Lightbringer (Empirium #3) - Claire Legrand Page 0,25

mind but never in flesh.

“And if I chose to help you,” she whispered, “what would I become?”

Wincing, he raised himself onto his elbows. “Your truest self. You would rise to greater heights than any being that has ever lived.”

There was a fever in his eyes, a relentless white plain of conviction. She would have thought it an absurd thing to say—greater than any being that has ever lived—had she not felt that same delicious certainty turning in the back of her mind ever since she was small, even before she was old enough to understand what it meant.

She tried for a scornful smile. “You flatter me.”

“You know I don’t. Not now. Not with this.” He touched her hand. “Rielle, this is what I offer you: If you help me in this war, in this great work I’ve planned for an endless dark age as my people suffered in the Deep, I will help you achieve everything you have ever ached to know. The ecstasy of joining with the power that made you.”

Quite against her will, her blood leapt to life at his words. The world sizzled around her, as if she were a ball of fire flung hard into a frozen sea. She stared at him, seeing the words he did not say, and shuddered down to her bones.

“And would you have me find God for you, Corien? The source of the empirium? Is that what this is? One war is not enough?” Her thumbs toyed with his lips, which opened at once. His teeth scraped her skin. “Would you use me to destroy and supplant the force that made us?”

“No, Rielle. It is you who would be God, not me. A kinder, more glorious God than whatever permitted humanity to condemn my kind to eternal suffering. And I would serve you gladly.”

For a long moment, neither spoke. Then Rielle looked away, unable to bear the intensity of his gaze, and ran her hands over the slender lines of his body, knitting closed every wound she had dealt him.

“I would have healed in my own time,” he pointed out, his voice a trembling thread. Her touch was light; she refused to grant him more pleasure than that.

“I prefer to heal you myself,” she said, pretending calm even though she knew he would sense the lie.

When she finished, Corien was himself again, unhurt and unruffled, smiling up at her. She helped him to his feet, her cheeks warming.

“Come, my glorious tormentor.” He kissed her hand. “My miraculous queen. Together, we will right the many wrongs that have been done, and then, our war won, we will find the empirium’s source at the heart of creation. We’ll rend it from the stars and remake its heartless throne into one you deserve.”

“You assume I have agreed to help you, or that I ever will,” she managed with dignity.

“No, my beauty. It’s only that with every breath you draw, I feel how deeply you crave more than this small, pale world will ever be able to give you.”

Rielle could say nothing to that. She had thought the same thing herself, and he knew it. Refusing his arm, she returned to lead the way back to the abandoned manor house, feeling cold in the still mountain air and unsettled, her mind heavy and muddy—and then she realized, just after Corien did, what their argument in the ruins had done.

A beat of silence, and then he grabbed an ancient, cracked vase from the floor and flung it against the nearest wall with a roar of fury.

The house was empty. Obritsa and Artem—and the three castings—were gone.

6

Eliana

“They say Elysium’s towers pierce the clouds, that it’s as white as the highest snows. They say it glitters day and night with the stolen jewels of dead cities. They say there are thousands of desperate people on the bridges, screaming to be let inside, and more arrive every day. Cowards and traitors, all of them. Pathetic wretches. But if the doors opened up for me, I’d be right there with them. I’d kill my own brother to get inside the Emperor’s city, if I had to.”

—Collection of stories written by refugees in occupied Ventera, curated by Hob Cavaserra

The Emperor’s city was a gargantuan sprawl of spires and turrets on a high flatland, surrounded by a circular chasm spanned by a dozen slender white bridges.

It glittered like a careless spill of jewels, thousands upon thousands of them, every facet finely crafted, every tower winking in the chill sunlight. The air was