The thing I love about a really good, meaty canon-divergent AU is the meta-mystery of it. The reader knows how things should go, and the writer drops them into a situation where something different has happened and they don’t know why. The quickest way for me to lose interest in someone else’s AU is if they just explain the change from the very beginning. I love the chills I get as I’m reading this story and we’re meeting beloved characters in familiar settings but it’s all wrong. I love trying to figure out what happened, slowly getting the shape of it in my head, and then finally getting all the details later on. This is why my AUs always tend to be “change one thing and watch the butterfly effect” stories. It turns the whole thing into sort of a detective story from the reader’s point of view, and I love assembling the puzzle pieces, whether as a reader or as a writer.

For example, a fic I never wrote more than a few chapters of: Tempus Furat (Harry Potter AU). It starts on Halloween night, and Sirius Black is walking through the ruins of Godric’s Hollow, and every HP fanfic reader on the planet knows what that means. Except he doesn’t seem all that upset. And when he gets to his destination, it’s not James and Lily’s little cottage, it’s some grand mansion, and although it’s been destroyed, Sirius’s reaction is more like “well fuck” than grief-to-the-point-of-madness. Then the bad guys pop up, but they’re not Death Eaters (even though their numbers include Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Black), they’re calling themselves something else (Firewalkers). Sirius is apparently a member of an organisation called the Silver Guard. He escapes via a portkey to Hogwarts, meets McGonagall, and demands to see the headmaster – who turns out to be Tom Riddle, and not Voldemort, a Tom Riddle who’s certainly got a hard edge to him but is in no way the man who became the Dark Lord.

Sirius explains that he was on his way to meet a double-agent, a Firewalker who has agreed to switch sides; he persuades Riddle to help him get away even though Riddle claims absolute neutrality in the conflict between the Silver Guard and the Firewalkers. Sirius makes his rendezvous, meeting up with… no, not Snape, it’s Remus Lupin, with scars across his face (given him by James Potter) and a snarl in his voice and they hate each other and apparently have since school, but Lupin’s decided to turn on the Firewalkers, so Sirius has to work with him.

So this thing had its own plot (sort of, that’s why it never got written – it’s taken me the fifteen years since then to understand my own writing style and how to move a story like this forward without getting stuck on details) about the Firewalkers and their Mysterious Leader planning to attack Muggles, the Silver Guard attempting to stop them, etc. But the real story was the one that the characters themselves weren’t even aware of (well, most of them…) – working out how the hell we ended up in this situation. Why is Riddle not Voldemort? Where did these two new factions come from? Why do Sirius and Remus hate each other, why on Earth would Remus Lupin ever join the bad guys? (Bear in mind that I shipped Sirius/Remus so this was a very deliberate “everything is Very Wrong” plot element.)

I absolutely live for this stuff, for throwing in all these things that make people go “wait, what, HOW, no!” But I also have strong feelings about what makes a good canon-divergent AU, and often it’s not so much about the ways it’s different from canon as the ways it’s similar. One reason plenty of people don’t read AUs at all (whether canon-divergent or the ones that I used to call Elseworlds, i.e. the coffee shop AUs and their cousins) is because it can feel like it’s straying too far from the canon characters and their world. Funnily enough, Elseworlds often have an easier time with that, because authors are usually trying to replicate the canon emotional beats in this new setting.

Canon-divergent AUs can easily get off track, though, if the author becomes too focused on trying to show how Everything Is Different Here, particularly when it comes to characterisation. Now, I am an absolute sucker for specifically the trope where a good person is on the side of evil but I lose interest if that good person has changed so significantly that I no longer recognise them. For full tragedy and angst, I need to be able to see the person they should be and the potential for them to get back to that.

I think that’s the key of it, for me, though it sounds counter-intuitive: a good AU, even one that has wildly broken the canon timeline, should be trying to get back to the same basic outcome as its source material. The characters (at least the sympathetic ones) should be moving back towards their Real Selves from wherever you’ve punted them. If you take too much away from them and don’t allow them to get it back, it’s not a happy ending even if the characters themselves think it is, because we all know how things should be, and this isn’t it. (Conversely, I  am always okay with adding in things that were lost in canon, such as having canonically dead characters survive.)

So going back to Tempus Furat: Sirius and Remus seem to hate each other, but it becomes quickly apparent it’s predicated on hurt of some kind, that something happened at school to drive them apart and they’re both still snarling over it out of emotional self-defence. The conflict between the Silver Guard and the Firewalkers seems like Death Eaters vs Order of the Phoenix under another name, but Sirius and Remus discover that there’s more going on than that, and the leaders of the two factions are connected in some way. A lot of characters who would be dead in canon (e.g. Neville’s parents, James and Lily) are alive. The goal was at the end of the story to be able to have an epilogue showing this universe’s Harry, Ron, and Hermione going off to Hogwarts in ten years’ time, and for it to be not that different from canon. A different history of a different war (but it’s still over), maybe some different faces teaching at Hogwarts, but overall, we’re back where we ought to be, now with bonus living parental figures.

Another example, which I just wrote: in Pray For Us, Icarus (Good Omens AU) I royally fucked up the last 350 years of Crowley’s and Aziraphale’s existence, drastically altering how they interacted with each other and with Armageddon. The first three stories were specifically designed to show off all the ways this world was different and broken, but even then (particularly in Like a Sunless Garden) I was setting things up to make sure I could get them to a happy ending, because I knew that there were some things that could not be lost along the way, or it wouldn’t really be happy. Once I moved on to the “fixing it” part of the series, it was a question of bringing all the strands together so they were ready to be rewoven back into something that looked as much like canon as possible.

So Crowley had to have the Bentley, and it had to be the Bentley, with an equivalent level of love and history behind it. If we got to Happy Ending 2019 and he had no Bentley it would be on some level tragic even if he didn’t know it. Aziraphale had to have the bookshop, and it had to have the same weight of time and history and his relationship with Crowley attached to it. Crowley had to end up back in his own form, with powers and immortality and all his memories. Aziraphale had to be demonstrably able to heal from the trauma of watching him live and die. They had to be together, and be ready to face the future together.

Again, the question I asked myself was: ten years after the end of this story, are they in roughly the same place as we assume they are ten years after canon? In a happy relationship, with a cottage in the country (if in a slightly different location), and immortal lives stretching out in front of them? With the bookshop and the Bentley and good memories of their past together in various forms? With Aziraphale having learned to cast off Heaven’s yoke and Crowley having earned his freedom from Hell?

Other people’s mileage on this may well vary; I expect there are people out there who feel like having an AU end up back on the same track as canon is a cop-out, but this is how I approach it and the kind of AU story I like to read. It feels very much like a puzzle, and I love the meta-narrative that can only exist because the reader is aware of the contrasts and similarities between canon and this divergent timeline. It’s a feeling I’ve never managed to capture in original fiction (historical AUs just don’t do it for me). And I fully intend to just write AUs of my own original stories too, at some point.

Web of Shadows
Chapter 3

This time the haunt was tucked into a grubby intersection between busy roads. A flyover created a dark space, and the four lanes of traffic whizzing past on either side made it difficult to reach. Akemi had to time it carefully and then run hard to make it across, and she still got honked at by a sports car that was definitely not sticking to the speed limit. She made a rude gesture at its retreating lights.

She’d been itching all week to get out and fight more Spectres, but now she was looking at that oily, unnatural darkness again, she found herself hesitating. She vividly remembered the pain of long talons slicing into her leg, the heat of her own blood, and the terror that had filled her when she couldn’t find the way out.

But the wounds had healed into barely-visible scars, and Sakaki had said that this haunt was weaker than the one in the park. She could sense them, apparently, and tell Akemi where to go.

Of course, then it had turned out that Sakaki’s directions were… not exactly direct.

“South and then a little east, beyond an expanse of water, at a great crossroad,” Akemi muttered to herself, looking back towards the recreational lake and then up at the raised highway above her head. “I mean, yeah, okay, not wrong, but I could have been here a lot quicker if she knew what an intersection was…”

She was stalling, she realised. She took a deep breath, clenched her fists, and strode into the darkness.

… and it was almost easy, this time. The Spectres fled her wrath and burned in her fire. This haunt was as black and baffling as the first, but Akemi just kept walking until she caught the dim glow of the sigil at its heart. When the fiery symbols burned away beneath her purifying flames, she couldn’t help but feel a rush of something like joy. The shadows fled. The darkness ebbed away. She was standing in the no-man’s land beneath the highway, with no threat greater than the occasional cockroach.

She flipped open the medallion and reached out to Sakaki just like they’d practised.

“I did it,” she said proudly. “Piece of cake.”

“Well done,” Sakaki replied. “There is another weak point some distance away, in the shadow of old trees and near to a place of worship…”

Akemi groaned.

“I’m gonna need to get a map,” she said. “And explain a few things to you. Like postcodes…”

For the third time, Shoichi got to the end of the maths problem, checked his answer, and found it was not only wrong, but so wrong it was in a whole other category of wrongness. He might as well have been pulling random numbers out of a hat. He rubbed his eyes tiredly and considered putting his head down on the library table and giving up.

He’d never been great at maths; applied science was fine, but the mysteries of calculus and probability often eluded him. After so many nights of broken sleep in the last couple of weeks it had become an ordeal. He was beginning to seriously consider the option of locking himself in his room and refusing to come out until someone made the stupid quadratic equations go away.

Not for the first time, he wished Satoru were here to help him figure it out. But that brought its own wave of sadness, still surprisingly potent after almost a year, and as tired as he was, Shoichi couldn’t push it aside as he normally did.

