The two Sixes put hundreds of worlds between them, flying ever outward from Meliz. And then one of them cut a door too far. It opened into darkness, and the darkness was alive.
This came to be known by survivors as the Cataclysm, though survivors were tragically few. The Faerers fled back whence they’d come, and the great beasts of darkness pursued, pouring after them through the cuts they’d made from sky to sky to sky. All the way back to Meliz they came, and every world the Faerers had opened, they devoured. Even Meliz was lost, Meliz eternal, the garden of the Continuum. Those seraphim who escaped into the neighbor world Eretz managed to hold the portal closed, and they held it to this day, pouring their strength into shoring up their sky to keep the darkness at bay.
A bold young queen in that distant world was even now training a legion of angels and chimaera to battle the darkness and hopefully destroy it. But that’s another story.
As for the other Six, led by Thakra—who knows? Perhaps they died long ago, or perhaps they’re still going, far, far out in the infinity of the great All. That’s another story, too.
This is the story of the portals between Zeru and Mesaret, and how they were used after the angels had moved on, and by whom, and at what cost.
Mesaret was the world with the extraordinary blue metal that made its people like gods. Through the cuts in the sky their empire spread. With their skyships and soldier-wizards, they were invincible. For a time.
All empires fail. They overreach, spread too thin, collect one enemy too many. They’re gnawed at from within by corruption, greed, betrayal. The Mesaret Empire was no exception. There was fighting on all fronts when a young smith called Skathis looked into the swirl of chaos and saw…opportunity.
He slew the emperor, but he did not take his place. He had other aspirations. He wished be a god. So he took the emperor’s godsmetal, and then he left the world with his ship and a small, handpicked crew that included his spy, Korako, whether she wanted to go or not.
Nova reached Aqa just too late. She missed them by a week. And she might as well have wished to fly to the moon as follow them through the portal. It simply wasn’t possible. Nevertheless, she did it. Not that year or the next, but she did it. Skathis had a mesarthium skyship to navigate portals and realms. She had nothing but her wits and her diadem, and still she found ways to follow. Sometimes it took her years to get from one world to the next. The trail grew old and faint, but always she kept on going.
There comes a certain point with a hope or a dream, when you either give it up or give up everything else. And if you choose the dream, if you keep on going, then you can never quit, because it’s all you are. Nova had made that choice a long time ago. She was so far down this path that to turn around would be to face a howling, dark tunnel with nothing at its end, not even ice or uuls. There was no going back. There was nothing else. There was only Kora, and the words that haunted Nova:
Find me. I am not free.
It had taken her more than two hundred years to track Skathis’s skyship to the edge of the shattered empire. She had lived many lives in that time, finding her way—making her way—through world after war-ravaged world. It was something, to have survived so much and come so far. The sea, she thought, would not know her now. She scarcely knew herself. No one still lived—in any world—who remembered Koraandnova, save Kora herself, her other half, so long ago severed from her.
She had been just Nova for centuries now, but the broken edges of that sundered name had not grown smooth with time. If anything they had gotten sharper. Touch them and you’d bleed. Through it all, whatever life she was living, whatever way she was surviving, she never stopped searching for her sister.
There was a treacherous whisper that lived inside her—the sea’s voice, which she couldn’t leave behind. Thakra knows she’d tried. Whenever she felt it stirring, its words starting to form in her mind, she’d bite the inside of her cheek or lip, hard enough to draw blood. The blood was a tithe she paid to keep it silent, or else it was a prayer that she would prove the whisper wrong.
Too late.
Those were the words she couldn’t kill. That was the fear she quelled with her blood—that she would always and forever be too late.
But now, at long last, she had found the white bird—or it had found her, as it had once before. And as she followed it through the portal, she knew: It could only be leading her to Kora.
Chapter 40
Onslaught
Sarai was numb with the shock of the red-sea vista as Wraith burst through the portal. The warp stretched to disgorge the eagle, its massive wings spread wide, and snapped back into place only to open again as figures poured in behind it: one…two… four black-clad marauders, one in the lead, three fanning out behind.
Wraith’s shriek was twinned with a scream, and even muted by the chamber, it was bloodcurdling. It was no natural scream. Sarai, Lazlo, and the others were racked by it. It invaded them, body and mind. It came from a woman, the one in the lead. She was fair-haired and slight. She was blue, clad in tight black garb that made her seem dipped in oil. At her brow, like a crown, she wore a circlet of mesarthium. Her eyes were mad, and her mouth was open to pour forth this soul-scouring scream.
Sarai had never heard a wilder sound. There were wolves in it, and war cries, carrion birds and storm winds, and she’d never have believed it came from a person if she weren’t seeing it with her own eyes. It struck terror in her, in all of them, rendering them stunned and helpless.
It was magic. It was an assault. It drilled into their minds and cut them off from their instincts, muting their natural reactions.
Lazlo faltered, stricken. He was in the act of pulling back the walkway and closing the orb, but everything halted. Where he might have sent forth a surge of mesarthium to engulf the intruders, he did not. Even the defensive instincts of Eril-Fane and Azareen, razor-honed by years of training, were overpowered. They didn’t draw their hreshteks, which should have been second nature, but shrank from the sound, hands flying up to flatten against their ears.
…
Nova breached the portal screaming Werran’s scream. He was one of her cohort, and this was his gift: a scream to sow panic in the minds of all who heard it. There was no better way to stun one’s foe in the opening assault. Nova liked to lead with it, and buy herself a moment to assess her opponent at leisure. Usually, she let Werran use his gift himself, but she had a mighty need to scream as she followed Kora’s bird into this unknown world, so she took it over and let it loose, and relished the way it ravaged her throat.
At last she had come to the moment she’d been chasing for more than two centuries, since the night she unwrapped the diadem and vowed to free her sister.
She’d lost count of the number of worlds there were between this one and her own. And she hadn’t kept track of the men she’d killed since Zyak and Shergesh. But she knew the years, and the months, and the days since the white bird came to Rieva. It had been so long, but now she was here. She was going to save her sister, and she was so much more than ready.
She scanned the room, still pouring out the scream, her heart pounding fit to burst. Five Servants and three humans, she counted. Her eyes flicked over them fast, then over them again even faster. Kora’s bird flew in circles, its cry twining with her scream. Nova’s heart beat harder. She bit off the scream. She’d thought the bird would lead her to her sister. The need to see her was a violent fire within her.
But Kora wasn’t here.
Too late, came the treacherous whisper. She bit her cheek, and her mouth filled with the metal tang of blood.