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S ilvanus cursed his wretched luck. They were woefully unprepared to meet Drakon head-on. Caught between the Beast of Old and the Dragon’s Spine Mountains, there was only one place to go. Doing so might save their lives, if they made it, but it would ensure his own execution twice over.

“Where are we going? We’ll be trapped against the foot of the mountains!” Aurora called back to him.

“We won’t!”

Sunrise became twilight as the air was choked with oily ash. Silvanus unsheathed his sword, willing it to become a spear. He raised it high, dispelling the monstrosities as far as its blinding light reached. The divine magic flowing through his veins answered his every instinct, a weapon as familiar to him as a limb, no matter that he’d only been in possession of it a mere few weeks. But without Aurora’s help, the best he could do was hold off the monstrosities. He would need to call upon his wild magic if they were to survive now. He closed his eyes, trusting his loper, Neptune. Neptune knew the way and was more than capable of dealing with monstrosities.

When Silvanus opened his eyes, the world was no longer composed of light and shadow, of mass and movement. Instead, he saw what the deities did—the Tapestry. Using this forbidden wild magic, all things were but threads in the great expanse laid out around him. Divorced from the raging tempest of emotions inside him and all but the barest hint of his physical body, Silvanus was free to make the most strategic of choices. But he had to be careful in this state, for he could not only see the threads that made up the Tapestry—he could alter them, if in a limited fashion. Behind him, Drakon made his descent, a mass of angry, warped, red threads encasing something that glittered so brightly even a glimmer hurt his senses. A thin strand of fate connected him to the beast. A thicker one, as if made of a hundred bleeding cords, connected Drakon to Aurora. It allowed the beast to find her, to locate her in the gloom enshrouding the physical world. Though impossible to sever, it could be redirected.

May the goddesses forgive him for what he was about to do.

Four paladins, an imperial guardsman and the princess followed on their mounts.

Six targets on five lopers. Five chances to deceive Drakon until Silvanus and Aurora were the only ones left to attack.

He found the imperial guardsman in the rear, his thread and that of his loper paler than those touched by divine magic. Silvanus plucked the man’s thread and merged it with the one linking Aurora to Drakon. When those who hated him spoke of his magic, this was it—tricking Fate, if only for a moment in time. The magic wouldn’t hold for long, but it should redirect Drakon’s attack away from Aurora.

Drakon closed in, almost on top of them now, and let loose a streamer of magic made of the deepest red. It engulfed the guardsman and his steed, shaking the ground like an earthquake, the trembles reaching him even in this plane. Their threads snapped and frayed, lives extinguished. The beast’s magic dissipated, and the lives it had snuffed out, now translucent threads, were subsumed into the Tapestry.

A wave of anger surged down the cord between Aurora and the beast. She flinched against him in the physical world.

“That blast was meant for me!” Aurora yelped.

“Not if I have any say in the matter.”

Strands of deepest crimson gathered around Drakon. The next attack. Silvanus grabbed the thread of the slowest paladin and tied it to Aurora’s. Another blast. Another bone-jarring quake. Another dead when they should be alive, their goddess-blessed strand winking out of existence, cut short and woven back into the Tapestry. Another rush of anger from the beast to Aurora.

“Oh goddess, the skies!”

Silvanus looked up. All around Drakon, dark strands gathered, several becoming dozens, dozens multiplying into hundreds.

“There’s no escape! He’s going to rain fire down on us!”

Two of the paladins were riding side-by-side. A tinge of panic hurried his next action. Silvanus tied both their threads to Aurora’s before he turned his attention to the meteoric assault of Drakon’s magic. He did everything he could, working quickly and precisely, clearing the path around them, redirecting the foul magic onto objects in the distance, onto threads of the landscape, onto small creatures hiding in burrows, onto Drakon himself. His head felt like it was splitting in two, dividing his focus between the physical plane and the Tapestry.

Drakon fired another crimson bolt, annihilating the two paladins in an instant, and nearly unseating both Silvanus and Aurora from Neptune’s saddle. Too close.

Ahead, Silvanus spied salvation.

“We’re going to run ourselves into solid rock!” Aurora shouted.

Aurora attempted to redirect Neptune. Silvanus held the course, fighting Aurora’s panic for control of the reins.

“Trust me!” Silvanus replied.

Where his physical eyes would see only rock, his wild magic saw the opening to a cave—one shrouded in protection both wild and divine. A hidden sanctuary. He reached out, parting the threads that held its gates closed.

“There’s an entrance!”

And they would make it.

Except Drakon had already gathered the crimson threads of his magic, a mere moment away from incinerating them.

There was one paladin left to sacrifice—the one riding with Princess Phaedra. He’d rushed into the fray to save her in the last attack because he’d known what she meant to Aurora—that without her, Aurora would lose the strength to fight. He’d trusted Aurora’s safety to Neptune and recklessly rushed in to cleanse the camp just to spare Aurora the emotional blow. Now, it would be unavoidable. Between the princess and Aurora, the princess mattered not at all. As he reached for the paladin’s goddess-blessed thread, his blood ran cold.

Shock nearly dragged him back to the physical plane.

There, thick and unmistakable, a red line of fate connected him to Phaedra, the same kind that connected Drakon and Aurora. She could be destined to become his greatest enemy, hunting him down throughout all of time. Or she could become a lover whose passion would chase him across the Tapestry, inexorably drawn to his thread in every lifetime.