He shook himself. It was stupid to feel like this. Satoru had just been… someone he did homework with in the library. They hadn’t even been friends, not really. They just talked sometimes, and Satoru made him laugh, and helped him with maths problems. Satoru was a year older; he was probably just being polite to a junior student. It must have been annoying, to have Shoichi coming up to say hi to him after class. That was probably why he’d stopped coming to the library. Shoichi should have known better than to get his hopes up. He wasn’t good at making friends.

Anyway, Satoru would be off studying in Europe now, and thinking about him wasn’t getting the homework done. Shoichi picked up his pencil, then found himself staring blankly at the page. A pervading sense of loneliness was seeping through him. He didn’t really have friends at school. No-one actively disliked him; his classmates were always polite. They just… didn’t seem to think of him as one of them.

He knew a lot of it was the way he looked. Blond hair and blue eyes on a Japanese schoolboy were… striking, would be the kind way to put it. Or freakish, as he’d been told more than once in Elementary. People assumed he was mixed-race, or even a visiting American student. They tried to speak to him in English, or asked him when he was going back home.

He’d lived in Osaka all his life. His parents were both Japanese; there was no Western blood in his family. His parents had told him that his fair hair and skin were a form of albinism.

When he was younger, they had tried to dye his hair, according to school guidelines. It turned out Shoichi was allergic to every kind of dye ever invented, so in the end they’d sent him to the private Silver Cross Academy, which had a lot of international students, and was more generous with its uniform rules.

He’d found the Western kids friendlier, but he’d also noticed that they seemed to expect him to be… less Japanese than his classmates. Sooner or later, he always drifted away from their company.

Sooner or later, he always ended up on his own again.

Without making a conscious decision, he found he was packing away his homework. Maybe he just needed a break from studying. He’d get dinner in one of the places by the station, then head home. He didn’t feel like cooking anyway, and it wasn’t like he was short on his allowance. He was starting to think his parents were trying to compensate for their absence by throwing money at him. He didn’t know how to tell them that it could never be enough.

Wearing the medallion everywhere she went had been strange for the first few days, but Akemi quickly got used to its weight around her neck. Which was how she ended up forgetting about it when she was changing for track.

“Oh wow!” Hana paused in putting on her trainers and stared as Akemi shrugged out of her school shirt. “Is that the same locket we found in the tree?”

Akemi’s hand flew to the medallion, closing over it protectively. She was never normally self-conscious in the locker room, but now she grabbed her t-shirt and yanked it over her head as if Hana had never seen her in her bra before.

“Yeah, um, I cleaned it up.”

“What was inside?”

“Just a mirror.”

“Can I see?”

“Maybe later.” Akemi pulled on her tracksuit top and hastily zipped it up. “I’m just gonna get a drink.”

She hurried to the drinking fountain and hoped that slurping the cool water would take some of the heat out of her face. How could she have been so stupid? Now what was she going to tell Hana?

But when she got back, Hana was concentrating on re-lacing her trainers in an intricate pattern like it was the most important task in the world. Akemi shook her head. Hana had strange priorities sometimes, but if it stopped her asking any more questions, she wasn’t going to complain.

“So anyway,” she said, “do you think we can lap Nanami again today?”

“It’s not her fault she’s slower than normal,” Hana replied without looking up from her laces. “She’s still getting over that bronchitis.”

“Yeah but it’s still funny. She makes faces.”

“I don’t know. I think it’s getting kind of mean.”

Akemi frowned down at the top of Hana’s head.

“What do you want me to do, run slower?”

“No, just…” Hana finally stood up, glanced at Akemi, then headed for the door. “Just don’t laugh at her.”

“I’m not laughing at her,” Akemi protested. “I’m just trying to make her feel better.”

Hana sighed.

“Sometimes you’re not very good at reading people,” she said. “Just say something nice to her, okay?”

Shoichi felt better after a bowl of his favourite noodles and some comforting oolong tea. The owner of the restaurant knew him by sight and was always kind to him. She’d also never spoken to him in any language but Japanese, or asked him about his hair. It was the little things that counted.

There were no free seats on the train, so he grabbed a strap and tried to get comfortable. At this time of night he often ended up standing for the whole forty-five minutes. He usually read a book, but today he didn’t feel like he could concentrate, so he settled in to people-watch instead.

It was something he loved to do, although he was always careful not to stare or give offence. People on the train sometimes seemed to forget where they were, absorbed in their phones or their books or just their own thoughts. You saw expressions and emotions on their faces that would normally be hidden under polite masks. The people travelling with friends talked about their lives, and listening was like a window onto another world. Sometimes he saw someone crying, or so angry they could barely sit still. A part of him always wanted to go up and ask them what was wrong, if he could help.

He didn’t, of course.

Nothing special was going on today, just tired commuters, laughing high schoolers, a little group of grandmothers who’d colonised the seats by the doors and were swapping embroidery tips. Shoichi listened to that with half an ear for a while. He had no real interest in the subject, but it was fun to figure out the relationships between the women from their conversation. One was clearly the head of the pack, another was anxious to win her approval, and another clearly resented her. Not all that different from high school, if he was honest. The thought made him smile, so he quickly looked away in case they thought he was laughing at them.

The last thing he expected was to find himself looking right at Satoru.

For a moment he thought he must be mistaken. Satoru shouldn’t even be in Japan right now, let alone on this train, and the guy at the other end of the carriage was slumped forward, elbows propped on his knees, in a way that made him look older. He was reading something on his phone; when he lifted a hand to push his hair out of his eyes, Shoichi knew for sure it was him. He’d seen that gesture so many times in the library.

It was beyond strange. He’d just been thinking about Satoru earlier, and here he was, as if in answer to the thought. Maybe he was back for a family visit? But his parents lived in Hong Kong, didn’t they?

He looked… tired. Even more tired than Shoichi felt. Shoichi had always liked his smile. Right now it was hard to imagine that expression touching his weary, sombre face.

Shoichi was moving before he had time to think it through. Satoru looked sad and alone and exhausted, and Shoichi couldn’t have said if it was altruistic concern or a bone-deep recognition that pulled him down the carriage.

“Hi,” he said, trying for casual, sounding unbearably awkward to his own ears.

Satoru straightened sharply, looking up at Shoichi in surprise. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, which made his eyes more noticeable, a grey that was slightly too pale for his black hair and tan skin. His mother was from New Zealand, Shoichi seemed to recall, but you could barely tell he was mixed race. Some people had all the luck.

Satoru was staring at him like he didn’t remember who Shoichi was. Something cold started in the pit of Shoichi’s stomach, but it barely had time to reach his chest before Satoru’s expression gave way to a surprised smile. The chilly lump dissolved instantly into a nervous flutter.

“Shoichi?” Satoru locked his phone and slid it into a pocket. He straightened, shaking his hair out of his eyes again, and there was no mistaking the genuine warmth in his voice. “It’s been a long time! How are you?”

“I’m— I’m fine.” Shoichi had the unexpected urge to be a lot more honest, to say that he wasn’t fine, and he didn’t know why. He shoved it down hard. “What are you doing here? Are you on vacation?”

Satoru frowned. “No, why?”

“I… thought you were going to study abroad?”

“Oh.” Satoru looked away abruptly, and Shoichi immediately regretted asking. “No, I… ended up staying here. I’m attending Osaka University.”

There was no joy in the statement, just a dull acceptance.

“But you were going to Europe—”

“It didn’t work out.”

“I’m sorry,” Shoichi managed, unsure if he was apologising for bring it up, or trying to offer sympathy. Both felt like he was overstepping, but Satoru shot him a grateful glance that only confused him more.

“What about you?” Satoru asked. “Where are you going to apply?”

“I’m… not sure.” He’d had a half-formed idea that he might try to apply to the same school as Satoru. But that had seemed like madness when it had involved going abroad. Now that he knew Satoru was right here in Osaka… “Um, I guess I’ll see how my grades are looking?”

“You’ll be fine,” Satoru said with a certainty Shoichi didn’t share. “You’re smart enough, you just need more confidence.”

Shoichi could feel himself blushing. “I still suck at maths.”

“Everyone sucks at maths before they learn how to do it. People who say they don’t are lying. You’ll figure it out.”

“I don’t know, I think Joshua in my class was born understanding parabolas.”

Satoru snorted with laughter.

“The Australian kid? He has three private tutors.”

“He does? How do you know?”

“Because one of them was tutoring me too.” Satoru grinned at him. “That’s my terrible secret. I suck at maths, I just got really good at hiding it.”

Just like that, the ice was broken, and it was as easy to fall into conversation as it always had been in the library. When the seat next to Satoru freed up, Shoichi looked around to see if anyone else wanted it, but no-one seemed in need. It was easier to talk when they were sitting next to each other. The rest of the journey passed so quickly Shoichi almost missed his stop.

As he jumped up to leave, he was seized with a sudden certainty that he didn’t want to let Satoru vanish again. While other people crowded off the train, he grabbed a notebook from his bag, tore a corner of paper off, and scribbled his phone number on it.

“Maybe we could talk sometime?” he said, offering it to Satoru.

“I’d like that,” Satoru replied, an odd, almost surprised expression on his face as he took the piece of paper.

Then Shoichi had to go, squeezing past the newly-boarded passengers to dash through the doors just before they closed.

On the platform, he turned to wave, but the people who’d just boarded were blocking his view of Satoru. The train pulled out of the station before they got out of the way. Shoichi stood and stared after it for far too long, wondering what had gotten into him to make him so bold.

