There is a faraway world where things grow like a song builds to its crescendo.
There is always music there. Melodies that make and unmake beneath strangely dancing skies. Symphonies of lightning and thunder and whispering winds. Dissonant chords plucked in the space between stars like faint echoes of worlds beyond.
It is atop the highest peak hidden in the clouds that a boy gives audience to this divine orchestra. He sits by the icy gates he is tasked with guarding, lonely but never alone. The music keeps him company, the winged horses, too, and he has his lyre to play when he aches for something more attuned to his moods.
But mostly he listens.
Not many people listen, and so the moon and sun and stars share their secrets with the boy. They sing visions that swim in his eyes and chant prophecies that prickle at his skin. They whisper of bloodstreams that are also lungs and rib cages that wrap around hearts and the hollow at the center of it all where a once-sprawling sea turned to ash and its once-mighty gods were left unmoored.
Listen, they whisper. Hear the blood and hear the bones and hear the fiercely beating heart.
They fill his soul with hope, longing, purpose, and soon the boy is too unstrung to merely sit and listen.
It is his turn to make music now, to voice all the secrets he cannot keep alone.
Thus he picks up his lyre and begins to play.
Can you hear him? The boy who sings of silver and marble and gold? The gods speak through him, and he lets them, thinking himself the cleverer adversary. Come, he beckons the scholar and the witch and the warrior whose souls are an echo of his own. Seek me as I see you.
He wills the chords of his lyre to draw them a map among the stars, and the skies weep to hear the sound.
Patience, they whisper. Take heart.
They will find him among the stars—he is certain of it.
And so the boy waits by his gate, still lonely, but not for long.
25 EMORY
THE SIGHT OF THE INSTITUTE made Emory’s skin crawl.
She was caught off guard again by the New Moon sigil on Baz’s right hand as they climbed out of the cab. He met her gaze, face bloodless.
“This will work, right?”
Emory ground her teeth. “Let’s hope.”
It had been Baz’s idea to mask his Eclipse sigil to get inside the Institute—a little illusion work to get us through the door, he’d said—but the inspiration behind it had sprung from her. They’d been in Obscura Hall under the twilit hues of its imagined sky, trying to figure out how to get into the Institute—notorious for turning away Eclipse-born for no reason, according to Baz—when she had reached for Baz’s magic, wondering what it might feel like to bend time to her will.
It had felt like plunging into shockingly cold waters, her lungs filling with it as she gasped for breath. She didn’t know which way was up or down, how to pull away from this magic that felt terrifyingly foreign, vast and complicated and crushing in a way she would never understand. She’d finally sputtered out of its grasp, eyes wide and clutching at her chest, to find Baz reaching for her as if he’d meant to shake her out of her stupor.
His voice trembled. “What in the Tides’ name was that?”
Emory hadn’t known how to describe it, how scary it had felt. She’d thought Eclipse magics might somehow be easier for her to wield, that being Eclipse-born herself would create an affinity for them.
“Tidecallers drew on the lunar magics of the Tides, not the Shadow’s own magic,” Baz had argued like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
But Emory was undeterred. Now that she’d tried it, she wanted to see how far she could go, test the limits of her power. “What if I tried with another Eclipse magic?”
Somehow, she managed to sway him, and it was how she found herself reaching for the Illusion magic around them. It wasn’t as overwhelming as Baz’s magic, though it still felt dangerous. Like treading murky water without knowing when she might drop into an abyss. She got the sense that one wrong step would bring her to Collapse faster than it would take Baz to reach for his magic to stop her.
In the end, she’d painstakingly succeeded in making a single sunflower appear in the fields of rippling tall grass. It felt like using Sower magic, in a sense, but so much harder, given that she was conjuring something from nothing.
After practicing enough times to get the hang of it, it was with this same Illusion magic that she’d made the dark moon and sunflower of Baz’s Eclipse tattoo disappear, leaving his left hand perfectly unmarred, while on his right was a near-flawless rendition of the dark moon and narcissus of House New Moon’s sigil. Same as hers.
Baz caught her smiling at her handiwork and flexed his hand. “If it gets too hard to hold the illusion…”
“I know.” She could already feel the strain of it on her magic, how difficult it was to keep the illusion up. The sunflower had felt easier: once sprung into being, it had stopped draining her power, though the illusion had then slowly withered away to nothing. For this, she needed to keep a hold on the magic long enough at least to get them into the Institute—without Collapsing.
A stern-faced Regulator greeted them at the door. “Purpose of your visit?”
“We’re visiting a Collapsed patient,” Baz answered with surprising calm. “Kai Salonga.”
The Regulator noted the New Moon tattoos on their hands. “Identity cards.”
Emory felt Baz stiffen ever so slightly as the Regulator looked at their cards, searched their faces. For a moment, she thought it wouldn’t work. But the Regulator handed them back their cards and motioned them through the next door with a bored jerk of the head.
Baz blew out a sigh. Emory forced a smile; the magic was already taking its toll. Just a while longer, she told herself as an attendant led them through the maze of corridors. The edges of her vision began to blur.
“Let go of it,” Baz muttered at her side. “Now.”
She didn’t need to be told twice. Emory sighed in relief as she let go of the illusion. Baz tugged on his sleeves, hiding the back of his hands. She hoped it would be enough.
They were brought to a small inner courtyard where another attendant watched over four patients: an aging man and a middle-aged woman playing chess, a girl not much older than Emory huddled in the corner drawing in a notebook, and Kai, sitting cross-legged on a bench with a book open in his lap. Without taking his eyes off his reading, he swept his shoulder-length dark hair back, tying it in a low bun. The sunlight caught the delicate chains he wore around his neck, complementing the warm undertones of his skin, and Emory thought she saw the edges of a tattoo peeking out from his shirt.
Kai finally caught sight of them as he lifted his head. His eyes narrowed in on Baz, and the air between them grew taut in a way Emory didn’t quite understand.
“Back so soon, Brysden?”
Emory seized. That voice…
There was a curious glint in Kai’s gaze as it fell on her. She stood completely hypnotized.
“This is Emory Ainsleif,” Baz said with an awkward clearing of his throat. “She’s a friend. Of Romie’s.”
“You were in my dream the other night,” Emory blurted.
Kai’s brow shot up. “Was I now?”
There was no mistaking his voice, like a midnight breeze.
That way lies madness, dreamling.
Wake up.
“You were there when I saw Romie. You woke me from my dream.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed where I’m currently being kept,” Kai sneered as he motioned to his branded hand, to the heavy damper cuffs around his wrists, “I can assure you I’m in no position to be walking into anyone’s slumber.”
Something in his tone, in the faint recognition he tried to hide from his eyes, told her he knew exactly what she was referring to.