Chapter 1
The clasp of the braided silver torc clicked shut against my collarbone, cold and heavy as a shackle. “Wear it always,” Julian whispered from behind me, his slender, ink-stained fingers lingering at the nape of my neck until I shivered. “The beast-horde’s telepathy is insidious. Without this ward, their madness might seep into your mind.” I reached up, tracing the intricate knotwork carved into the metal. The headache that had pounded behind my temples all morning instantly dissolved into a compliant hush. “I’m nothing without your wards, Julian,” I murmured. His reflection in the polished glass smiled—patient, victorious, and impossibly gentle.
“Never say that,” Julian chided softly, turning me by the shoulders so I had to meet his gaze. His eyes were the faded gray of river slate, ringed with dark circles born from weeks of candlelit translation. He looked exhausted, brittle enough to snap in the first stiff gust from the caldera, yet the resolve in his jaw was harder than granite. “You are the blade of House Valerius, Sariyah. You are the fire that will reclaim our world from the monsters. Without you, I am just ink and paper in an ash heap.”
A warm flutter settled under my ribs, accompanied by that familiar surge of protective fierce loyalty. I reached up and carefully adjusted the collar of his traveling coat, buttoning the thick wool against the biting sulfuric draft of the ruins. His skin was cold, always so painfully cold, unlike mine.
“Ink and paper preserve the soul of an empire, Julian,” I said, resting my palm flat against his chest for a brief second before reaching for my broadsword. “Steel just clears the dirt so you can write.”
He laughed, a small, breathy sound that ended in a dry cough. The ash in the air was thick here at the edge of the Cinder Wealds—the gray, dead borderland where the final draconic war had ground humanity down to marrow and cinder. Every breath Julian took had to be filtered through a linen scarf, his lungs complaining at the grit, while I breathed the caustic haze as easily as morning mist.
I checked our supplies with practiced efficiency. Julian’s satchels were stuffed with vellum rubbings, brass compasses, and the heavy leather-bound codices of the High Archons, while mine held dried mutton, water skins, and whetstones. When he bent to hoist his heaviest pack, his knees wavered, the straps biting into his slight frame.
“Give it to me,” I commanded gently, catching the leather before it strained his shoulders.
“Sariyah, you already carry the provisions and sixty pounds of cold iron. I am not an invalid.”
“You are a scholar,” I countered, swinging the extra fifty pounds onto my opposite shoulder as effortlessly as tossing a cloak over my arm. “Your hands are meant for deciphering imperial sigils, not hauling pack-weights. If you rupture a tendon before we find the Matriarch’s seal, we’ll be wandering these crags until winter.”
He watched me with a faint, wry tilt of his lips, surrender flickering in his gray eyes. “One day, your stubbornness will kill me.”
“Never,” I promised, meaning it with every fiber of my being. “Nothing will touch you while I draw breath.”
We set out across the smoking flats an hour before dawn, the sky an oily purple bruised with streaks of amber. The Cinder Wealds stretched for fifty leagues to the north, a graveyard of calcified trees and shattered basalt ridges where the remnants of the draconic broods still scavenged the ruins of our fallen cities.
Julian walked half a step behind my right shoulder, exactly where I could pivot to shield him with my buckler if an ambush sprang from the fissures. His boots crunched unevenly against the pumice, his walking staff thudding into the earth with every labored stride.
The heat radiating from the ground was enough to curl the leather soles of a common soldier’s boots. Rivers of sluggish magma pulsed beneath thin rifts of black rock, illuminating our path in angry crimson veins.
“Careful,” Julian warned, his voice muffled by the damp cloth over his mouth. “Step on the gray basalt only. The dark slate has hollow chambers beneath; a mortal falls through, and their bones are slag before they can scream.”
“I’m careful,” I said.
I looked down at the fissures. The air rising from them shimmered with a heat that made Julian’s eyelashes bead with sweat, but against my bare forearms, it felt almost... soothing. Like stepping into a sun-drenched courtyard in the height of midsummer, or wrapping oneself in a heavy, woolen blanket fresh from the hearth.
I frowned, rubbing the skin of my wrist where a stray spark of burning cinder drifted down and landed. It hissed against my flesh for a second, then went dark. It didn't blister. It didn't even sting.
*Odd,* I thought, a familiar prickle of unease brushing against my thoughts. *Human skin shouldn't be so numb.*
Almost instantly, as if summoned by the doubt, a violent throb detonated behind my left eye.
A gasp tore from my throat before I could swallow it. The world blurred into a wash of white agony, my vision splintering into double-images of the jagged horizon. Deep in the core of my skull, a sound began to rise—a low, rhythmic cadence that felt less like pain and more like a voice screaming from the bottom of an ocean, desperate to be understood.
*Child... blood of the sky...*
My knees buckled. The iron sword clattered against the basalt with a deafening ring.
“Sariyah!”
Julian was there in a heartbeat, dropping his staff and falling to his knees beside me. His pale hands immediately went to my throat, finding the cold contour of the silver torc.
“Breathe,” he commanded, his voice tight with an urgency that verged on terror. “Look at me, Sariyah. Eyes on me. Don't listen to it.”
I clutched at the rocks, my fingernails digging into the stone so hard that the brittle basalt cracked beneath them. “Julian... the noise... it’s inside the bone—”
“It’s the telepathy,” he hissed, his fingers working feverishly at the latch at the base of my skull, tightening the silver band by a notch until the metal bit directly into my skin. “The beast-horde left psychic residue in these wastes. It preys on human marrow. It wants to rot your sanity, make you tear your own flesh.”
He pressed his thumbs against the base of my jaw, chanting a low, rhythmic litany in the dead tongue of the High Empire. The silver grew icy, a sudden shock of freezing magic that rushed down my spine and flooded my veins like winter water.
The voice in my skull shattered.
The agony receded instantly, shrinking back like a whipped hound into the dark corners of my mind. The world snapped back into focus—the jagged volcanic glass, the swirling soot, and Julian’s pale, sweat-streaked face hovering inches from mine.
“There,” Julian breathed, his chest heaving, his fingers trembling where they rested against my throat. He stroked the side of my neck with an agonizing tenderness, smoothing away the sweat with the pad of his thumb. “There, my brave girl. It’s gone. You’re safe.”
I leaned into his touch, trembling, feeling pathetic and unmoored. I was supposed to be the warrior. I was supposed to be the unbroken vanguard of humanity. And yet here I was, brought to my knees by mere ghosts in the wind, entirely dependent on a scholar’s wards to keep my own mind from fracturing.
