Eliana. Watching you work is a joy I have not felt in an age.
Eliana only half listened, her hands still buried in the air. Gold veins of the empirium crackled around her fingers. Each grain of light painting the thicket gold whispered to her, and she listened closely, staring at the impossible thing before her.
A shape floated in the air, dark and thin, like the pupil of a cat’s eye. Its insides roiled with stormy color—indigo and violet, a blue so brilliant it was nearly white. At once, Eliana felt pulled toward it, as if it were a mouth greedy to swallow her.
She dug in her toes, braced her hands against the earth. In her mind, the Prophet’s surprise hummed like a struck bell.
What is this? Eliana asked.
A seam, the Prophet said carefully. You have opened many across the world without knowing it in those moments when you called upon your power in fear and anger. This, though—look how even it is, how precise. It was your focused will, Eliana, that opened this door.
Eliana stared at it. Something pulled at her shoulders, beckoning her forward. She searched the darkness, the angry light shifting inside it, and saw a faint vista of low hills, scattered pine woodlands, a sky purple with twilight.
A door to where? she wondered, her heart pounding, and before the Prophet could answer, Eliana’s hands flew to the seam. She gripped the edges and pried them open wider until it was possible for her to slip inside.
The Prophet flew into a panic. Eliana, wait!
But the empirium had pulled her to this place, and now golden whispers tugged her forward.
here
HERE
come see
they are everywhere
hurry
Before the Prophet could stop her, Eliana held her breath, shut her eyes, and stepped through the fissure into what lay beyond.
Her feet hit solid ground. She opened her eyes and saw gray clouds moving fast across a violet sky. The hills were shallow and rolling, furred in downy green grass, and there was not another living thing in sight. No animals, no people. There was not even wind. Only a quiet that felt unnatural. An eerie, pale light suffused it all, like a dusk tinged with storms. Black clouds edged every horizon, and below her feet, past the green of the grass, shifted a vast darkness, as if the meadow and hills were only a thin veil cloaking something terrible and lightless.
Then a bird called out, and when Eliana looked up to find it, she saw far above her the shifting faint shape of an enormous winged beast. It fluttered past, sending darkness rippling across the sky, and was gone, but another followed in its wake, and then another, and three more, slithering and serpentine, each of them a behemoth.
Eliana stepped back, staring in horror. What she had thought were gray clouds were in fact the shadows of these creatures, swarming from horizon to horizon.
A sickening heat blossomed at her breastbone and flooded her fingers. She ducked low, searching in vain for something to hide beneath. But the unnatural quiet remained, and when Eliana looked back at the sky, she saw that it looked just the same as before. The monstrous shapes were no nearer to her. It was as if she and this strange green world existed within a bubble beyond which writhed gargantuan beasts—but whether they were far away or very near, she could not guess. At least, it seemed, they could not reach her.
She slowly straightened, forcing her breathing to calm. Cold sweat prickled the back of her neck.
Then, a glottal cry split the air, puncturing the eerie quiet. On the horizon, something long and dark and twisting dropped out of the clouds and began to fly. This was no distant gray shape. This was clear and sharp, long-tailed with broad black wings, and approaching fast.
Eliana spun around and ran for the thin vertical slice of lush green marking her path back to Corien’s palace. Long minutes passed before she managed to push through it, for a great force was shoving back against her.
But with a last controlled burst of power, she managed it, tumbling out into the garden courtyard. She whirled to grab the seam’s edges. Her fingers tingled as if she had plunged them into water hot enough to burn. The seam sucked at her; that place, whatever it was, wanted her back. But she fought its force, wrenched the sizzling edges back together, and used her power to seal shut the fissure. Only a faint glimmer remained in the air,