Finally, he shook his head and headed home. He still had quadratic equations to wrestle with, after all. At least they didn’t seem quite so terrible now.

Another day, another haunt. At least the map was helping a little. Akemi was getting pretty good at interpreting Sakaki’s directions. It was sort of like a scavenger hunt.

A scavenger hunt that led to evil shadow monsters, admittedly, but at least she could do something about those when she found them.

At least – at last – she had a purpose. And if her homework was suffering for the time she was spending running around the city looking for haunts, and if the lies she was telling her mother were starting to weigh on her conscience, it was easy to tell herself that this was important. Much more important than school, or trying in vain to please Izumi.

She was feeling cheerful as she left the latest dark corner a little less dark and a lot less full of Spectres, although she was disappointed that Neikos hadn’t showed up. Sakaki said he was unlikely to be able to reach any of these minor haunts in time to defend them, and that this was for the best, as Akemi needed more time before she was ready to confront him. Akemi just wanted to see his nasty, smirking face when she set him on fire.

She felt the tug of the medallion and flicked it open to report back. Sakaki spoke before she could say a word.

“They have found another shard-bearer.”

Akemi stopped dead, her good mood draining away. She’d been to the hospital twice to check on the girl she’d saved, but Sakaki was right: she wasn’t waking up. The second time, Akemi loitered around long enough to hear the doctors talking about vegetative states and traumatic brain injuries, but she’d seen the way they frowned, heard the uncertainty in their own words as they tried to make sense of something beyond the realm of science.

The girl’s parents had been there too. After seeing their faces, Akemi knew she wouldn’t be coming back for a third visit. Not until she could retrieve the shard and make everything right again.

“Where?” she demanded. “I need to get there as soon as possible—”

“You have a little time. Neikos must lure the shard-bearer to one of his haunts before he can strike.”

“Why? Can’t he just… do it?”

“His strength is limited. I do not believe he has many shards in his possession. For now he needs the power of the haunt and the protection of the Spectres.”

Akemi’s mind raced.

“Couldn’t I just stop him, then?” she said. “If I warn the person—”

“No, Sol.” Sakaki’s voice was gentle but firm. “As I said, we also need the shards. You must allow Neikos to attack, and be ready to deny him the prize. There is no other choice.”

“Why?” Akemi demanded for a second time. “Why isn’t there another choice? There should be another choice!”

Sakaki was silent. Akemi closed her eyes and made herself take a deep breath.

“Fine. Where do I go?”

Shoichi’s classmates might not have been interested in him, but he was interested in them. He liked hearing the little details of their lives. He often spent his lunch break with a book open on his desk, but he was as likely to be listening to the conversations around him as reading. So he realised quickly that something strange was going on with Natsuko.

She’d transferred to Silver Cross a year ago, and the rumour mill whispered that she’d been kicked out of her previous school, though opinions differed as to why. She’d had a fierce and defiant attitude from the start, but she’d always been friendly to Shoichi, and he secretly envied her confidence.

She’d been missing from class three times this week, always in the afternoon, always back the next morning with a half-hearted excuse and a smile that was almost a smirk, daring the teacher to challenge her. So far, none of them had.

Shoichi hadn’t known what to make of it until he’d overheard two girls discussing “Natsuko’s boyfriend”. An older guy, one of them whispered. Gave her the creeps. What did Natsuko see in him? The other girl thought he was pressuring her to cut class. Should they tell someone? No, they couldn’t do that. Natsuko would be so angry, and it was none of their business, not really…

It was none of Shoichi’s business either, and he had his own problems this week. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, why he was having so many nightmares or why he felt such a sense of impending disaster, but by Thursday afternoon he had a splitting headache and he found himself, almost to his own surprise, telling his teacher that he didn’t feel well. He fully expected to be disbelieved, but the teacher took one look at him and told him to go home and rest, which was almost worse, because it meant that maybe there really was something wrong with him.

Shoichi packed his books up without meeting anyone’s eye and slunk out of the school like he was playing truant. The headache seemed to ease a little once he was in the fresh air, which only made him worry more about getting into trouble. He almost turned around, but the thought of having to walk back into class was too much, so he began to trudge towards the station.

Maybe that overheard conversation was still lingering in his mind, or maybe it was just coincidence that he spotted Natsuko as soon as he entered the small shopping mall that surrounded the station. She was sitting at a cafe table, laughing at something her companion had just said. Shoichi glanced sideways at the man as he approached, and almost stumbled.

There was something wrong with his face.

Shoichi couldn’t put it into words. His first impression was of a guy in his twenties, good looking enough to turn heads, but there was something about his face that didn’t fit. It wasn’t right for the rest of him, the scrawny body, the baggy jeans and sweatshirt, the slightly greasy-looking hair. His smile was delayed by a split second, as if responding to a conscious command.

And his eyes were… shadowed. Too dark, as if some narrow band of shade was falling exactly across them, though the overhead lights were bright and there was nothing to create such an effect.

Shoichi was seized by an urgent conviction that Natsuko should not be talking to the man. That he was a bad influence… no, that he was in some way dangerous. A reckless urge took him to stride up to the table and intervene.

Instead, he ducked his head and hurried past, hoping Natsuko didn’t look in his direction.

“… so you’ll meet me there? Eight o’clock?” the man was saying. He sounded eager. Too eager. It made Shoichi’s skin crawl. “I’ll be at the station.”

“Okay, okay, I guess. What’s so great about Hirabayashi anyway?”

“You’ll see. It’s worth it, I promise…”

Then Shoichi was out of earshot. The headache was getting worse again, a painful hammering behind his eyes. Maybe that was the cause of his reaction to the guy, just a weird sleep-deprivation thing. Maybe once he’d had a nap and some painkillers, the whole exchange wouldn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary.

He fumbled for his travel pass, and glanced over his shoulder one last time. The man’s shadowed eyes were fixed on Natsuko. His smile should have been attractive, but instead, all Shoichi saw was greed.

What am I even doing?

This train was nearly empty, partly because it was later in the evening, but mostly because it was heading out into the warehouse district along Osaka’s waterfront. Shoichi had needed to look Hirabayashi up on a map. There was nothing there but industrial outlets and shipping companies; he could think of no good reason for anyone to want a seventeen-year-old girl to meet them there.

But he could think of far too many bad ones.

And so here he was, heading out to intercept Natsuko at her rendezvous. He’d tried to think of other options. He couldn’t justify calling the police. He didn’t want to get her into trouble at school. He had no way of contacting her parents, or even her friends.

He would have liked to ask his mother or father for advice, but both had texted him to say they wouldn’t be home until “very late”, which he knew from experience meant they had court deadlines and would be sleeping in their offices, if at all.

Sometimes he wondered if they ever communicated with each other or realised how often both of them were completely absent from his life.

At any rate, he had no-one to consult, only his own intuition. And his intuition had been screaming at him for hours that he couldn’t just ignore what he’d overheard. He didn’t know what he was going to say to Natsuko when he got there. He was shaking with anxiety just thinking about it. He had to hope that something would come to him, some inspiration would strike in the moment, make it obvious what he needed to do.

He was twenty minutes early, not least because he’d wanted to avoid being on the same train as Natsuko. The station was tiny and deserted. He’d stand out like a sore thumb if he waited here, so he ducked into the convenience store by the entrance and pretended to be browsing the magazine section while keeping an eye on the gates.

It almost worked, but after he’d been standing there for a while, the convenience store clerk decided he must be a lost tourist and tried to offer help in halting English. Shoichi’s polite and icy response in perfect Japanese confused him enough that he retreated, but the exchange took long enough that when Shoichi looked back, it was just in time to see Natsuko disappearing around a corner.

He rushed after her, not caring if the clerk thought he was rude or crazy. He got to the top of the stairs as she reached the bottom, and her boyfriend was there waiting, and Shoichi froze. He looked even more sinister in the dark. Even Natsuko seemed to hesitate, but the guy took hold of her arm and led her down the street, and she didn’t try to pull away.

Now what?

He’d hoped to catch Natsuko alone. Everything in him quailed at the thought of confronting the man with the shadowed eyes. But he’d come all this way, and he was even more worried about Natsuko now, and where could they possibly be going…?

Someone came rushing up behind him, almost knocking him down the stairs.

“Sorry!” It was another girl, her hair in pigtails and her school uniform askew as if she’d been running. “Hey did you see a girl and a creepy dude go past here just now?”

Shoichi stared at her, too taken aback to be anything but honest.

“Um… yes, they went that way—”

“Thanks!” She started down the stairs, then paused, an odd expression crossing her face as she looked back at him. “… do I know you?”

“I don’t think so?”

Although there was something vaguely familiar about her, something he couldn’t place…

“Oh, okay, never mind, uh… thanks again!”

She flew down the stairs and sprinted in the direction he’d indicated. Shoichi stared after her. Was she a friend of Natsuko’s? Was that why they half-recognised each other? She clearly wasn’t from Silver Cross, but why else would she be here?

A part of him whispered that maybe he should just go home. Someone else was looking out for Natsuko. He didn’t need to get involved.

He started down the stairs, hurrying after the running girl. She was fast, way too fast for him to catch, but she slowed down as she got nearer to the couple up ahead, so he was able to keep her in sight.

He was so busy making sure he didn’t lose her or get spotted – not that she so much as glanced back in his direction – that he wasn’t really paying attention to where they were going. It took him by surprise when he realised that the sounds of the road had died away, and that the looming warehouses on either side were very dark. He could see where he was going by the reflected glow of streetlights from somewhere in the distance, but it seemed like this whole block was out of power.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. This was… bad. As bad as his worst fears. He should call the police…

… and tell them what?

