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T he mass of serpents scatter as Syril’s torch hits the ground, but Fortiss shouts at me—I don’t hear his command, but I don’t need to. I sprint past Syril and scoop up the guttering torch, then jam it into the thickest knot of skrill I can find.

“No!” Syril’s cry of horror is lost in a rushing whump ! of sound as the snakes explode into sparks. Within moments, the entire hallway has become a writhing inferno, but Fortiss doesn’t stop. He races up behind me, and throws his arm around me, another one already clasping Syril close.

With us all tangled up like this, there’s no way he should still be able to move, yet he seems to pick up speed.

He shouts out something I can’t quite understand.

His voice is low and guttural, but his words do the trick—a hole opens up ahead.

We flee through a tunnel of flame and poisonous snakes, around the turns and up the stairs.

Once again, I see that Fortiss doesn’t just fight through fire, doesn’t just batter back the danger.

He clears paths through chaos, hauling us all along with him. Even when we don’t ask him to.

We finally burst out into one of the main corridors of the castle, and stagger to a halt sucking wind—just in time to hear another warrior’s light feet upon the corridor floor.

“Syril! You’re hurt!”

“Report, Greta.” Syril pulls herself upright, shoving her soot-streaked hair out of her face.

“There’s four recovered from the main floor—no one harmed. Still no sign of Daggar or Nemeth.”

“What?” Fortiss rounds on Syril, but she’s regained her focus, and she glares at him, then me.

“You’re not hurt? You can run?” She screws her face up in concentration and stares up at the ceiling.

“With you setting their scouts ablaze, the skrill will hit this place in less than a quarter hour. We’d better be under cover by then, but the fastest way is out the front doors.

That’ll run us right into the teeth of them if we’re not fast.

“Go—get your people out. Talia, with me,” Fortiss orders, but he doesn’t take off for the front doors. Instead, he heads back toward our rooms.

“What are you doing ?” I demand as Syril shouts out after us, then barks orders to her subordinate. A moment later I hear her hard charge on the stone floor behind us.

“There are books in this keep—records! They’re all in Daggar’s inner chambers. We can’t just leave them here.”

“You’re a fool ,” Syril roars at us as we pound up the stairs, but I can only grin. If there’s one other thing I’ve learned these past few weeks, Fortiss will do just about anything to preserve knowledge, even run headlong into a fire he created.

But there’s still more that we don’t understand. Syril gasps out her next words as she nears us down the long corridor. “Daggar’s been dead for weeks—they’ve all—been dead.”

Fortiss stops, whirling around, and she inhales deeply and rushes on.

“We saw the lights in the windows tonight and thought maybe the Eighth House warriors from Trilion had finally returned, and we set out immediately to warn them away. No one has breathed air in this keep for a full fortnight. Those who could, fled to the villages down the range, but most—” she draws in another huge breath.

“Most of them died in the first skrill attack.”

He glares at her. “Then who is it we’ve been talking to since we’ve gotten here? Who are these people?”

She winces. “They’re not people at all, Lord Protector Fortiss. The best we can tell, we believe they’re skillful illusions created by the skrill to lure you to your death.”

“ What ?” Fortiss’s face flushes with outrage as I gape at her. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

Syril bristles with equal anger. “I didn’t even know you were here until a bare hour?—”

“Save it.” Fortiss turns again and takes off, not stopping until he reaches Daggar’s inner chambers. He races through the sitting area and flings open the door to the sleeping room. No guards rush out to block his way, but I can hear the slip and whisper of snakes in the walls.

Here, the room looks remarkably like Fortiss’s own chambers—like any sleeping chambers I’ve ever seen—a desk, a few shelves, and a large bed, curtained against the cold and damp. But the similarity stops there.

Because here, there are books. Large and small, thick and thin, stacked high on every shelf and scattered across the floor.

Some aren’t even books, but rolled up maps and scrolls, strewn about with a madman’s sense of organization.

Fortiss holds his torch up high, illuminating the room, then jams the torch into the nearest sconce.

Then he darts forward and pulls a cloth hanging from the wall, muttering something at it as we stare.

It zips around the room as books tumble from the shelves into it, weighing it down until full.

I stare in wonder at what’s happening, unable to fully process it. How is it that Fortiss has so much power—and what’s behind this magic? Could Rihad wield it so easily? Can he still?

Those thoughts converge into a chaotic howl in my mind as one cloth, then another fill in the same way. Finally, Fortiss whirls toward us. “Don’t just stand there. Haul .”

