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She gave the truest answer she could. “No. As far as I know, they’ve been looking for this place for fifteen thousand years, but I’m the only one who’s ever made it back.”

“Who is they?”

“The Asteri. I told you—intergalactic parasites.”

“What does that mean?”

“They are …” Bryce paused. Who was to say these people wouldn’t hand her right over to Rigelus? Bow to him? Theia had come from this world and fought the Asteri, but Pelias had bought what they were selling and gleefully knelt at their immortal feet.

Her pause said enough. Amren snorted. “Don’t waste your breath, Rhysand.”

Rhysand angled his head, a predator studying prey. Bryce withstood it, chin high. Her mother would have been proud of her.

He snapped his fingers again, and the blood, the dirt on her, disappeared. A stickiness still coated her skin, but it was clean. She blinked down at herself, then up at him.

A cruel half smile graced his mouth. “To incentivize you.”

Amren and Azriel remained stone-faced. Waiting.

She’d be stupid to believe Rhysand’s incentive meant anything good about him. But she could play this game.

So Bryce said, “The Asteri are ancient. Like tens of thousands of years old.” She winced at the memory of that room beneath their palace, the records of conquests going back millennia, complete with their own unique dating system.

Her captors didn’t reply, didn’t so much as blink. Fine—insane old age wasn’t totally nuts to them.

“They arrived in my world fifteen thousand years ago. No one knows from where.”

“What do you mean by arrived?” Rhysand asked.

“Honestly? I have no idea how they first got to Midgard. The history they spun was that they were … liberators. Enlighteners. According to them, they found Midgard little more than a backwater planet occupied by non-magical humans and animals. The Asteri chose it as the place to begin creating a perfect empire, and creatures and races from other worlds soon flocked to it through a giant rip between worlds called the Northern Rift. Which now only opens to Hel, but it used to open to … anywhere.”

Amren pushed, “A rip. How does that happen?”

“Beats me,” Bryce said. “No one’s ever figured out how it’s even possible—why it’s at that spot in Midgard, and not others.”

Rhysand asked, “What happened after these beings arrived in your world?”

Bryce sucked her teeth before saying, “In the official version of this story, another world, Hel, tried to invade Midgard. To destroy the fledgling empire—and everyone living in it. But the Asteri unified all these new people under one banner and pushed Hel back to its own realm. In the process, the Northern Rift was fixed with its destination permanently on Hel. After that, it remained mostly closed. A massive wall was erected around it to keep any Hel-born stragglers from getting through the cracks, and the Asteri built a glorious empire meant to last for eternity. Or so we’re all ordered to believe.”

The faces in front of her remained impassive. Rhysand asked quietly, “And what is the unofficial story?”

Bryce swallowed, the room in the archives flashing through her memory. “The Asteri are ancient, immortal beings who feed on the power of others—they harvest the magic of a people, a world, and then eat it. We call it firstlight. It fuels our entire world, but mostly them. We’re required to hand it over upon reaching immortality—well, as close to immortality as we can get. We seize our full, mature power through a ritual called the Drop, and in the process, some of our power is siphoned off and given over to the firstlight stores for the Asteri. It’s like a tax on our magic.”

She wasn’t even going to touch upon what happened after death. How the power that lingered in their souls was eventually harvested as well, forced by the Under-King into the Dead Gate and turned into secondlight to fuel the Asteri even more. Whatever reached them after the Under-King ate his fill.

Amren angled her head, sleek bob shifting with the movement. “A tax on your magic, taken by ancient beings for their own nourishment and power.” Azriel’s gaze shifted to her, Rhysand presumably still translating mind-to-mind. But Amren murmured to herself, as if the words triggered something, “A tithe.”

Rhysand’s brows rose. But he waved a broad, elegant hand at Bryce to continue. “What else?”

She swallowed again. “Midgard is only the latest in a long line of worlds invaded by the Asteri. They have an entire archive of different planets they’ve either conquered or tried to conquer. I saw it right before I came here. And, as far as I know, there were only three planets that were able to kick them out—to fight back and defeat them. Hel, a planet called Iphraxia, and … a world occupied by the Fae. The original, Starborn Fae.” She nodded to the dagger at Azriel’s side, which had flared with dark light in the presence of the Starsword. “You know my sword by a different name, but you recognize what it is.”

Only Amren nodded.

“I think it’s because it came from this world,” Bryce said. “It seems connected to that dagger somehow. It was forged here, became part of your history, then vanished … right? You haven’t seen it in fifteen thousand years, or spoken this language in nearly as long—which lines up perfectly with the timeline of the Starborn Fae arriving in Midgard.”

The Starborn—Theia, their queen, and Pelias, the traitor-prince who’d usurped her. Theia had brought two daughters with her into Midgard: Helena, who’d been forced to wed Pelias, and another, whose name had been lost to history. Much of the truth about Theia had been lost as well, either through time or the Asteri’s propaganda. Aidas, Prince of the Chasm, had loved her—that much Bryce knew. Theia had fought alongside Hel against the Asteri to free Midgard. Had been killed by Pelias in the end, her name nearly wiped from all memory. Bryce bore Theia’s light—Aidas had confirmed it. But beyond that, even the Asteri Archives had provided no information about the long-dead queen.

“So you believe,” Amren said slowly, silver eyes flickering, “that our world is this third planet that resisted these … Asteri.”