The girl had rounded a corner up ahead. By the time Shoichi reached it, there was no sign of her. He stopped, looking from side to side, and saw that one of the warehouse doors on this narrow alley was partly opened. It was the only place she could have gone.

The darkness inside was so intense, it was like looking at black cloth. Shoichi stood rooted in place, half-remembered dreams rushing back with an intensity that made him shudder. Black, roiling shadows consuming everything in their path, rushing to swallow him. And the sea, the sound of the sea…

From inside, someone screamed. A girl’s voice, torn with terror.

Shoichi plunged into the darkness.

He was lost as soon as he crossed the threshold. The light that should have followed him through the open door vanished like a curtain had fallen into place behind him. He collided with a shipping crate, fumbled his way along its side, found himself in a narrow gap between two more. He turned to try and make his way back, but where he thought the door should be, his outstretched hands found the outlines of a forklift truck.

He turned again, feeling his way along the crates, and finally he saw a faint glow spilling around a corner. He stumbled towards it. The light was pale and strange, sickly, like ghostly bio-luminescence. When he reached the end of the row of crates, he peered around the last one, and froze at what he saw.

Natsuko was sprawled on the floor, the man standing over her. At least, Shoichi had to assume it was the same man. He was now wearing a long, black hooded cloak like something out of a movie, and his face had changed. Gone were the handsome features, but the sneer and the self-satisfaction that had replaced them were a perfect fit for the rest of him as he chanted words in an unknown language.

He was holding a knife, outstretched in one hand, and the pale glow was cascading from its tip to surround Natsuko’s motionless body. As Shoichi watched in disbelief, the light coalesced into a bright point, suspended in mid-air. The man in the cloak kept glancing around, as if checking for witnesses, and now Shoichi could hear movement in the darkness, a horrible slithering like snakes writhing over each other. Something brushed against him in the dark; he would have screamed, if his voice hadn’t been snatched by terror.

The chanting stopped. The light around Natsuko faded out. And then suddenly, there was fire.

The man reeled back, yelping as flames seared his outstretched hand, ducking away from the inferno. Shoichi flinched instinctively, but the crate was between him and the fire, and the flames seemed drawn to the man in the cloak. The shadows leapt crazily, beginning to take on solid forms, things with claws and sinuous arms and too many mouths…

“Back off, Neikos!”

The girl Shoichi had been following had appeared from somewhere, standing between Natsuko and the man in the cloak. She looked different; it took him a moment to realise that she was no longer wearing school uniform, but an outfit that would have been more at home at a cosplay convention. He couldn’t begin to fathom how or why she’d changed clothes, and besides, he had more pressing questions.

Such as how was she controlling the fire?

Because that was clearly what was happening. The flames danced at her fingertips, raced out into an arc that forced the man in the cloak to retreat further.

“What the hell—” The man – Neikos – was staring at her in disbelief. “You again?”

“You bet.”

The flames lunged for him as she stepped forward; he stumbled back, anger swiftly replacing incredulity.

“You can’t— there’s no way you could get out of that haunt—”

“What haunt?” There was no mistaking the triumph and glee in the girl’s voice. “I guess you haven’t checked in on it recently. I took it down, just like I’m going to take you and your Spectres down.”

“Who are you?” Neikos demanded.

“Me?” The girl almost seemed to have to think about it, but when she replied, there was certainty in her voice. “I’m Guardian Sol.”

A shock went through Shoichi, something like recognition, something like deja vu. Sol, it means ‘sun’, Guardian Sol, shadows fear the blazing sun…

The name seemed to hit Neikos like a slap to the face. For just a second, his eyes widened. Then the expression was swept aside by ugly contempt.

“You? You’re it?”

All at once the shadows were boiling around him. Those shapes Shoichi had seen in the firelight, they weren’t just a trick of the eye. Spectres. They were creeping up around Neikos, shielding him from the flames, and Shoichi could see them sneaking around the sides, trying to get behind Sol.

As he followed them with his eyes, he realised two things at once. The first was that the bright object was still hovering in the air near where Natsuko lay, defying all laws of gravity and common sense. The second was that someone else had joined the scene, another cloaked figure moving stealthily towards that point of light. Even as Shoichi watched, the new arrival reached for the prize.

“This is what she warned me about?” Neikos’s voice grew louder with disdain and something close to outrage. “You’re just a girl in a stupid costume! And you were dumb enough to follow me here— into a full nexus—”

The other cloaked figure seized the bright object, and in the same movement, turned and fled into the darkness, stealth abandoned. Either the sudden disappearance of its light, or some small noise, caused Sol to spin around in horror.

“No!” she yelled, throwing herself after the figure. “Get back here!”

As if he’d been waiting for his moment, Neikos snarled something in that other language. The Spectres gathered around him lunged forward. Darkness welled up like water and flowed out over the flames. Under the sudden onslaught, the fire flickered and faded, but its dying light was enough for Shoichi to see the massive, inhuman creature rearing up to Sol’s left, its seven needle-tipped fingers slashing directly for her unprotected back…

“Look out!” Shoichi yelled.

She barely dodged in time, crashing to the ground and then rolling awkwardly to get to her feet. The rest of Neikos’s Spectres were on her in a second, and Shoichi thought she’d disappear under their darkness, but a burst of fire sent them reeling back. Neikos himself raced past her with barely a glance, except to sneer mockingly.

“Stupid bitch,” he snarled, and then he was gone into the darkness like the other figure.

Sol tried to follow, but the shadows crowded in, and she was forced to give ground. At the same moment, dozens of multi-jointed talons closed on Shoichi from all directions. He cried out and struggled, but the grip was supernaturally strong. He remembered those hungry mouths…

Then flames engulfed him, so close they singed the ends of his hair, and he was free. A second later, Sol had him by the wrist, hauling him over to where Natsuko still lay. More flames sprang up around them in a circle, but they seemed weaker, like they didn’t have as much fuel.

“Who are— wait, you’re that boy, from the station— what are you doing here?” The words tripped over themselves and she didn’t wait for an answer. “Okay, stay close to me, don’t panic, we can get out of this. Can you carry her?”

“I— I can try.”

“Good, do that. Maybe I can… make us a path…”

Shoichi struggled to lift Natsuko, who didn’t so much as stir. Her limp body gave him chills. Was she dead? Her skin still felt warm, but he had no time to check for a pulse.

“Ready?” Sol glanced over as Shoichi staggered to his feet with Natsuko awkwardly on his back like he was trying to give her a piggyback ride and she wasn’t cooperating. “No, not like that, turn her sideways—”

“This is the best I can do,” Shoichi managed through gritted teeth.

“Okay, fine, just follow me then, got it?”

A corridor of flame sprang up. Sol darted towards it; Shoichi followed as best he could. Somewhere in the darkness he heard a cry of pain. He couldn’t tell if it was Neikos or the other person. Sol’s head turned towards the sound, her fists clenching, but then she looked back at Shoichi and Natsuko like she was swallowing something bitter, and continued to lead the way in the opposite direction. They reached a wall of crates; Shoichi couldn’t tell if it was the one he’d been standing behind originally. They all looked the same.

“Is this the way out?” Shoichi asked.

“Uh…” He didn’t like the uncertainty in her voice. “We’ll have to go around.”

“Are you sure—”

Something that felt like a freight train struck him from the side, sending him crashing to the concrete with Natsuko still on his back. His outflung hand bent at a painful angle as he tried to break his fall, leaving his wrist a halo of agony. Sol leapt towards him, fire racing to lash at the Spectre that had attacked him, but behind her Shoichi saw another one darting forward, its razor claws already moving towards her neck. There was no time to shout a warning, no time for her to dodge.

Shadows flee the rising moon.

He thrust out his uninjured hand, palm outward. A shimmering wall of light sprang up around him, spreading outwards, a white dome of iridescence like the gleam of mother-of-pearl. The Spectre at Shoichi’s back reeled away with a howl; the one that had been diving for Sol was unable to stop in time. When it struck the glimmering shield, it came apart like clouds parting.

Sol stumbled to a halt, whipping around to take in the barrier, then whirling back to stare dumbfounded at Shoichi.

“How—”

“I don’t— I don’t know—”

“You’re a Guardian,” Sol breathed, understanding dawning on her face. “You’re like me. But you’re a boy, how does that even work—”

Shoichi stared at her helplessly. Sol shook herself, quickly knelt at his side, and lifted Natsuko over her shoulders.

“Can you keep it going?” Sol asked.

Shoichi’s hand was shaking but he didn’t dare let it drop. He could feel the effort of maintaining the shield, like something pouring out of his veins.

“I think so, but not for long.”

“Then we need to move!”

They ran, as best they could with Sol burdened by Natsuko and Shoichi concentrating on that brilliant light. The Spectres scrambled to get out of their way and seethed into their wake. He barely registered where they were going, hoping against hope that Sol really did know the way out.

His vision began to swim. The shield flickered twice, then suddenly winked out, and Shoichi didn’t know how to bring it back, or if he even could. But the pause seemed to have given Sol’s fire new vigour. Flames spiralled around them, holding back the darkness for just a few more precious moments.

Just enough to reach a threshold that Shoichi couldn’t see, to stagger out into a dark alley that seemed bright in comparison to the place they had just left. He glanced behind, only to see that the Spectres hadn’t given up, were boiling out of the warehouse door like a nightmare. Sol suddenly shoved Natsuko at Shoichi and turned to face their pursuers.