He hesitated, weighing the value of his own heart against the fate of Trisia. He smiled bitterly, grateful he was in the Tapestry, unmoored from the anchor of his feeling heart. Fate was a cruel mistress.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

He tied the paladin’s thread to Aurora’s just as Drakon aimed his blast. But Silvanus wouldn’t be a coward—he would watch in full what he’d done. He returned to the physical plane, assaulted by every emotion and sensation that traversing the Tapestry had suppressed.

He snapped back into his physical body, recoiling from the sheer weight of existence. His throat was raw, every breath that sawed in and out more difficult from the last, the very air choked by Drakon’s evil, his tongue fouled by the oily ash raining down from above. Ear-splitting cracks rent the air and shook the earth beneath Neptune’s pounding hooves. Dust and rock were thrown up with every crimson meteor that streaked down from the sky.

The apocalypse was upon them.

Silvanus pitched his spear forward, his muscles screaming as he pushed against the thick, bubbling black of emerging monstrosities. The whole world had been swallowed by the gloom, the holy weapon the only source of light, save for the flashes of lightning above. He turned his head, glimpsing the riders behind him.

Panic and horror dealt the next blow. Great goddesses, what had he done? He’d put a target on the backs of men and women given grace by Justice Herself. Sacrificed the lives of others with barely a thought. Nausea threatened as his heart dropped to his knees. Now he could do nothing but watch as Drakon obliterated a woman fated to find him in every lifetime, for good or ill.

Drakon’s magic pierced the gloom, a streak of purple fire aimed directly at Phaedra and the paladin. Aurora turned her head, a sharp intake of breath preceding a tortured scream.

Her magic whipped out like a tongue of invisible flames, searing his senses.

But it was not enough.

Between one blink and the next, both riders and loper were reduced to ashes. The impact threw Aurora, Silvanus and Neptune into the air. Neptune landed with a bone-jarring thud, his pace unbroken, riders still mercifully seated.

They barrelled through the magical entrance into the mountain, Aurora’s desperate, hopeless shrieks echoing in the dark.

As he pulled back the last of his wild magic, sealing the entrance behind them, something flew through the air and knocked them both off Neptune’s back. Silvanus collided head-first with the wall, pain stealing his consciousness in an instant.

Wakefulness came to Silvanus in waves of ever-increasing pain. When at last he could open his eyes, it was to Neptune ruffling his hair with worried huffs. His head throbbed, and his next sharp intake of breath only added to the agony. With a shaking hand, he sought for purchase, cataloguing his injuries. Bruised, broken bones, most notably a few ribs, sticky blood trailing down his back from a wound on his head, but alive. It could be worse.

With a great deal more effort than he would have liked to admit, Silvanus got to his feet, leaning heavily on Neptune’s saddle.

In the darkness of the cave, blue lights winked from the walls. Like sparkling sapphires that were still half-buried in the rock, they were relics of a time long past. The remains of pre-sundering technology. Without them, he wouldn’t have been able to spot Aurora.

He knelt down, groaning against the pain, and pressed his fingers to her neck. A pulse. She was alive. His relief nearly drained the last dregs of his energy.

But what had knocked them off Neptune? He searched the dark cavern. Not a monstrosity, clearly. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have woken—he’d be dead. And in any case, neither Drakon nor a monstrosity could ever breach the mountain’s magical defences. He tried to think back to what it had felt like. Not a boulder or some other rocky bit of debris. It had been softer. A body? But everyone else had been obliterated. Perhaps part of a body.

Silvanus released a shaky breath, hollowed out by his guilt. He’d been warned a hundred times that using his wild magic in that way came with a cost. He was barely a person inside the Tapestry. Cold logic reigned supreme there, leaving his heart, his conscience, his soul, but a distant, vague tether he could easily ignore. Right and wrong were tossed aside in favour of utility and strategy. But no one could remain inside the Tapestry forever. Silvanus tried to swallow down his unease. He’d killed them all, used them like pawns on a chessboard. Every single one of them had loved ones. Families. Friends.

He couldn’t bear looking at Aurora, knowing he’d sacrificed her closest friend. She could never know what he’d done, or she would never forgive him, and any chance they had at ending Drakon would die along with her trust. Just one more secret he would be forced to keep, more lies he would need to speak in order to obey the will of the Triad.

He clenched his hands, nails biting into his palms hard enough to draw blood. He should have been kinder to Phaedra. It wasn’t her fault she’d been born into the imperial family with its cruel legacy, but every time he’d looked into her fierce, dark eyes, he could only see his people’s persecutor, their boogeyman. It was just as likely she would have become his executioner as his greatest ally. He wished he could see it again, the string that had connected them.

What happened to a red string of fate when the person you were destined for died? Did it become translucent, woven back into the Tapestry? He had to know. Silvanus dared to use his magic once more.

Surrounded by the magical threads of the Dragon’s Spine mountain, he instead focused on the threads that spread out from him. Every connection he’d made, past or present, unravelled from his core, stretching across the whole of Trisia. Friends, family, lovers, acquaintances, rivals, enemies—all were there, a web that, if he delved too deeply, connected him to every living person in existence. It might have taken days to sort through them all, but the one he sought was unmistakable—thick and red and attached directly to where his heart should be. He touched it, exploring the connection, more curious than mournful, courtesy of the Tapestry. Pain shuddered along it, foreign and strange to his senses.

This was not his hurt.

He tracked the string with his senses, his body following, walking in the physical plane. His boot hit an obstacle the same moment he found the other end of the string. Elation dragged him back to his body before he could ascertain how close she was to death. Silvanus doubled over as agony roared through him, dulled only by adrenaline. Phaedra was here, inside the mountain!

Shakily, he pressed his fingers to her neck, praying to all the gods, both tangible and intangible, that she yet lived.