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N YX THRASHED IN a nightmare. She had endured this same harsh dream an untold number of times. It had repeated so often that she had come to recognize it as a dream, yet its hold still kept her trapped, unable to escape.

Again, as she had countless times before, she fled up a shadowy mountain slope…

… through the fringes of a leafless forest made of stone. Screams of man and beast chase her the last of the way. The clash of steel rings all around, punctuated by the thunder of war machines.

Panting and breathless, she skids to a stop at the summit. She takes in everything, recognizing she is older, scarred, missing a finger on her left hand. But she has no time for such mysteries.

Ahead, a cluster of figures with tattooed faces and blood-soaked robes circle an altar where a huge shadow-creature thrashes and bucks, its wings nailed to the stone with iron.

“No!” she screams…

Atop her bed, Nyx cried out loud, too, hearing it in her ears but still unable to wake. Her throat ached with the misery of it all.

As before, she was heard…

… dark faces turn toward her, curved daggers flashing into view.

She swings her arms high and claps her palms together as words, foreign to her, burst from her lips, ending in a name. “Bashaliia!”

With that last word, her skull releases the fiery storm held inside. It blasts outward with enough force to shatter the altar stone. Iron stakes break from black granite, and the shadow-beast leaps high. Its blood blesses the dark gathering, sending them scattering…

Even now, Nyx recognized the sigil that had been ignited, the fiery brand that had been burned into her spirit by the raash’ke horde-mind.

Her lips silently formed those ancient words that turned song into purpose.

Again, someone in the dream recognized this threat…

… a figure runs toward her, a blade held high, a curse on his lips.

Wasted and empty, she can only fall to her knees. She cannot even raise an arm in her defense. She simply lifts her face to the smoke-shrouded skies, to the full face of the moon. The sickle form of the winged creature passes over its surface and disappears into the smoke and darkness.

As she watches, time both slows and stretches. The moon grows ever larger. The war machines fall silent all around her. Screams and cries of agony malform into a chorus of terror. The ground quakes under her knees, ever more violent with each breath.

And still the moon fills more and more of the sky, its edges on fire now, darkening all the world around it.

She finds the strength to name this doom.

“Moonfall…”

Then a dagger plunges into her chest—piercing her heart with the truth…

The shock of that impaled blade jolted Nyx awake, casting her from the nightmare and into her bed. Still, she carried that truth out with her and stated it aloud.

“I’ve failed… I’ve failed us all.”

She freed an arm and brought her fingertips to her lips. She noted her left hand still had five fingers.

So there’s still time.

Over the past year, this same vision had continued to plague her, repeating over and over, tracing back to when she had first been poisoned and dreamed of moonfall. It always ended the same, with doom, with her failure. She had discussed this with Krysh, and with Frell before him. While some aspects of the dream had come true, others had not.

She rubbed the finger that had been missing in her dream.

But it wasn’t that loss that worried her the most.

She still felt the dagger’s plunge, as an ache in her sternum. She remembered the dreadful silence that often followed, a silence without end. Even now, she cowered at its immensity and inevitability.

Was this doomed end a certainty or merely a warning?

She did not know, could not know. All she could do was follow this path to its end. She shoved up out of her sheets. She shivered away the cobwebs of her nightmare, wondering why this dream had struck her so vividly.

A knock on the cabin door startled her.

“What is it?” she croaked out, her throat still raw from her scream.

“Nyx, you must come see this!”

It was Jace, his voice urgent.

She climbed from her bed. “Give me a moment. I’ll be right there.”

She crossed and pulled on a light shift that floated over her naked skin. She belted it at the waist and slipped her feet into sandals. She could not tolerate any more clothing in this heat.

Even with the ta’wyn coolers whispering throughout the ship, the air stifled. The Fyredragon had become an oven. Those aboard moved slowly, sweated profusely, tried their best to stay close to those copper tubes that seeped out a miserly amount of chilled air. With a ship this massive, many regions were not fed by those tubes and had been closed off. As such, the living spaces aboard grew more cramped, raising tempers, which only grew pricklier over these past two months.

But that was not the worst issue.

She crossed to the small carafe on a table near her bed. She took the barest sip from it, no more than enough to wet her fear-dried mouth.

