he flew onward, pursuing the distant form of the Queen, if he could somehow watercraft the portion of his brain that had advised this idiotic course of action. Clearly, it was defective.
And then a great blackness came rushing up at him - the ground. He slowed enough to land with a great shock of impact to his legs, as opposed to his spine, and rose, fighting the blinding wind and sleet. Though he knew it was full morning now, the storm had left it as black as night.
There was a hole gouged in the ground nearby, where the Queen had been flung to earth. She had climbed out of it, clearly. Windmanes in Legion strength scoured the land nearby. Lightning raked at the ground, each bolt lasting several seconds, carving great, long trenches into the soil. When the strike would fade, the land would be almost as dark as a moonless night.
And in that darkness, Tavi saw a flash of light.
He struggled toward it, noting signs of passage on the ground being swiftly obliterated by the rain. The markings, then, were fresh. Only the Queen could have made them. Tavi followed the trail, turning aside dozens of windmanes with windcraftings of his own, finally resorting to the use of a vortex that he set spinning about the blade of his sword, substituting windcrafting for the usual firecrafting that would ignite his blade. Once that was done, a single stroke was enough to send the deadly furies wailing away from him into the night, and he plodded forward, sinking ankle deep into the cold, muddy earth, struggling up a slight incline.
The warm light of furylamps spilled out onto the ground in front of him, abruptly, and Tavi sensed the presence of a structure, a great dome of marble the height of three men. Its open entryway glowed with a soft golden light, and above it, writ into the marble in gold, was the seven-pointed star of the First Lord of Alera.
His father's grave, the Princeps' Memorium.
Tavi staggered inside. Though outside the storm still raged behind him, within the Memorium, those sounds came only as something very distant and wholly irrelevant. The vast scream of the storm was broken here to near silence. Here in the dome there was only the slight ripple of water, the crackle of flame, and the sleepy chirp of a bird.
The interior of the dome was made not of marble, but of crystal, the walls of it rising high and smooth to the ceiling twenty feet above. Once, the scale and grandeur of the place had instilled in Tavi a sense of awe. Now, he saw it differently. He knew the scale and difficulty of furycraft it had taken to raise this place from the ground, and his awe was based not upon the beauty or richness of the structure but upon the elegance of the crafting that had created it.
Light came from the seven fires that burned without apparent fuel around the outside of the room, simulated flames that were far more difficult to create than the steady glow of any furylamp. That irregular, warm light rose through the crystal, bending, refracting, splitting into rainbows that swirled and danced with a slow grace and beauty within the crystal walls - crystal that would have long since cracked and fractured had it been wrought with anything less than perfection of furycraft.
The floor in the center of the dome was covered by a pool of water, perfectly still and as smooth as Amaranth glass. All around the pool grew rich foliage, bushes, grass, flowers, even small trees, still arranged as neatly as though kept by a gardener - though Tavi hadn't seen the place since he was fifteen. The woodcrafting needed to establish such a self-tending garden was astonishing. Gaius Sextus, it seemed, had known more about the growth of living things than Tavi did, despite the differences in their backgrounds.
Between each of the fires around the walls stood seven silent suits of armor, complete with scarlet capes, the traditional-style bronze shields, and the ivory-handled swords of Septimus's singulares. The armor stood mute and empty upon nearly formless figures of dark stone, eternally vigilant, the slits in their helmets focused upon their charge. Two of the suits were missing weapons - Tavi and Amara had taken them for protection on that night so long ago.
At the center of the pool rose a block of black basalt. Upon the block lay a pale shape, a statue of the purest