Page 9 of Voidwalker (Beasts of the Void #1)

Planes and Shards were distinct physical spaces, but they weren’t necessarily in different spaces.

Planes lay over each other like stacked parchment, separated by layers of Void, scraps of smaller tissue paper—Shards—scattering the space in between.

Fi could move from a Shard to a Plane. From one Shard to another Shard.

But cutting a Curtain anywhere one piece of reality didn’t overlap another?

Ended with a step into the deadly maw of the Void itself.

She let her gaze soften. Reality had thinner walls than most people would be comfortable to realize.

Where Shards did overlap a Plane, boundaries could blur.

As Fi’s eyes slipped out of focus, transparent images drifted into her vision, phantom outlines of the Winter Plane.

A cedar tree. The stone path. She took a step.

There lay the city parkway lined in streetlamps. A wall of red stone. Another step.

She Shaped energy out of her forearm, a current of silver thin as a blade at her fingertips.

Then she plunged her hand through the air.

Reality rippled, somehow frigid and scorching simultaneously, a squirm beneath her fingernails. Fi pushed, dragging the distortion wider, until the translucent folds of a new Curtain floated in front of her.

Moment of truth. Or certain death. Fi sucked in a breath and stepped through.

Solid ground met her on the other side. She stumbled in the dim light, colliding with a shelf of… filing boxes? A storage room. Fi dug an energy capsule from her coat pocket for light as she navigated to a window. She tipped onto her toes to peer outside.

A plaza stretched before her. Across it, the stone columns and aurora dome of the courthouse, a red perimeter wall at its back—placing her in the basement of the capitol building.

Astrid was right. Fi was damn good at what she did.

She stepped back to the Shard where Milana waited. “We’re good to go.”

They carried the crates through the Curtain into the storage room, leaving the cart within the Shard and Aisinay unhitched to browse the meadow for Shard voles. Milana handed Fi a bag.

“You’re not very faithful to the daeyari, are you?” Milana asked.

Fi withheld a snort. “Not particularly.”

“You are today. Put these on.”

Fi opened the bag—another jolt at seeing the silver attendant robes. She scowled, the cloth like slime beneath her fingers. Style varied across territories, but she could picture these too easily on the attendants in Verne Territory, where she grew up.

Too similar to the ones who came to her town a decade ago.

A disguise was a disguise. Fi’s stomach squirmed as she removed her coat and donned the wretched robe. Into the pockets she stuffed her sword hilt, a couple of energy capsules, a polished carnelian transport stone, small comforts against suffocating fabric.

Milana beckoned her to follow. “No sense lurking in a storage room. You can wait for us in the reflection hall. Find a place to sit by the candles, no one will bother you.”

Fi huffed and tied back her rainbow hair, hiding it beneath her raised hood.

Outside the storage room, dark tile set into patterns of conifers and mountain peaks squeaked beneath her boots.

Copper energy conduits framed the ceiling, feeding lamps of blown glass in metal casings that spiked like stars.

Milana led them through the maze of marble halls with startling ease. Someone did her research.

Fi’s heart hammered harder with each step.

This was a distressing observation. She’d cut a Curtain into a capitol building, was poised to pull off her most lucrative job to date, all reasonable cause for nerves.

But that wasn’t the problem.

It was the robes. The corridors of polished stone. Milana leading her with hardly a backward glance. Sharp little pieces, each tugging at cold-clawed memories.

The weight of hands on her arms.

The lulling voices.

Don’t be afraid.

Fi bristled, chin up, metal barbs to reinforce her spine. Milana had assured her the Lord Daeyari was out of the city today. Nothing to worry about.

“We’ll fetch you once the work is finished,” Milana said.

She paused on the threshold to a large, circular chamber.

On the floor, gray and white marble shaped a mosaic of trees, scattered with pillows for long spells of sitting.

Overhead, the ceiling vaulted into a dome of Void black.

High walls accentuated the emptiness. The pin-drop quiet.

Scents of wax and pine oil mixed with the sulfur of matches, tiers of mahogany shelves lined with candles. Hundreds of them.

One for every sacrifice consumed by the daeyari.

The grim memorial stood for anyone who wished to visit, though the sparse offerings of flowers and trinkets suggested few people opted to pay their respects here, of all places.

Most families probably spread the ashes closer to home, energy back to the Void and body back to the dust of the Plane—or whatever remained of the body, once the daeyari was done with it.

In other words: one of the least fun places in the entire Plane. At least no one would bother Fi here.

“Under an hour, as promised,” Milana whispered. “Then back through the Curtain—”

Scuffed footsteps broke the silence.

Milana’s accomplice, Erik, hurried across the room. He, too, wore silver attendant robes with Void-embroidered sleeves.

The ashen look on his face had Fi reaching into a pocket for her sword hilt.

“We have a problem,” he hissed. “A big problem!”

Milana raised a calming hand. “Slow down. What’s happened?”

“Look.”

Across the reflection hall, two glass-paned doors stood open, letting in a creep of cold. Outside lay a courtyard, shade from the building preserving a coat of frost upon stone banisters and pots of winter-blooming azaleas.

And there upon the white-dusted steps…

Stood a fucking daeyari.