The rationing had become severe over the past two weeks. Even the extra trickles from the Chanaryn tarps, designed to trap vapor from the winds, had dried away. This deep in the Barrens, the sun had seared the air to an arid parch.

Without spotting a watering hole for nearly a month, Esme had worked with Hyck to engineer an apparatus of copper tubes and pots, not unlike the tackle used to distill fiery bogbite back in the swamps of her home. Only instead of producing throat-burning spirits, the ship’s device dripped out water. And instead of bean mash going in, the fuel for this process came from their own bladders, emptied from chamber pots.

Nothing could be wasted in this unforgiving desert.

Even their winged crewmates in the lower hold had been rationed severely, leading to a sullen lassitude. But at least, deep in the shadowy hold, a spot farthest from the sun, the cooling tubes managed to keep the space comfortable enough for the great beasts.

Jace knocked again. “You must see this! Everyone’s gathering in the wheelhouse.”

Nyx crossed to the door and opened it as the first dawn bell clanged out across the ship. She felt little rested, unable to fully shake the terror of her dream.

Out in the hall, Jace wore the same light clothing, which hung to his knees. His face had grown more gaunt, worn by the deprivations on board, but she wondered if something more dire had been wasting him, some insatiable hunger of his inner void.

Still, his eyes sparkled with verve and excitement as he led the way forward. “After skirting south of the sandstorm four days ago, Darant had been stoking our forge-engines as much as he dared in this heat. Hyck looked ready to throttle the captain due to this abuse.”

Nyx had not known about this, having spent most of her time with Bashaliia. But that was not the only reason she had avoided the wheelhouse.

Jace opened the door at the end of the hall. Sunlight blazed into a blinding burn. She shielded her eyes with her forearm. Heat washed out along with the glare. She staggered alongside Jace into the wheelhouse. He passed her a pair of amber goggles.

She quickly donned them to dull the blaze.

Still, the arc of windows across the bow remained fiery. She blinked away the sting until her eyes adjusted. Darant was at the maesterwheel, while Graylin shadowed him with Kalder, who panted heavily. Fenn and Krysh manned the navigation station, both men shifting between its various scopes. Not far from them, Rhaif stood with Shiya, whose bronze glowed brighter, fed by the shine of the Father Above.

“Come see,” Jace said, drawing her forward.

Hyck paced across the substation’s many wheels and levers. “We gotta give our blasted engines a rest or they’ll melt right off this bird.”

Darant waved this away, looking as irritated as anyone would in the heat. Still, he called to his daughter. “Glace, slow us a quarter.”

“Better a half,” Hyck griped.

Darant ignored the engineer. “Stay the course. Due north. Three-quarter speed.”

Nyx crossed to the furnace of the windows, the heat growing with every step. She squinted through the glare. The sun sat high in an achingly blue sky, as high as she’d ever seen the fiery face of the Father Above. His merciless countenance pounded the landscape that looked little changed. Below, mountainous dunes rolled in a continual red sea from out of the west. To her right, towering bluffs framed the world, running north and south. They dwarfed the cliffs on the other side of the Tablelands, climbing four times the height of those ruin-haunted scarps.

As she searched, she failed to spot what had excited Jace. “What am I supposed to see out there?”

Jace drew to her shoulder and pointed ahead, due north. “Look near the horizon.”

She leaned closer, as if that would help. Then she spotted a dark, glaring expanse, where the sky met the sand. She had thought it was just some trick of the fiery light. But as her eyes adjusted further, she realized it was due to a reflection off the sand.

No, not sand…

“Glass,” she gasped softly, and turned to Jace.

She had read about sections of the Barrens, closer to the Crown, even in the Guld’guhl territories, where some ancient cataclysm had melted the sand into wastelands of broken glass, creating vast fractured landscapes, a shattered black mirror.

Is that what lies ahead?

Nyx remembered Esme’s description from ancient Chanaryn legends, of a vast sea made of black glass—and what might be buried there.

She turned to Jace. “Are we already this close? I thought we were still another two or three days off.”

“Darant made good time by pushing the engines. We’re only one day from the site marked on Shiya’s map.”

Her heart pounded harder.