The gout of fire that engulfed the Spectres was so bright it hurt Shoichi’s eyes. It lasted bare moments, but it was enough, finally, to deter the monstrous darkness. The shadows reeled and withdrew. Sol grabbed Shoichi by the arm and hauled him along the alleys between the buildings until they were both out of breath and Shoichi began to be afraid he was going to pass out. When they finally stopped, it was all he could do to sink down onto his knees rather than falling flat on his face. He let Natsuko slip from his back, and wondered dimly if he’d hurt her during their frantic escape.

Sol seemed to have the same thought. She crouched beside him, carefully moving Natsuko into a more comfortable position, checking her pulse.

“She’s alive,” Sol said, but her tone was at odds with the words, as sombre as if she were announcing the opposite. “We’d better call an ambulance.”

“What happened to her?”

Sol looked away.

“Neikos took something from her.”

“That… bright thing?”

“Yeah. It’s called a shard. They’re what the Multitude wants to get hold of, why it’s here. I was supposed to get it first.”

Her shoulders sagged.

“But will she be okay?” Shoichi demanded.

“She won’t die,” Sol replied miserably. “Not if we get her to hospital. But she’ll stay like this forever unless we can get her soul back.”

It hit Shoichi then, the madness of it all, souls and shards and living shadows.

“What,” he said after a moment, “the hell is going on?”

Sol blinked at him. The ghost of a smile touched her face.

“That was pretty much my reaction,” she said.

She put her hand up to a golden locket that hung from her neck, and then suddenly she was glowing with light. The sparkling sheath faded after a split second, leaving her in the school uniform she’d been wearing at the station.

“Hi,” she went on. “I’m Akemi. You’re a magical girl now. And I need to introduce you to this tree…”

Web of Shadows
Chapter 2

The Honmori Shrine had been abandoned for as long as Akemi could remember. It lay on a side street, but its steps and gate were visible from the route she walked with Hana every day to get to the station. The shrine buildings were shuttered, its kami forgotten and forsaken, and it was always full of feral cats, sleeping in the now-dry stone water basin and on the greying wooden steps of the buildings.

It should have been spooky in the dark, but Akemi had seen spooky up close already this evening, and the quiet stillness of the shrine felt comforting in comparison. Several pairs of luminous eyes watched her warily from a distance. Somewhere, she could hear purring, and the sound of a kitten or two playing with a dead leaf.

She stopped in the middle of the open space.

Now what?

What had she been expecting? That the shrine doors would be open? That there would be someone waiting here, a priest in ancient robes, or a fox spirit, or one of the guardian ogres come to life? The anger and certainty that had driven her here began to drain away.

“Sol!”

Akemi caught her breath. The call was faint with distance, but familiar. The voice was from her dream, but the sense of recognition went far deeper, an almost painful moment of connection.

“Who are you?”

“Come here, Sol.” Now Akemi could tell that the voice was coming from behind the shrine. “I will explain everything.”

Akemi fumbled in her bag for her phone. Using its dim light, she followed the remains of a path around the main shrine building and into the overgrown trees behind. The same route they’d taken to follow the white cat. Her heart skipped. Could it really be…?

Feline eyes shone from the bushes as she reached the clearing, but they darted away at her approach. Akemi swung her phone around, but its light showed her only bits of dead twig, long grass, and a couple of startled cicadas.

“Where are you?”

“I am here,” came the voice from right beside her. Akemi spun around, startled, but all she saw was the tree she’d climbed the day before. There was no-one hiding behind it, or up in its branches. At least… no-one human sized…

“Are you a talking cat?” she blurted out.

“What?” The voice lost some of its calm authority. “A cat? Me? Don’t be ridiculous!”

“If you’d had the kind of day I’ve had it wouldn’t seem so strange,” Akemi retorted. “Come out, then. I can’t see you.”

A sigh.

“You are not looking, Sol. I am right in front of you.”

There was a faint glow in the clearing. Now she realised that its source was the tree in front of her. The light was so faint it could almost be mistaken for reflected starlight, but it clustered like blossoms among the leaves. The branches were moving as if stirred by a heavy breeze, though the air around her was still. All the other trees were motionless, not a leaf twitching. As Akemi stared, the whole trunk of the tree bent towards her, slowly and gracefully, in something like a bow.

“How,” she said after a long moment, “is a talking tree any less ridiculous than a talking cat?”

“I am not a talking tree,” said the talking tree indignantly. “I am a spirit whose anchor to this realm happens to be this sacred sakaki tree. I am here to guide you—”

“Can you leave the tree?”

“No, but there is much I can teach you—”

“… so you’re basically a tree. Who is talking to me. Right now. A talking tree.”

Akemi started to giggle. She couldn’t help herself.

“I am not—” The tree paused. When she spoke again she sounded, for the first time, less formal, and even faintly amused. “Oh, as you please. Call me Sakaki then. Will you listen to what the talking tree has to say?”

Akemi found she couldn’t quite stop giggling, and that there was something close to hysterical in the sound. Her legs suddenly felt wobbly. She sat down in the long grass with a thump.

“Is this really happening? It feels like a dream.”

“It is not a dream, Sol. Be at ease. You are safe here. Though this must seem very strange to you—”

“Very strange doesn’t even begin to—” Akemi shook her head, at a loss for words. She blinked up at the faintly glowing tree. “What do you keep calling me?”

“Sol.” Sakaki spoke the name with an odd combination of reverence and fondness. “Guardian Sol. Chosen of the Sun. Take out your crest.”

“My what?”

“The medallion you took from my branches yesterday.”

“That thing—?”

Akemi grabbed her bag and started searching through it. She had to empty most of its contents onto the ground, probably losing a few pencils to the long grass, before her groping fingers closed on the bundle of tissue paper. She pulled it out and tore the wrapping away.

She gasped when she saw the locket. The dull black grime was gone. The gold – for there could be no doubt it was gold – gleamed in her hand. The red crystal sun in the centre was clear and clean, and glittered when she turned it in her hand. There were intricate patterns engraved into the metal, fine filigree edges to the setting of the crystal. The chain that had been broken was now whole, as new-looking as the rest of it.

“It really was magic,” she said, stunned. “It really was.”

“Magic is a trivial term for the power within the crest,” said Sakaki. “The power of the Celestial Guard, sworn to fight the Infernal Multitude, which would cover all the world in darkness if left unopposed.”

Akemi’s fingers tightened on the locket.

“Those shadow… things?”

“Those were Spectres. The Multitude is a formless thing, all eyes and mouths and grasping hands, an army of hundreds of thousands all driven by one purpose: to retake the surface world.”

Akemi shuddered, remembering those grasping hands all too well.

“What do you mean, retake?”

“Eons ago, this world was wreathed in fire and shadow. The surface was molten rock; the skies were blanketed with smoke and ash. The Multitude thrived then; this was its realm and no other could endure it. But after many ages of dominion, the world began to cool, and the skies began to clear. The fiery Fiends could not tolerate the cold, and the shadowy Spectres fled in fear from the light of sun and stars and moon. The Multitude dove deep underground and slumbered for long ages, but it never forgot that this world had once been its sole domain. And when new life arose to take its place, its resentment was vast and bitter.”

“And now it’s back?”

“Yes. The Multitude has found itself human allies, who can walk the surface world at will, and draw upon the power of the the depths. They call themselves Archdukes—”

“That guy!” Akemi sat bolt upright. “Neikos, he called himself Archduke Neikos—”

“I feared you had confronted one of them when I sensed your proximity to that haunt. And yet you got the better of him even without your full powers?”

“He left me there,” Akemi said, feeling her blood begin to boil. “Me and the other girl, he just left us there with the Spectres. He took off after the other guy—”

“What ‘other guy’?” Sakaki demanded sharply.

“I don’t know, some other guy in a cloak. There was a… a thing…” Akemi gestured vaguely with her hands. “Something bright and shiny, I guess Neikos wanted it? But then this other guy swooped in and grabbed it, and Neikos chased him. And then the Spectres came.”

She looked down at the medallion in her hand once more.

“And I burned them up,” she said. “How did I do that?”

“Stand up, Sol. Hold the crest against your heart.”

Akemi scrambled to her feet and pressed the medallion against her chest.

“Now repeat after me: I call upon the sun, my liege, bright warden of the day. Grant me the power to overcome the dark.”

The words were archaic, old Japanese like something out of a samurai movie. Akemi paused for a second, making sure she had it all straight in her head.

“I call upon the sun, my liege,” she began, and there was heat under her hand and heat in her chest, “bright warden of the day.”

A certainty swelled in her, a recognition, a deep sense of completion. This no longer seemed strange. This seemed exactly right.

“Grant me the power to overcome the dark!”

Light sprang from her fingertips and raced across her body, so fast it was almost a flash, so warm and golden that it made her heart sing. She felt the change, like being turned inside-out, like something that had been coiled up and tense inside her was suddenly, gratefully released. She wanted to laugh, and she wanted to cry, and she wanted Hana to be here to see this.

Her clothes had changed. She could feel the difference immediately. Her body was wrapped in some form-fitting garment; her fingers were now sheathed in gloves. As the afterimages cleared from her eyes, she saw that the gloves were red with orange trim. They fitted her perfectly.

So did the rest of the outfit. The white underlayer felt like a jumpsuit, its material light and stretchy enough to make movement easy, but with an odd feeling of sturdiness, as if it were reinforced with some stronger fibre. Over it she was wearing a short red dress – or was it a tunic? – with a flared skirt and more orange trim, and a belt of golden links at the waist. Knee-high boots in the same shade of red completed the ensemble.

Akemi stared down at herself for several seconds, then put her hands behind her back, feeling around her waist.

