Kai had tracked the motion of a stray bee as it landed on the windowsill. “This didn’t even scratch the surface of what you truly fear, Brysden. Most people suppress their worst ones. Bad memories, traumas, childhood wounds. They bury them so deep they aren’t even aware of them anymore.” His dark eyes had slid to Baz. “It’s always the quietest minds that hide the worst sort of violence.”
Something about the way he’d said it—almost fondly, his voice a midnight breeze—had made Baz shift uncomfortably in his seat. He remembered the dwindling light gilding the side of Kai’s handsome face, the supple strands of jet-black hair that fell from his bun to kiss his jawline. Baz had hoped Kai wouldn’t notice the flush creeping up his neck, mortified at the thought of him seeing the horrors that lived in his mind. It wasn’t the first time the Nightmare Weaver had found himself in Baz’s nightmares—something about their proximity, he’d explained, that called to his mind more than most. The thought was horrifying in its intimacy.
Kai’s cologne lingered now in the commons, a scent at once upsetting and oddly comforting. Baz could almost picture him coming into the room and draping himself over the chaise longue by the fireplace, imagined him unscrewing the lid of his trusty flask with that sardonic smile of his.
It felt like only yesterday he was here, but now Kai was gone and never coming back.
Baz knew more than most how unpredictable and dangerous those of their house were when their powers went unchecked. Unlike those of other lunar houses, whose magic lay dormant in their blood, slowly building until their moon phase came around again, their own magic didn’t follow such a cycle. It flowed freely in their veins at all times, power that seemed to want to be used, building to dangerous levels in their blood until they released it.
The danger was in letting it consume them.
One slip was all it took to take that power away from Kai. One feat of magic that pushed him too far past that precarious line between small magic and big magic, a line Baz himself was always keenly aware of.
There was a difference, he knew. Small magic was innocuous, safe. It went unnoticed by the world. It was the time he slowed by a fraction of a second, all so that a minute could turn into a minute and a half, allowing him to get a bit more reading done in a night. It was the seconds he sped up to brew a pot of coffee in half the time it usually took, all so he could hit the Decrescens library before anyone was even awake. It was the thread he pulled to see a lock unlocked so he could hold the fabled manuscript of his favorite book in his hands.
Small things that took the edge off. Inoffensive bursts of magical release. That was all Baz would allow himself.
Big magic, on the other hand, was the sort he dared not touch—the kind he wasn’t entirely sure he could wield, even if he tried. At least not without deadly consequences. Not without Collapsing.
“Magic sustains us like air,” his father had taught him long ago. “Go without it and you suffocate. Keep too much in your lungs and you’ll burst. The key,” he’d said, “is taking carefully measured breaths.”
The lesson was deeply ingrained in Baz. It sounded easy enough, but even his father, Eclipse-born like him, had ended up slipping. Baz remembered all too well how Theodore Brysden’s face had been plastered in every newspaper and shop window around the city of Threnody after his Collapsing. How the other children Baz’s age had stopped wanting to play with him because of it, seeing all Eclipse magic as dangerous, perverse. Evil.
The sins of the Shadow, theirs to carry on.
Even then, Baz couldn’t fault those kids for how they’d acted. He couldn’t blame Romie for distancing herself from him either; his sister wasn’t Eclipse-born and therefore didn’t need to shoulder the weight of what their father had done as Baz did. The other kids still wanted to include her so long as Baz kept his distance. And he understood, truly. No one was as shaken as he was by the deaths his father’s Collapsing had left in its wake, because all he kept thinking was how that might happen to him one day. So he retreated into himself, doing everything he could not to be contrary.
The world is as it is, he would think, and who am I to challenge it?
That had never been Kai Salonga’s way of thinking. A challenger through and through, so much so that he’d risked his life to dispute everything people thought of Eclipse-born and Collapsings.
Much good it had done him in the end.
Kai had Collapsed right on the heels of Romie’s death, two painful blows that left Baz utterly unmoored. He’d come back from Romie’s funeral having decided to spend the summer at Aldryn, the thought of staying home without her there too unbearable. Kai, too, was staying at Aldryn over summer break, as he always did, claiming to have no interest in following his parents around the way he’d done his entire childhood, moving from country to country, boarding school to boarding school.
Baz had looked forward to it. A full summer with almost the entire campus to themselves and a near-abandoned Cadence to explore, the quiet evenings they would spend reading in the commons, the debates they’d have as they reread Song of the Drowned Gods for the umpteenth time.
Instead, he’d come back to find Kai gone, taken to the Institute to have his magic sealed.
With a sigh, Baz reached for a cup of lemon ginger tea long since gone cold. He should go up to Kai’s room and start packing up his belongings as Professor Selandyn had requested. She wanted everything ready for when Kai’s parents arrived; apparently, they were traveling to Cadence to pay their son a visit at the Institute. But Baz couldn’t bring himself to do it because all he kept thinking of was the last conversation he’d had with Kai before Kai Collapsed and how, if he hadn’t gone home, if he’d taken Kai more seriously, Kai might not be rotting away at the Institute, the Nightmare Weaver no more.
Instead, he reached for The Tides of Fate and the Shadow of Ruin.
The heavy book began with illustrations he remembered poring over as a child, included in every piece of literature on the Tides. He would stare at the detailed renderings of the deities for hours on end, even tracing them on blank sheets of paper he would then gift to his mother. He’d always loved drawing, had devoured picture book after picture book as a child, but had eventually come to focus on the words more than the illustrations themselves. That was what he was truly interested in, the stories they told.
Baz let himself look at those images now, mesmerized once more. According to the oldest myth, the Tides had once been a single person, a girl born of the sea who had lived an entire lifespan in the space of one moon cycle. It started with the one who was now known as Bruma, depicted here as a child standing on the frozen banks of a sea amid a fierce winter storm. Above her was a dark, moonless sky dappled with stars. Black narcissus flowers bloomed behind her, impossibly sprung from the cracks in the ice.
The Tides were first birthed in darkness, the text below the image read, when the seas were still ungoverned by the moon, and from the chaos of their motions emerged a child whom both life and death called their own. She understood the seas, predicted their moods so that sailors could safely make port, and the moon marveled at the child’s cunning.
Then came a slightly older version of the girl, known now as Anima: rosy-cheeked with eyes a deep indigo like the stalks of hollyhock around her that bent toward a sparkling sea. Her hands reached for the heavens, where three moons shone among the constellations: the waxing crescent, the first quarter moon, the waxing gibbous.
As the moon grew to a sliver that ate the darkness around it, so did the child grow into a maiden burning bright, so lovely and full of laughter that the seas calmed at her feet, a triumph not even the moon could boast of.
Aestas followed, her naked body heavy with child, waves lapping gently at her ankles. Her eyes were the same shade as the pale orchids that adorned her flowing silver hair, reflecting the milky light of a full moon.