I’m not ready…

Nyx turned back to the desert. After they’d been forced off course by the sandstorm, she had thought there would be more time, not less. Then again, the swirl of dust had been nothing like the ishuka back at Seekh. While Darant had given it a wide berth, he must have sought to regain their course, stoking the engines to a fury, crossing back north at far greater speeds. She suspected the captain’s haste had less to do with a correction and more with concern about their dwindling reserve of water.

She also wondered if the vividness of her nightmare had been stoked by her anxiety as they closed upon this spot. But as that black sea grew steadily wider and larger ahead, she feared another cause.

Is that site somehow calling to me—stirring my vision brighter for another reason, for another purpose, one closer at hand?

As a warning of doom to come.

B Y THE TIME the third bell of dawn rang throughout the ship, the wheelhouse had drawn more of the crew out of the shadowy depths and into the glaring brightness. All eyes remained fixed on the black sea ahead.

As the Fyredragon swept toward the glass’s sand-swept shore, Nyx listened to the murmur of the others, a whispery chorus of anxiety and curiosity. Daal had climbed up with Tamryn. Esme had been summoned by Graylin, who wanted the Chanaryn’s insight. Her chitinous molag clattered in the woman’s shadow, as if avoiding the sunlight or fearful of what lay ahead. His spiked legs tapped out a nervous patter on the floorboards.

The noise grated on Nyx, but only because of the tension across her shoulders. If there had been any question that they had reached the spot marked on Shiya’s map, that dimmed as the sight grew ahead of them.

The expanse of black glass filled the world to the north. It appeared nothing like the descriptions of the blasted areas closer to the Crown. While the surface near the shoreline was similarly cracked, creating a shattered mirror that reflected a fractured view of the sky, farther out the black sea rolled north in an unbroken ripple of sheer glass. The reflection out there was an endless dark mirror of the world, turning blue sky into a grim firmament of dark purples and blacks, as if a storm continually threatened. Even the shine of the sun, while blinding at the center, smothered quickly under that dismal sheen.

But it was not the sea that had captured all their attention.

At the horizon, a mountain had appeared, climbing ever higher as they swept north. It rose in shattered crystalline cliffs, lower to the west, higher to the east. It appeared like a broken black crown, tipped and sitting crookedly in that baleful sea. But over the past quarter-bell that illusion broke.

From its eastern height, twin columns of smoke churned into the sky, chugging steadily out of the depths of that ominous mountain. Winds stirred those stacks into slow spirals. It was if something massive and vile huffed heavily from below, out of nostrils formed of cracked crystal.

Esme named that dreaded beast. “Draakki nee Baersh…”

No one contested her declaration. The creature before them had to be the monstrous fiend from ancient Chanaryn sagas.

The Dragon of Black Glass.

Nyx stared at the rising mountain ahead. It did indeed look like the enormous skull of a wyrm cresting out of the black sea, with its snout resting atop that dark expanse. She imagined its body slumbering below. She pictured it curled deep, claws buried in molten rock.

As she did, she remembered where she had caught another glimpse of this same beast. She glanced over to Daal.

Off in the Frozen Wastes, looming over his home in the Crèche, had been a sharp ridge of peaks that pierced the ice and towered high in a jagged line. The first to lay eyes upon it, a Noorish ancestor of Daal’s, had named the range the Dragoncryst, believing the mountaintops looked like the crested spine of a giant wyrm bursting through the ice.

She pictured that Dragon buried at the heart of the world, its colossal bulk spanning the Urth, from one side to the other, stretching from the ice of the Wastes to the fire of the Barrens.

She cringed at the immensity of this image—and the threat it portended.

Esme expressed a similar fear. “The Draakki nee Baersh… it must never wake.”

No one wanted to argue with her in this regard, too.

Still, Graylin stated what they all knew to be true. “No matter the risk, we must go there.”

Nyx kept her gaze fixed on that dire mountain.

But what will we face?

Darant must have had the same concern. The captain called over to the navigation station, “You two, what do you make of that foul crag?”

Krysh answered, lifting his eyes from the goggled lens of a farscope. “The glare makes it difficult to discern much. But I think I could make out tiny motes stirring out there, both on the flat glass and along those peak’s flanks. Just the barest glints of movement.”

Rhaif grimaced. “Those glints didn’t happen to be bronze?”