“What are you doing?” Sakaki asked.

“Trying to see if I have some sort of enormous ribbon back here.” Akemi spun around. “Do I?”

“No.”

Akemi laughed. She felt so light and free, it was as if she’d sprouted wings.

“But I’m basically a magical girl, right? A mahou shoujo?”

“I suppose you could term it thus.” Sakaki seemed to have veered back into amusement. “Put the crest around your neck, Sol. From now on, you must never be parted from it.”

Akemi paused in the middle of slipping the chain over her head.

“What, never? That’s going to be awkward.”

“Nonetheless, it is your protection. The Multitude is rapidly growing in strength. This city is already marred with haunts. You must be cautious, and prepared to defend yourself.”

Some of Akemi’s glee fizzled out. She let the medallion fall onto her chest, where it lay perfectly framed in the curved cut-out of the tunic’s orange collar. For the first time, she noticed that she also had epaulets on her shoulders, holding the tunic in place; red crystals glimmered in a gold setting. It reminded her uneasily for a moment of the red sigil glowing on the wall beneath the bridge.

“Tell me how to fight,” she said.

“You can conjure flame to burn the shadows away. Call the fire: it will respond to your need.”

Akemi cautiously held out a hand. It was there, the heat, under her skin, pooling in her fingertips.

“Burn,” she whispered.

Flames leapt from her hand. She flinched back, and watched in dismay as a small shrub went up in flames.

“Oh no—”

Sakaki shook her branches. Drops of water from the earlier rain quenched the fire. They also drenched Akemi, who glared at Sakaki even as she rushed over to stamp on the remaining embers.

“Now I’m wet. Great.”

“You’ll forgive me for being a little nervous around open flames,” Sakaki replied dryly. “I do not wish to go up in smoke.”

Akemi had to concede the point. She looked at the charred remains of the shrub for a long moment.

“So if I go back to that… haunt,” she said, “I can destroy the Spectres?”

“Not yet,” Sakaki said. “You need to learn more about your powers. Now that haunt has been bolstered with the power of a shard, it is too potent for you to confront.”

“But the other girl… I can’t just leave her there.”

“There is nothing you can do for her.”

“Is… is she dead?”

“No, but she is beyond your reach,” Sakaki said as if that would be the end of it. She sounded all too much like Akemi’s mother. “To begin with, Sol, you must focus on the weaker haunts—”

“Akemi.”

“What?”

“My name is Akemi.” Her fists clenched. “And I’m not leaving that girl with those Spectres.”

She took off running, darting through the overgrowth, out to the shrine courtyard and down the steps. She could hear Sakaki calling after her, but she ignored that, focusing on her breathing, the rhythm of her stride. Running always made her feel better, always helped clear her mind, and there was so much to try and understand right now, so many impossible things, and wasn’t it just easier, to run as fast as she could, to save the girl, and save the day?

She was back at the park before she knew it. She slowed to a walk, then stopped in front of the entrance. The unnatural darkness still sent a chill through her, but now she had a fire of her own to dispel it. She took a deep breath and strode into the tendrils of shadow.

The black fog closed around her, making her skin crawl. She could barely make out where she was going. For now, at least, there didn’t seem to be any Spectres nearby. She made her way slowly through the park, feeling her way towards the canal. The darkness thickened around her as she approached the chain-link fence.

Something moved, something she felt more than heard. Fire leapt from her hands with barely a thought. Its light cut through the darkness, and she saw Spectres flinching back from it, even as the one that had been sneaking up on her went up in flames.

“Yes!”

Exhilaration and fear blended into a heady rush of adrenaline. Before the fire died, while she could still see what she was doing, Akemi sent more flames racing towards the fleeing Spectres. They went up like paper, curling and twisting, and a savage part of her was disappointed that they didn’t make a sound. She would have liked to hear them scream.

She plunged through the gap in the fence and into the deep darkness beyond. Claws immediately snagged her legs. With a shout, Akemi sent a torrent of fire in that direction, and saw something indescribably inhuman writhe and burn.

She couldn’t find the girl. The darkness seemed to go on forever, and she walked easily far enough that she should have come out the other side of the tunnel. Twice, she found herself somehow back at the chain-link fence. She kept burning the Spectres, but they kept coming, and now there was a… a weight to them that hadn’t been there before, a thick blackness that burned at the edges but could survive her fire long enough to duck away.

Just as fear began to close cold fingers around her chest, she spotted an outstretched hand lying limply on the concrete. The girl hadn’t moved at all, still lying exactly where Neikos had left her. The cold feeling plunged deeper into the pit of Akemi’s stomach. Sakaki had said she wasn’t dead, but…

Akemi knelt beside her. She looked to be Akemi’s age or a little younger. Her eyes were closed, her skin drained of colour. Akemi checked for a pulse, and let out a shaky breath when she found it, slow and steady in the girl’s throat.

“Hey.” She shook the girl gently, then harder. “Hey! Wake up!”

She might as well have been shaking a doll. The girl made no sound, no response. Her head lolled to one side, and Akemi stopped, afraid she would hurt her.

Something slithered and reared behind her. Akemi snarled over her shoulder. Fire leapt to engulf the Spectre. It reeled back, but then she saw it begin to shrug its burning outer layers free, like a snake shedding its skin.

She hauled the girl into her arms. It was harder than she’d thought it would be. Somehow she’d imagined she’d just scoop the other girl up and carry her bridal-style, but they were about the same height, and the girl’s body was just dead weight. Some distant memory of a school trip to the local fire station gave her the idea to sling the girl over her shoulders, but even then, she could barely stagger upright.

Something was gathering in the darkness. She could feel it. Gritting her teeth, Akemi turned back to where she thought the entrance was, and began to walk. She had to keep pausing, balancing the girl with one hand while she threw fire at the Spectres with the other. Each time, it seemed the flames did less damage to the Spectres, and the glimpses she caught of them were enormous, towering over her like something out of a nightmare.

And she couldn’t find the way out. She was sure she’d turned and retraced her steps, but the fence, which she’d been unable to get away from before, was now nowhere to be found. Her heart was hammering in her chest from the exertion of carrying the girl and the fear that at any moment, one of the Spectres would lunge towards her. It was getting harder to summon the fire, as if she was using up a supply of energy. Sakaki hadn’t said anything about that. But she hadn’t given Sakaki a chance to finish explaining how all of this worked…

The attack came suddenly and from two sides. A fist like a hammer slammed into her head and sent her reeling, while razor-sharp talons sliced at her body. The only reason she wasn’t gutted was that the first blow had spun her around; the talons raked across her hip, opening deep gashes even through the protective suit. Akemi cried out, stumbling to her knees. The girl slipped from her shoulders. Desperately, she summoned up every scrap of strength she had left.

Fire sprang up in a circle around them, a wall to keep the Spectres back, but Akemi could feel how precarious it was. Her head was throbbing and her hip was a hot mess of agony. The edges of her vision were blood-red and pulsing, and beyond the ring of fire the Spectres were thronging with a monstrous eagerness. She could see the outlines of them against the red glow, all spines and fins and humped shoulders…

Akemi shook her head, trying to clear her vision. That glow… it wasn’t coming from the fire. It was the deep red light that had spilled from the sigil inscribed on the wall. She squinted, trying to find its source.

There – she could just make it out. Faint in the depths of the darkness, like the afterimage of the trail left by a sparkler.

She didn’t have much left in her. She was starting to feel light-headed, either from concussion or from loss of blood. If she passed out here, the Spectres would devour her. She knew instinctively that if she tried to summon any more fire, the protective circle would fail.

But that symbol tugged at something buried deep in her mind, like a dream she’d forgotten, like deja vu. Like it was the glue holding this whole thing together…

The flames that sprang from her hands were so bright they blinded her, but her aim was true. The fire rushed past the Spectres and engulfed the strange symbol. For a moment the red light grew brighter, and Akemi had the horrible thought that the sigil was feeding off the fire…

And then it winked out like someone had pulled the plug, and the world seemed to bend around her, a wind rushing through the darkness, and as the fiery circle died away, the last of its light showed her the Spectres warping and rippling, turning to flee, running like water down the concrete walls of the tunnel.

She could see the walls. She could see the blackened outline of the sigil on the nearby pillar, and the manhole cover that had been flung aside in the Spectres’ haste to get away. Light filtered in from beyond the tunnel, dim and artificial but as welcome as sunrise after the endless dark of the haunt. She was barely an arm’s length from the chain-link fence.

It was all Akemi could do not to just lie down on the gritty concrete and close her eyes. Her head was swimming. She looked down at her injured hip, pulling aside the skirt to reveal that the white leggings underneath were soaked in blood. She… probably ought to do something about that. Like, call an ambulance. And get help for the girl too…

Her hand went for her phone automatically, before she remembered that she’d left her school bag in the shrine clearing with Sakaki. She leaned over to check on the other girl, who was as still and unresponsive as ever.

There was a faint ringing in her ears, like a distant chime. It had been there for a while, but she’d thought it was part of the headache. Except it brought with it a tugging sensation, a conviction that that she should respond.

Akemi lifted the medallion from her chest, stared at it for a moment, and then flicked open the catch and opened it for the first time. There was no clockwork mechanism inside, nor a portrait: instead, she found herself looking into a small round mirror like a makeup compact. Her own white face peered back at her for a second, before the silvery metal surface began to glow.

“Sol? Can you hear me?” Sakaki’s voice was desperate and afraid. “Akemi?”

“Yeah,” Akemi said, rocked by weary guilt. “I’m here.”

“Are you all right? I can no longer sense the haunt—”

“It’s gone. I destroyed the… symbol thing.”

