were elegant, impossible structures, carved out of glassy stone, their shapes drifting toward the sky like smoke. They reflected what little light was left as the dusk thickened into twilight, but there was no other source of light. No lanterns on hooks or fires in hearths. Holland had keen eyes, so it wasn’t the pressing dark that bothered him, but what it meant. Either there was no one here to need the light, or what remained preferred the darkness.
Everyone assumed Black London had consumed itself, destroyed itself, like a fire starved of fuel and air. And while that seemed to be true, Holland knew that assumptions were made to take the place of facts, and the stretch of green at Holland’s feet made him wonder if the world was truly dead, or merely waiting.
After all, you can kill people, but you cannot kill magic.
Not truly.
He followed the thread of new growth as it wove through the ghostly streets, reaching out here and there to brace himself against the smooth stone walls, peering as he did into windows, and finding nothing. No one.
He reached the river, the one that went by several names but ran through every London. It was black as ink, but that disturbed Holland less than the fact that it wasn’t flowing. It wasn’t frozen, like the Isle; being made of water, it couldn’t have decayed, petrified with the rest of the city. And yet, there was no current. The impossible stillness only added to the unnerving sensation that Holland was standing in a piece of time rather than a place.
Eventually, the green path led him to the palace.
Much like the other buildings, it rose like smoke to the sky, its black spires disappearing into the haze of twilight. The gates hung open, their weight sagging on rusted hinges, the great steps cracked. The grassy thread continued, undeterred by the landscape. If anything, it seemed to thicken, braiding into a rope of vine and blossom as it climbed the broken stairs. Holland climbed with it, one hand pressed to his aching ribs.
The palace doors swung open beneath his touch, the air inside still and stagnant as a tomb, the vaulted ceilings reminiscent of White London’s churchlike castle, but with smoother edges. The way the glassy stone continued inside and out, without sign of forge or seam, made it seem ethereal, impossible. This entire place had been made with magic.
The path of green persisted in front of him, winding over stone floors and beneath another pair of doors, massive panes of tinted glass with withered flowers trapped inside. Holland pushed the doors open, and found himself staring at a king.
His breath caught, before he realized the man before him, cast in shadows, wasn’t made of flesh and blood, but glassy black stone.
Just a statue seated on a throne.
But unlike the statues that filled the Stone Forest in front of the Danes’ palace, this one was clothed. And the clothes seemed to move. The cloak around the king’s shoulders fluttered, as if caught by a wind, and the king’s hair, though carved, seemed to rustle gently in the breeze (even though there was no breeze in the room). A crown sat atop the king’s head, and a wisp of grey a shade lighter than the stone itself swirled in the statue’s open eyes. At first Holland thought it was simply part of the rock, but then the swirl of grey twitched, and moved. It coiled into pupils that drifted until they found Holland, and stopped.
Holland tensed.
The statue was alive.
Not in the way of men, perhaps, but alive all the same, in a simple, enduring way, like the grass at his feet. Natural. And yet entirely unnatural.
“Oshoc,” murmured Holland. A word for a piece of magic that broke away, became something more, something with a mind of its own. A will.
The statue said nothing. The wisps of grey smoke watched him from the king’s face, and the thread of green trailed up the dais, wound itself around the oshoc’s throne and over one sculpted boot. Holland found himself stepping forward, until his shoes grazed the bottom of the throne’s platform.
And then, at last, the statue spoke.
Not out loud, but in Holland’s mind.
Antari.
“Who are you?” asked Holland.
I am king.
“Do you have a name?”
Again, the illusion of movement. The faintest gesture: a tightening of fingers on the throne, a tipping of the head, as if this were a riddle. All things have names.
“There was a stone found in my city,” continued Holland, “and