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“I, Leon of the Verdani, hereby establish this plain from the Venhold Mountains to the Gray Barrows as Tiran , which means God’s Haven in Old Verdanish.

The faithful who have joined me here will now be called Tiranish , for we and our descendants will serve as stewards of God’s Bright Haven.

Here we will dwell from henceforth in the Light of Truth, the pursuit of Knowledge, and the Bounty of God. ”

B EFORE S CIONA

COULD ask what on Earth was the matter with Thomil,

the Kwen had whirled and fled the laboratory, pushing through the door so hard that it banged off the wall in his wake.

“Thomil!” She followed, but he was ridiculously fast. By the time she had picked up her skirts to pursue him out of the lab, he had vanished down the hall. “Thomil, wait!” When she rushed into the lobby, there was no sign of him.

“Have you seen my assistant?” she asked the secretary.

“The Blighter?” the man behind the desk said, sounding bored. “He ran off that way.”

Sciona found Thomil in a back stairwell between the third and fourth floors, curled up against the wall like a child. He was quaking worse than before, his head between his knees, strong arms clutched tight around himself as though he feared his body might shake apart.

“Thomil, what is it?” Sciona reached for him, but he flinched back so hard she recoiled.

“Don’t! Mage!” He spat the word like it burned in his mouth. “Don’t touch me!”

“You can’t talk to me like that,” she said, unnerved. “What’s gotten into you?”

“I told you! That was Blight!”

“And I heard you,” she said, “but what does that mean?”

“The siphoning spell you did…” Thomil’s head was still clenched between his knees, fingers digging into his copper hair. “That white light… That’s what Blight looks like when it takes a living thing.”

“That’s…” Sciona took a step back, shaking her head. He couldn’t be suggesting what he seemed to be. It was insane. Unthinkable. “I’m sure you’re mistaken,” she said in the calmest tone she could muster. “No one siphons energy from this realm. Only from the Otherrealm.”

“Call it the Otherrealm, then. Call it whatever you want. That place we saw in the mapping coil was a meadow in the Southern Kwen.”

“Thomil.” Sciona did her best to channel Alba’s soothing air, though she knew she was bad at it. “Trust me, that’s simply not possible. I promise.”

He looked directly at her, and she was disconcerted to find tears standing in his usually stony eyes, sharpening them to steel. She drew back, afraid of the edge.

“Not possible?” His voice had gone low, and Sciona was abruptly reminded that her assistant was, at heart, a predator from a ruthless wilderness where men sometimes hunted and ate each other. “I grew up on the plains of the Southern Kwen, Highmage. I know what they fucking look like.”

“Hey now, listen—”

“No, you listen!” Thomil hissed, and Sciona took another step back.

“My father died in a deerskin tent pitched in a snowy field like that one. He came apart in spirals of light, just like that bush. Siphoned . It—” His voice caught, shaking with something more than grief.

With rage. “It took my sister an hour to scrub all the blood off me. She didn’t cry.

She never cried when there was someone who needed her to be strong.

She never stopped moving forward, believing the next migration could bring us something different, something better.

But even she…” He paused to take a shuddering breath, and when he blinked, tears spilled from his eyes.

“Blight took her, too—during the crossing into Tiran, within a mile of the barrier.”

But it couldn’t be. Sciona shook her head, struggling for the rational explanation she knew existed—because it had to exist. Tiran was built on magic, and Tiran was an inherent good, God’s Chosen City, His Bright Haven in a world of darkness. There had to be some other explanation.

“Look…” Her thoughts, which had scattered like a flurry of panicked birds, lit on the first explanation that seemed stable.

“Founding Mage Leon referred to the Otherrealm as a garden—which can also mean ‘paradise’ in Old Verdanish. If it happens to look like the Kwen to you, it’s because that’s your idea of paradise and bounty.

Right?” That made sense, didn’t it? Yes.

“You said yourself that our human minds might not be capable of processing the Otherrealm. Maybe God accounts for that. Maybe He only shows us the Otherrealm in a form that we understand.”

“Then what is Blight?” Thomil demanded.

“It’s what our top researchers have always said it is: a sickness that manifests in the unwashed—”

“Blight is not a sickness,” Thomil cut her off. “Pox is a sickness. Fever is a sickness. Blight is a supernatural evil that happens to do exactly what your siphoning spell did to that bush.”