“Are you hurt?” Sakaki sounded like she already guessed the answer. “Can you return to the shrine?”

Akemi opened her mouth to say that she didn’t think she could walk, then paused. The pain in her hip had diminished, the tearing agony reduced to a fierce soreness, and the heat of her own blood had cooled.

“I think so,” she said, “but there’s something I have to do first.”

When she limped back into the shrine clearing, Akemi was back in her school uniform. Dealing with the police had taken longer than she’d hoped, and she’d been on edge the whole time, afraid they’d notice how she was favouring her right leg, or ask more questions about what had happened. But everyone involved – the police, the paramedics, the woman who’d called the ambulance for her when Akemi had accosted her outside the park – had accepted Akemi’s explanation that she’d heard a scream and found the girl in here unconscious.

She didn’t try to tell them about Neikos. Even if she could have described his face, which was a blur of malice and shadow in her memory, there would have been too many other questions she couldn’t answer. What was he wearing? Oh, a long black cloak. Did he have a weapon? Yeah, some sort of magic sacrificial dagger. Was he alone? No, there were all these living shadows…

The glow had faded from Sakaki’s branches, but her leaves shivered in relief when Akemi finally arrived. Akemi said nothing, finding her school bag in the darkness and sitting down next to it with a wince for her throbbing hip. She braced herself for yet another scolding.

“How badly are you hurt?” Sakaki asked, her voice surprisingly gentle.

“I don’t know.” The blood-soaked leggings had vanished when she’d transformed back into her normal clothes. “I thought it was really bad, I was bleeding a lot, but now it seems like it’s not such a big deal—”

“You are made more resilient by the power of the Celestial Guard,” Sakaki explained. “Your wounds will heal faster than normal, and your body will recover swiftly from blood loss and sickness.”

“Oh. That’s good to know.”

Akemi laid a hand gingerly on her hip. She could feel the thick, lumpy scabs beneath her school tights, three parallel slashes each as broad as one of her fingers. They were still very painful, but yes, now she thought about it, it was the kind of pain you got a few days after an injury, a mixture of bruised ache and sharp jabs when the muscles and flesh were pulled.

“And the shard-bearer?” Sakaki asked.

“The what?”

“The girl you attempted to rescue.”

“I did rescue her,” Akemi said. “I got her out. I called an ambulance, they’re taking care of her…”

“You have done all you can, then,” Sakaki said, still with that gentleness. “At least she will not be lost to the darkness.”

“I don’t understand what happened to her.” Akemi shivered, remembering the limp body and slack face. “Did Neikos stab her? There wasn’t any blood. She was alive, but she wouldn’t wake up…”

Sakaki sighed.

“I am afraid, Sol, that she will remain in that state.”

“What?” Akemi stared at the tree, fists clenching unconsciously. “No, they’ll help her, at the hospital, they can figure out what’s wrong—”

“Her shard was taken, and her soul along with it,” Sakaki said quietly. “There is nothing any healer can do for her, except to keep her body alive for a time. That is… what I was trying to tell you before you returned to the haunt.”

“What… what’s a shard?” Akemi asked, forcing the words past the lump in her throat.

“A source of great power. They are carried within the souls of certain people. The Multitude seeks to gather them, for it is only by using their power that the darkness can hope to conquer light.”

“So if I stop the Archdukes taking any more—”

“I fear it is not so simple.”

“It’s not?”

“You too must seek the shards,” Sakai said, the words dreadful in their simplicity. “For it is only by their power that we can hope to defeat the Multitude.”

“You… you can’t be serious.” Anger and disgust battled for control of Akemi’s voice. “You can’t expect me to… to suck out people’s souls… like some sort of vampire—!”

“The Archdukes will be the ones targeting the shard-bearers.” Sakaki’s voice was still quiet, but there was a remorselessness about the way she spoke, a determination to make Akemi understand. “You cannot stop them; you cannot protect all the shard-bearers at all times. All you can do is be ready to seize the shard once it manifests, so that their sacrifice is not in vain, and so that the Multitude does not gain additional power.”

“No.” Akemi hardly recognised her own voice, it was so faint and ragged. “No. That’s not… that’s not fair.”

“No, it is not,” Sakaki agreed, with a sudden deep emotion that made Akemi go still. “It has never been fair, Sol. I am sorry for laying this burden upon you. But,” she went on before Akemi could speak, “take heart. There is some hope for these victims. If you can obtain the shard yourself, there is a way to return the soul to its bearer.”

“How?”

“Guardian Luna. The power of the moon has always been connected to the secrets of the soul. Find Guardian Luna, and you will at least be able to save some of the shard-bearers.”

“Another Guardian…?” But Akemi’s thoughts were racing ahead. “So… wait… if we get strong enough… if we defeat the Archdukes and take back the shards they’ve stolen… we could save everyone? All the people whose souls have already been taken?”

Sakaki hesitated.

“Perhaps,” she said cautiously. “If the healers of this time are as proficient as you think, if the bodies of the bearers have been sustained while the soul is absent…”

It was enough for Akemi to seize on with both hands.

“Okay,” she said. The helplessness was fading beneath a rising tide of determination. “Then that’s what I’ll do. Destroy the haunts. Fight the Spectres. Get the shards. And find… how do I find Guardian Luna?”

“Luna feels the same stirrings of awakening that brought you to this place and led you to the haunt,” Sakaki said. “It is only a matter of time before your paths cross.”

“Right, guess it would be too much to hope for that you could give me her phone number or something,” Akemi muttered.

Then a thought struck her like a thunderclap.

“Wait… is it Hana? Is she Guardian Luna?”

“No, she is not the one.”

“Are you sure? You haven’t met her—”

“I have,” Sakaki replied. “She was with you when you retrieved the crest, yes? The one who does not climb trees.”

“But she’s my best friend,” Akemi protested. “We do everything together. How can you make me a Guardian and not her?”

“The choice is not mine,” Sakaki said quietly. “I am just the guide.”

“But how am I going to tell her—”

“You must not!” Sakaki’s voice turned sharp. “Secrecy is your first defence. The Archdukes will search for you once they know you have awakened. You cannot take the risk of confiding in those who do not understand the danger.”

“She would never tell anyone!”

“Then you would place that burden on her? To know of the Multitude and be powerless to oppose it? To live in fear of the shadows?”

To that, Akemi had no rejoinder. She bit her lip, remembering the terror and helplessness she’d felt in the haunt. The thought of making Hana feel that way was unbearable.

“No,” she said finally, “I guess not.”

“You will keep her safe,” Sakaki said gently. “Even if she does not know it.”

“I guess now I know why superheroes have secret identities,” Akemi muttered. “I mean, apart from how I’d be grounded forever if my mom found out…”

Then she had a terrible thought. She dug in her bag for her phone, checked the time, and felt a rush of panic seize her.

“Oh, shit, I am going to be in so much trouble, even if Mom took the late shift she’ll be back any minute…” She started shovelling her belongings back into her bag. “Sakaki, I have to go!”

She jumped to her feet and immediately stumbled as the wounds on her hip protested. There was no chance of running to get home quicker. She gritted her teeth and hobbled towards the edge of the clearing.

“I’ll come back tomorrow!”

“Very well. And if you need to, you can reach me through the crest,” Sakaki replied. “Simply open it and focus your mind upon me. If I do the same, you will sense me calling.”

“Right, I remember what it felt like, just, um, try not to do it when I’m in school, okay? I’ll be back!”

For the second time, she hurried out of the clearing before Sakaki could respond, but this time, the tree did not call after her.

The shrine fell silent after she left. Sakaki rearranged her branches, but whatever she was thinking, this time she did not voice it even to the empty sky.

Shoichi dreamed of the sound of the sea.

Later, he’d realise how strange that was. He’d never lived by the sea, or at least, not this kind of sea. Osaka’s coast was all harbours and concrete and reclaimed land, still water and sluggish tides. This was a sea that rose and fell with a soothing, ever-changing roar against beaches and rocky shores. The rhythm of the waves should have been alien to him, but in the dream, he knew it by heart, and it was home, the most comforting, familiar sound he could imagine.

His feet were bare on cool stone as he hurried through hallways with carved columns and rooms with high ceilings. The walls were painted with murals depicting a long history, but it was too dark to read them. He needed to find a light.

Behind him, as he left each room, darkness seeped up out of the gaps between the flagstones and covered the floor like ink. All he could do was hurry blindly through the next door and hope it contained some source of light. But it seemed as though every candle, every lantern, every spark had been extinguished, and there was no end to the rooms, no end to the rising tide of darkness…

Shadows fear the blazing sun.

Terror drove him ever faster through rooms and halls and rooms again until suddenly he was outside, running through a cool night towards the sound of the sea. There was no sun in the sky overhead; not even the stars could be seen. He reached a stone balustrade and stopped, seeing that beyond it was only a steep drop to the waves below. He turned. It was too dark to see the building he’d just fled, but knew in his heart that the shadows were welling out of every window and door. There was no escape.

Shadows flee the rising moon.

Silver light streamed past him. The creeping darkness flinched back, and fled. Shoichi spun to see the full moon hanging in the sky, the last wisps of cloud billowing away from its remorseless light. Beneath it, the sea was as still as a mirror, and words seemed to hang in the air…

“I call upon the moon, my liege,” he whispered… and then the sea shattered, the world shattered, a thousand echoes of breaking glass pierced him like a song for the dead, and he didn’t even have time to scream…

… before he woke, the tears still sliding down his cheeks.