We plow back out of the room, staggering and straining under the weight of Daggar’s books, and the building roar of the skrill is louder now.

The walls of the place are practically vibrating, when the first snake slithers across the floor, it’s all I can do not to chase after it to stamp it dead.

Instead, we race down to the stairs to the visitor’s chamber and out to the overlook.

Fortiss howls into the night sky and with a mighty heave, he hurls the first bag of books into the air. He rips my burden from me and tosses it next, then Syril’s.

The cloth bundles barely clear the low stone wall before they plummet into darkness.

“ Go !” He shouts. I turn to grab Syril, who’s already backing up, but Fortiss beats me to her. He grabs her around the waist and, spinning, hurls her into the open air with what seems like the strength of ten men.

A burst of flame rips across the sky, and I hear Syril’s scream, but the urgency of Fortiss’s command reverberates through my blood. I race across the platform, taking three great strides, and launch myself out into the open space as I open my mind and heart to my great and mighty Divh.

I crest my low arc all too quickly then drop as heavily as Fortiss’s stolen books, dropping into a tight fissure. The Eighth House is tucked too tightly against the mountains, I realize too late—there’s no way Gent can swipe his mighty fist?—

A scream rips from my throat as my back is pierced with what feels like twin daggers as long as my body.

In three bone-breaking heaves I’m wrenched skyward, the pain swamping me until a familiar thick-fingered paw plucks me off the hummerbill’s talons like a vintner plucking a grape.

I tumble back, exhausted in Gent’s palm.

He curls his claws around me, his howl of outrage turning my bones to milk.

Kreya screams back at him as she swoops off, her indignation clear. If I wasn’t in so much pain, I’d laugh.

Instead, I loll to the side of his palm, fading in and out of awareness as Gent strides once, twice, then drops me to the ground, directly into the midst of a crowd of shouting people.

I think I hear my name called—no, I’m sure I do—but my hold on this world is feather light.

Instead, in my mind, I race along with my Divh, feeling every stride as he pounds up to the crest of the Meridians and leaps into the stars.

Then Gent turns, and though his eyesight is nowhere near keen, for just a moment, I see what he sees over that wild mountain range—the land of the Western Realms.

It’s a blighted wasteland.

I’ve never had the privilege of viewing the Protectorate from the shoulders of Fortiss’s or Tennet’s dragon, or even Nazar’s winged lion.

But I’ve leaned out over the grasp of my beautiful goliath, and seen the wide plains before me, lush and full, waves of yellow and green grasses stretching to the far horizon.

I have marveled at the bluish gray mountains surging high, punching up out of the earth like children eager to burst into a new world and call it their own.

I’ve witnessed marshlands and rivers, even wide lakes—to say nothing of the Blessed Plane with its sun-bright sky and heavy air, its lush green hillsides and the extraordinary lake that fills its center.

None of that awaits us in the Western Realms. Even with Gent’s poor vision, I can see an endless vista of stark, moonlit mountains and valleys filled with dull gray sand. Nothing seems to move in this barren hellscape, nothing breathes, nothing?—

A light flickers on.

Gent’s mournful cry reverberates through my blood and bones, but there is something there , I think, a tiny speck of gold glittering against the relentless expanse of shadow.

As I study it, stare at it, it flares even brighter, almost as if it recognizes me, reaches out to me.

I yearn to reach out to it as well, to grasp it and hold it in my hand, as if this tiny speck is my birthright, my own peace of sunshine to claim and call my own.

All this happens in barely a blink, but with that desire, I experience a lifetime’s worth of agony as Gent forcibly turns his head away from the barren landscape and fixes his gaze on the white canopy of stars.

Because he’s not carrying me, because I’m only seeing what he can see, I can no longer glimpse that tiny burst of light.

I can only sense his abject misery at the fact that it even exists, a sorrow so great, it sinks into my bones and renders me hollow on the inside, with endless tears pouring down.

Gent continues on to the Blessed Plane, leaving me behind, and I fall back into to my own body, in my own plane, still reverberating with his pain.

I was pierced through by Kreya’s talons as she strived to rescue me from the Eighth House, I know that clearly—and yet, I’ve been damaged worse by that tiny yellow speck against a boundless sea of ashen sand.

And that wound…I may not recover from.

I huddle into my cloak, weeping in harsh, shuddering sobs without really knowing why. Then the sounds of shouting men and women overtake me, and I collapse to the ground, my blood seeping into the earth of the Fated Plane.