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Dawsyn sees it all, in that singular microcosmic moment – time, and the way she can stretch it before it resumes its shape; space, and how it might be folded. She is full of glowing light, radiating dark, all-encompassing fear, and when she nods to the guard, the magic understands. She releases time from her grasp, lets go of the air that she stole from the world, and lets it detonate.

The guard is hurled away, his sword with him. The titanic gust forces his feet from the forest floor, and he is thrown away until his back meets a tree trunk. A crack rings out as it crushes his spine, and then the wind is gone.

The guard slumps into the leaves and dirt.

A collective breath is taken. A release of tension amongst them all. As one, they turn their faces to her, a corpus of shock and confusion.

Beads of blood collect along a shallow line at Ryon’s neck, and Dawsyn can hardly look at anything else.

“Thank the Chasm,” she says. She breathes the words, sheets of relief billowing from her lungs, the fear ebbing away with it. She closes her eyes against the moisture gathering in them.

She breathes, and breathes, and with each exhale she feels the dark and the light recede back to their respective territories.

Baltisse speaks before the rest can. Before the remarks and questions can begin to fly. “We must leave,” she says quietly. “Now.”

Already, the footfalls of the battalion sound more frenetic, closer. Too much disturbance in a forest so quiet. Too many guards to hold back. They are coming.

Ryon’s hand trembles and his eyes are still stuck on Dawsyn’s, but he nods. He goes to Salem and helps him limp to Tasheem. “Take him.”

Rivdan grabs hold of Esra and Hector. Ryon goes to Dawsyn, wiping her cheeks roughly with his thumbs. “Where?” he says to Baltisse, hurried and quiet.

It is Yennes who answers, stepping further into the camp, her hands uncharacteristically clenched into fists. “I know a place,” she says. “I can lead you.”

There is no room for argument. The boots of a hundred guards inch closer.

“Go with Baltisse,” Ryon tells Dawsyn, clasping her arm and pulling her to the mage. “Yennes, with me.”

“You know where to fold?” Yennes asks Baltisse, who nods, taking Dawsyn’s forearm in her hand.

Ryon lifts Yennes into his arms and his wings swoop down. The sound of armour and boots is drowned by the sounds of Glacian wings.

“Brace yourself,” Baltisse warns, and then Dawsyn is being compressed, her blood and bones grinding inward until she isn’t there at all.

When Dawsyn begins to feel her body unspool, she remembers to bend her knees. This time, she can feel the delicate way the collapsed space opens, one piece after another. She can identify the slow unleashing of time and space.

And suddenly, her feet are against solid ground.

“Not even a twinge,” Baltisse remarks smugly, as though to herself.

The smell of brine finds Dawsyn first, then the mist of wind-carried spray against her face. She opens her eyes to it: the boundless expanse of inky sea beneath the half-moon. Sluggish waves churning onto a sand and stone shore.

The same sea she once stood before with Ryon, resolving to turn her back on it and the escape it offered. The same sea, but from an unfamiliar perspective. A sea cast in shadow. Cliffs do not line the shore as they did the last time. The long grass that sways between her legs undulates to the sand’s edge.

It’s the colossal shadow that looms over the water that makes her turn. She traces the shadow along the shore, watching it stretch to the east, the water tunnelling into a channel.

A channel that cuts the land in two, right to the opening of mountainous rock.

Dawsyn staggers backward. Behind her, shallow forest is eclipsed by the endlessly rising obsidian rock face.

The mountain, just another side of it.

The sound of wings turns her gaze. The mixed appear in the distant sky, growing ever nearer, their wings unfathomably wide. A few moments later, Ryon lands and sets a drawn-looking Yennes on the ground. Her hands wring together immediately.

Tasheem comes next, balancing Salem gingerly on his uninjured foot, and then Rivdan, his burden heavier than the others. Windswept and panting, they turn their heads from the sea to the mountain.

“Is this – are we still in Terrsaw?” Hector asks, eyes wider than the rest as they take in the sight of the ocean for the first time.

Yennes answers hesitantly. “On the edge of it,” she says, and then with a nod, she directs their eyes to a chimney between the low treetops.