The rune flashed gold. Soul-deep agony arced through her with the ferocity of a lightning bolt aszuvraicame to life, unspooling her time. Unspoolingher. Invisible hands clawed at her lungs, wringing,twisting. Her screams were quickly swallowed by the now-cacophonous desert, alive with a thousand jeers. Every pulse of her heart was a clap of thunder. Falling to her knees, she clutched her head and gasped for air.
The ghosts laughed. “You were warned.”
“No,” she croaked. Teeth clenched, she slowed her panicked breaths. “I won’t die here.”
Slapping a palm against the rock face, she dragged herself up, gaze fixed on the now-glowing rune drawn into the mountain. Scarlet wove intothe gold lines, warning that she would soon be drained of power and life.Fifteen minutes? No. Ten.
“You know me,” she hissed to her listeners, heart thudding so hard that she feared it would stall any moment. “You know my kin and my kind. You willyield,” she snarled.
The ground shuddered.Yes. YES.
“Let. Me. In!” she screamed.
A chunk of the mountain’s craggy face crashed down with an earthquake’s force. She lost her footing and tumbled down the incline, cowering from the spray of rock and sand. Coughing, she raised her head when the rumbling ceased.By the Saints and Wretched.
The chunk had reduced the rubble blocking the entrance to dust. The Xaromand quieted when she staggered back up to that pitch-black mouth. A torch flared in an ancient sconce by it. Then another, and another, leading her in. She shuddered.Welcome or trap, it doesn’t matter. She was going where even the dead couldn’t touch her.
Pain clawed through her chest, hooking in and ripping down. Blood gurgled in her throat.Eight minutes.She ignored the broken corpses piled around the entrance, red tears snaking past her jaw from her own bleeding eyes.
She ran into the temple.
Firelight hissed to life in her wake, drawing golden fingers down frescoed corridors of battles past, fates avoided, futures won, gods appeased, murdered Seers—Elsar save me. The bones!Hollow eye sockets regarded her flight with mockery, their jaws unhinged in laughter.
“Will you make it in time?” they asked. “Can you control what even we couldn’t?”
I will, she vowed. The Seers had glimpsed the land’s future but been sequestered from its workings. She knew the people of Ur Dinyé.I can control them.
Libraries. Lecture rooms. Worship halls. Marble columns and limestone walls. The gilt had been chipped off, gaping holes left where statuesand prayer tablets must once have stood. How many treasure-seekers and scholars had the dead punished for it?
Three minutes. She had never known such pain even when—Faster. She rounded a corner, kicked down the banquet hall’s rotting doors, then froze.
There.A mighty oval courtyard hollowed into the center of the mountain. It opened to the sky, milky moonlight accompanying braziers that roared awake at her entrance. Avoiding the mess of collapsed columns, she ran to the shattered altar at the center, split down the middle by an unnaturally large handprint.
There had once been a god here. Chained for centuries by magi and Seers alike and twisted into an abomination that had been trapped in a man’s body so that Ur Dinyé could win its wars. But that had been during the time of the Scourgemaster, a time of monsters, prophecies, and men with honor. This was a new age. And yet, it needed a monster too.
She knew this to be debridement not death, but the arbiters of history took such umbrage to change. They needed their compartmentalizations of time and firm delineations of how the dust had settled. To stop it from happening again, they would argue, but knowledge of the past had never stopped its repetition.
Blood did.
Two minutes.
Dagger. She sliced both palms open.Safsher, she drew the Urdish rune for “Sword” atop the altar.Tuhigfor “Void.”Zefisfor “Weave.” Sweat slid down her temples, stung her eyes. Her strained gasps were a preliminary death rattle as the agony in her chest pulled tight.
“Soon.” Something caressed her neck. A fingertip? The past clawing for blood. She flinched. “You will join us soon.”
Faster. She bit straight through her lip and drew.Khon, frazam, layk, sayag.Blood, End, Unity, Shadow, and finally, Sleep.Nibas.
And she was out of time.
Thick iron welled at the back of her throat. She choked. Blood sprayed from her lips to coat the altar, smudging her desperate runes.SHIT.
She collapsed. The temple screamed in glee, a thousand voices grasping through death and time to claim her for their own. Blood seeped up from the courtyard’s tile, reaching inky fingers for her. A new ghost. A new scream. She tried standing but her limbs no longer worked.
It can’t be for nothing!She silently pleaded with herself as the blood neared.Stand up! Stand—
Blue-green flames roared from the altar and spread to fence her from the dead. Dazed, she watched the fire climb toward the sky and coalesce into a wall. The voices vanished.
She’s here.