“I…” What could Sciona say to that? How could Thomil be mistaken? But at the same time, how could he be right? How could that possibly be right? “Maybe you’re not remembering clearly. Sometimes, when an event is too upsetting to wrap your mind around, your memory gets muddled. When my mother died—”

“You suggest that your god shows us his bounty in the form of our subjective paradise,” Thomil said. “If that’s true, then why would he show me Blight?”

“Maybe it’s because of what you are and what you believe.”

Thomil’s anger didn’t rise. Instead, he blinked, and, for a brief moment, he looked so shattered that it broke Sciona’s heart. She didn’t want to say her next words. She didn’t want to think them. But the alternative was too hideous to contemplate.

“I’ve humored you in your outlandish claims about religion, alright? But the hard fact remains that your people rejected the True God and, by extension, Truth itself. Leon gave your kind a chance to join Him in the light, and your ancestors refused. You

continue to refuse Him, despite all evidence of His holiness and supremacy.

Maybe you can’t see God’s Bounty because it’s not meant for the eyes of non-believers.

It’s for the true seeker of knowledge. You see a nightmare because it’s what God intends for you—what your people brought on themselves through generations of willful ignorance. ”

At some point, as Sciona spoke, all the emotion had left Thomil’s face. He was dead stone when he asked, “What did you see, then, Highmage? If I saw only what a heathen sinner deserves, what did your holy mage’s eyes see in that coil? What did God show you?”

“He…” Sciona faltered. Because Thomil had referenced a snow-covered field. She had seen a field, too, unlike any place she had ever been.

“A Tiranish courtyard garden, maybe?” Thomil suggested. “Flowers that make you think of home?”

Sciona couldn’t put names to the evergreen bushes, or the animal, or any of the tracks she had seen in that field. They had been foreign like the moonlit snow. She shook her head, shutting her mind against the impossible.

“I saw Heavenly light.” She lifted her chin. “It was beautiful.”

“Blight is always beautiful,” Thomil said, “from a safe distance. Up close, it’s your father’s blood on your face.

It’s wanting to run to him just to hold him one more time before he’s gone, knowing that if you do, the light will unmake you too.

Knowing , even as a tiny child, that you must hold yourself still as your only parent peels to pieces in front of you.

That’s what Blight does to a person, you know?

” Thomil’s face twisted. “It strips them down in a spiral, skin first, then the rest. You saw the leaves and bark coming free of that bush. Imagine that happening to your sweet auntie, your cousin—”

“You’re out of your mind!” Sciona snarled before he could put one more hideous, ludicrous picture in her head.

She wished her voice wasn’t shaking quite so badly as she tried to pull Thomil back from this madness.

“I understand that you’ve seen terrible things.

You’re in pain—but that’s exactly why you need to take a moment and think about what you’re saying. You’re confused.”

“No, Highmage, I think I’m seeing everything for the first time in total clarity.” Thomil’s pupils dilated slightly against their icy irises as though processing something beyond Sciona’s sight. “The coordinates, Highmage Freynan…”

“What?” she asked—though why was she even humoring this lunacy? She was a highmage . She didn’t need to stand for this. She should order Thomil to go home for the day and rethink the way he spoke to his superiors. She should— “What coordinates?” she asked.

“You know , Highmage,” Thomil said without breaking eye contact. “If you think about it, somewhere in that busy little brain of yours, it must have occurred to you.”

“ What must have occurred to me?”

“When we first met, you explained the Forbidden Coordinates. I’m an endurance hunter. I place all things on the map in my mind, so I’ve always wondered… why are the Forbidden Coordinates placed the way they are? In a perfect circle. Like a certain city contained within a half-sphere dome.”

“No! You’re making things up. The nature of the Forbidden Coordinates is not for us to know.”

“You don’t believe that, Highmage Freynan.”

“Excuse me?”

“If you really believed there were godly things beyond your understanding, you never would have pushed your way into the High Magistry against the will of your elders. You never would have opened a Faene-forbidden window to the Otherrealm. If you know something is there, you have to peel back the scab, whether or not your god would approve. You can’t tell me this is any different. ”

“This is different! It’s heresy!”