Aequitas for breadth, rough slopes worn by Time’s chisel. At one corner, a pile of rubble listed precariously to the left, shielding what must once have been an entrance.A cave-in or a barricade?she wondered. The elongated finger bones extending in silent plea from a gap in the rock could speak to either. She steeled her spine against a shudder.It doesn’t matter.
She placed her shaky palms against the cool, stone face and felt an answering ripple within.Now for the price of entry.Withdrawing a dagger, she pricked each fingertip, barely noticing the pain. So great was her excitement that she barely winced. Five crimson streams rolled down her hand to dribble onto parched soil. Red faded to terra-cotta. The earth drank deep.
The wind halted.
Quiet. It was so very quiet now.
A hammering began in her chest, exultation and fear warping in a dangerous weave. She drew on the rock with bleeding fingers. A straight line, then a curved one, then several more.Zuvrai, the Urdish rune for “Time.” Mortal concept and immortal god. A rune so dangerously taxing that to draw it was to risk all the time that the user had left. The same rune Seers wouldhave drawn to enter the Lost Temple millennia ago. Her chest squeezed with every pass of her fingers over the rock face, breaths dwindling and labored.Zuvraiwas a Tenth-Tier rune, demanding a torrential, inherently unsustainable flow of power from its user. She was no Seer. She didn’t have long.
Faster.
Magic was a peculiar thing. An inner well of power shaped by ancestry and tied to blood, accessible only by drawing the right patterns in one’s life force. Runes were the language of the gods, the Elsarian priests said, and their first gift to humans to allow them a taste of the divine. It was also their first test, a sieve to separate the greedy and power-drunk from those good and faithful who would pass the gates into the Bright Realms where the High Elsar resided.
When all was said and done, where would she be placed? Monster or martyr?
A choked laugh tore from her. Had she access to her own epitaph, she would have written it now before history did it for her:Judge me or justify me, you know I was necessary.
Red flooded her vision as she drew the final set ofzuvrai’s lines, arteries bursting in her eyes like swollen streams. Blood laced her tongue when she swallowed. Her fingers drew the last stroke and paused midair.Gods help me.