The thief glanced over at Shiya.

Krysh shook his head. “I cannot say.”

Nyx worked the tightness from her chest and stepped closer to Darant and Graylin. “If a ta’wyn army truly lies out there, one led by an Axis like Shiya, then we’d best not rush headlong into that fire.”

“Surprise could work to our advantage,” Darant said with a shrug.

Graylin shook his head. “If sentries have not spotted us already, then they will once we’re closer. We’ll never be able to strike with enough surprise to overwhelm such a force.”

Darant considered this, rubbing the scruff of his chin, then called over to his daughter. “Glace, drop to quarter speed. Lower us to a skim over that blasted sea.” He turned to Graylin. “Let’s hope the glare off that glass hides us as well as it masks whatever Krysh had glimpsed.”

As Glace and the crew spun subwheels and tipped levers, the near-constant roar of the ship’s engines dimmed. The keel of the Fyredragon swept down, crossing from sand to broken glass. Soon they were gliding over a smoothly rippling mirror. The flaming blaze of their forges reflected off the surface below, casting out a glow beneath them. But like the shine of the sun, the dark glass swallowed and muted that burn.

Nyx wondered at the depth of that black mirror.

Closer now, she could see the expanse was not pristine and unbroken. Cracks parted this sea into vast plates, still held tightly together. She peered down into one of those fractures as the ship sailed over it. It cleaved deep, beyond the reach of her eyes.

She lifted her gaze to the smoking Dragon ahead.

She remembered the ta’wyn complex in the Frozen Wastes, the lair of the venomous Spider. It had looked like a giant tentacled Oshkapeer, one made of copper, rimmed by fiery chasms that glowed with molten rock. It had stretched a league in all directions, most of it buried into the frozen rock of the Brackenlands.

She tried to imagine such a construction beneath the Dragon, one that protected a massive sphere of crystal and bronze, pulsing with dread energies, at its heart.

The second turubya.

Another of the crew, though, focused elsewhere.

Fenn called from the navigation station, “Darant! Look to the west! To the shore on that side. There’s a strange forest prickling out of the sand.”

Nyx tore her gaze from the black countenance of the Dragon. She squinted past the glare of the sea to red sands. Ahead and to the west, the rolling dunes sifted apart into a spiked expanse. It looked like the winds had blown those grainy hills away, revealing a petrified forest beneath, one that glimmered in a thousand brilliant shades, as if a shining stormbow had crashed out of the sky and shattered across the landscape.

Esme shifted closer to the window, her eyes wide, her voice hushed. “Our sagas speak of such a forest. Named Argos. A wilderness of living crystals.”

Darant scowled, clearly unimpressed by all of this. “It’s pretty, Fenn, but what of it?”

The navigator pointed the same direction. “Through the farscopes, away from the glare of the glass, I spotted a shimmering blue in that forest. A lake of some sort!”

Nyx licked her dry lips, cracked from the heat and lack of water.

A thirsty silence followed.

Despite all the danger, one still plagued them all.

“Are you sure?” Darant called over. “A lake? In this infernal oven?”

“As certain as I can be from this distance.” Fenn shrugged. “But if we got closer…”

Darant glanced to Graylin. “What do you think?”

Nyx answered instead. “We need water, especially Bashaliia and the raash’ke.”

Daal stepped over with a nod of agreement toward Nyx. “She’s right. They grow weak,” he said firmly. “If we hope for them to fight, they’ll need more than the trickles of water flowing into their troughs.”

Krysh added his support. “That forest lies slightly ahead and to the side. Perhaps close enough for me to get a better look at the mountain.”

Graylin still looked worried and wary.

Nyx tapped into her frustration to confront the two men at the wheel, tired of them dictating their every move. “I can head aloft with Bashaliia and scout ahead. If Fenn is wrong, if it’s just a mirage, then I can swiftly return.”

The muscles of Graylin’s jaw tightened, clearly struggling to forbid it. But he stared at her for a long breath and finally nodded. “We do need water.”

Nyx felt a flush of appreciation at this acknowledgment, sensing Graylin was growing to see her more clearly, perhaps recognizing the woman standing before him and not that child he had lost.

Still, there were limits.

As she turned to leave, Graylin called after her, “But you’re not going alone!”