Web of Shadows
Chapter 1

Following a mysterious albino cat into an abandoned Shinto Shrine was supposed to lead to adventure in a magical kingdom, not getting stuck halfway up a tree and losing a shoe. It would be less embarrassing if Hana wasn’t laughing quite so hard.

“This was your idea,” said Akemi, leaning over to see where her shoe had ended up. “So how come I’m the one in the tree?”

“You’re always the one in the tree,” Hana managed between giggles. “Cos you’re better at it and I’m scared of heights.”

“This doesn’t count as a height.” Akemi was barely two metres off the ground, though it had taken a lot of effort to get there through the tree’s dense branches. “Can you find my shoe?”

Hana began scuffling around in the bushes, still laughing. Akemi swung her shoeless foot idly back and forth. At least it was April, the weather clear and warm, a month or more before the summer rains set in. It was pleasant, sitting here on the branch of the sakaki tree, its deep green leaves giving off a gentle scent. Quiet, too: the sounds of the city were muffled behind the overgrown trees and bushes of the shrine grounds. She could almost pretend that she wasn’t in the middle of the immense urban sprawl that made up Osaka.

At the edge of the small clearing, the white cat was watching them with suspicion, punctuated by the occasional warning growl. Close up, it was less ‘mysterious’ and more ‘hostile and mangy’. Its utterly non-mysterious tabby kitten was stuck on a branch some way above Akemi’s head. It peered down at her and mewed pitifully. Akemi waved.

“Oh, here’s your shoe!” said Hana. “No, wait, this is someone else’s. It’s all slimy, ew! Why would there be more than one shoe here?”

“It’s a shoe-eating tree, obviously. Tricks people into climbing it and then steals their shoes.”

Hana gave a huff of laughter, then stooped to grab something from under a bush. She squinted at it, then looked up at Akemi, grinning.

“Okay, this one’s definitely yours.”

She passed the shoe up to Akemi, who checked it for slime (just in case) before putting it on. Then she resumed the slow climb upwards, weaving her way through the thinner branches and testing her weight on the bigger ones before moving.

The kitten hissed at her.

“It’s going to scratch you,” Hana said. She sounded less concerned than Akemi felt was strictly fair. “Just so you know.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

She was almost within reach of the kitten, but paused to assess the best way to grab it. Unfortunately it was facing her, which meant that teeth and claws were both poised to maul her hand. After a moment’s thought, Akemi untied the green ribbon from one of her pigtails, letting the hair on that side fall lopsidedly over her shoulder. She dangled the ribbon temptingly at the kitten. As its head whipped around to follow the movement, she tried to grab it around the middle.

The kitten sank its teeth into her hand before falling sideways off the branch.

“Oh no, kitty, don’t–!” Hana shouted, but the kitten had already hit the ground – feet first, to no apparent harm.

It spun in a frenzied circle, hissed at Hana, spotted its mother, and ran towards her. Both cats vanished into the bushes before Akemi even had time to say, “Ow!”

“Are you okay?” asked Hana. She was still fighting giggles, but at least she sounded like she meant it. “Are you going to need stitches?”

“Hardly.” The kitten’s small teeth hadn’t even broken the skin. “Great, now I have to get down…”

“You could just jump. It’s not that far.”

“Too many branches in the way.” Akemi started edging back down the way she’d come. “At least it should be quicker getting down than it was getting up…”

A glint of something caught her eye and she paused. Now she was facing the trunk of the tree, she could see a little hollow where two branches came out and curved straight upward, and something inside glittered in the light of the setting sun.

“Hang on,” she said. “There’s something shiny up here.”

“Ooh!” Hana circled around, trying to see it from the ground. “Maybe the cat was onto something after all! What is it? Magic ring? Magic wand?” She paused thoughtfully. “Magic piece of gum wrapper?”

“I can’t see from here, wait a sec…”

Akemi stood up on the branch, balancing so she could reach as far as her arm would go. She could just get her fingers over the edge of the hollow. She hoped there wasn’t anything nasty in there. Just as she got a grip on something metallic, her foot slipped… and she discovered that it was, indeed, quicker going down than getting up.

“Oh my gosh are you okay?” This time Hana wasn’t laughing as she rushed over to where Akemi had landed. “Akemi?”

“Owww…”

“Is anything broken?” Hana knelt beside her and started prodding her arms and legs. “Can you sit up?”

“Yes—”

“Yes you’ve broken something or yes you can sit up?”

“No— I mean, yes— I mean—”

Akemi rolled her eyes and sat up, hopefully ending the confusion.

“Nothing’s broken,” she added, just to be safe. She hadn’t hit her head, but her arms were scratched up and she was going to have an enormous bruise on her hip. “Ow.”

Then she looked at her hand and brightened, lifting it to show Hana. “But I got it!”

“What is it? A watch?” Hana leaned in to look at the disc of metal, almost completely darkened with age and dirt, lying in Akemi’s palm. The only shiny part was a bit of red glass in the centre. “It looks like an old pocket watch on a chain.” She lifted a short length of broken links on one fingertip. “The chain’s broken.”

Akemi turned the disc over, looking for a catch that would open it, but if there was one, it was jammed shut. She tried rubbing the grime off the surface, but she mostly just left smears on the metal and turned her fingertips black.

“It needs a good clean, whatever it is. Think I’ll get three wishes if I polish it hard enough?”

“Oh, definitely.” Hana took the disc and held it up in a patch of fading sunlight. The glass glittered in the way that had caught Akemi’s attention originally. “It’s too thin to be a watch, I think. There’s no room for the gears.”

“It’s probably just a really fancy button. Or a charm off someone’s school bag.”

“I think it’s a locket. Maybe there’s a picture inside.” Hana offered her the locket with a smile. “Anyway if it turns out to be magic, we’re coming back to find me one too.”

Akemi laughed, and put the locket in her bag.

“You’re a mess,” Hana went on, smile fading into a frown. “You’ve got green stains all over. What happened to your hair?”

Akemi held up the ribbon. Hana took it from her and retied her pigtail while Akemi examined her school uniform. The stains didn’t show much on the green skirt, but she’d taken her blazer off to climb the tree, and her white shirt was looking distinctly sorry for itself. Plus she had a hole in her black tights, her shoes were scuffed, and her hands were too grubby to get clean with the tissues Hana pulled out of her bag. Akemi shot an envious and slightly baffled look at her friend’s pristine uniform.

Hana was as much a tomboy at heart as Akemi, but somehow she never seemed to end up, just for example, falling out of a tree. Her waist-length braids were always sleek and neat, while Akemi’s shoulder-length hair did everything in its power to escape from the basic pigtails she forced it into every day. Hana even seemed to understand the mysterious art of accessorizing, something Akemi struggled with beyond ‘the colours shouldn’t clash’. Today she was wearing a sweet pair of pink rose-bud earrings and just a hint of matching lip gloss. Akemi was wearing several dead leaves, a scattering of tree bark, and a big scratch down one arm.

“Mom’s going to give me hell when I get home,” she muttered.

Hana winced. “Sorry. It was my idea…”

“Like I wouldn’t have done it anyway.” Akemi clambered to her feet. “Come on, it’s getting dark.”

Hana jumped up, grabbed her bag, and looped her arm through Akemi’s as they headed back towards the shrine gate.

“Maybe you can sneak in and change before she notices?”

“Yeah, maybe…”

Behind them, in the now-empty clearing, the albino cat reappeared from the bushes and went sniffing around the base of the tree to see if they’d dropped anything edible. The leaves rustled as if in a breeze, although there was no air stirring anywhere else, and a few of the branches settled into more comfortable positions.

The tree said, “She climbed me.”

The cat hissed at the voice from nowhere, and bolted back to the bushes with her tail puffed out to twice its normal size.

“She actually climbed me. How undignified.” A pause, then laughter like bamboo chimes on the breeze. “Oh well, it’s a start.”

They were too old to really believe in magic, but with her mother’s scolding still ringing in her ears after dinner, Akemi couldn’t help but hope for three wishes. She tried to clean up the locket, to get it to do something, even just open up to reveal an old photograph. Ordinary soap and water turned a pile of tissues black, but made no difference to the metal. When she cleaned away the grunge from the faceted red crystal at the centre, she found that it was in the shape of a sun, but its surface was so scratched and dull that she couldn’t see through to the inside. She wondered it was possible to polish it until it was clean again.

There was that little antiques store by the station. Maybe someone there could help.

Or they’d tell her it was just junk.

With a sigh, she folded the locket up in a wad of tissue and put it back in her bag, then pulled out her homework. It would have been nice to be, say, whisked away to a land where homework didn’t exist.

They’d always hoped for something like that, she and Hana, ever since they’d met on their first day of junior high. When they were twelve they actually kind of meant it. When they were fifteen it was their private joke. Now they were seventeen and starting their last year of high school and… they did silly things like chasing a cat into the depths of an empty shrine in case it led them on an adventure. It was still their joke, but sometimes… Akemi felt a kind of desperation in it. Everything was about school now, studying to pass the entrance exams for university, facing her mother’s constant disappointment, cramming herself into the poorly fitting shape of a dedicated high school student.

She felt like she was being stripped away until there was nothing left of her except memorised facts and orderly equations. Everyone kept saying it was only until she got into university, only another year, but sometimes, she wondered if there was going to be any Akemi left by then, or if she would forget how to do anything else except try her hardest and never quite be good enough.

You are awakening.

In the dream, she was late for school and running towards the station, but she kept getting turned around. There was water around her ankles. She could feel the tug of the current. Had she fallen into the rain gutter? But this water stank of mud and brine, and it was choppy and full of debris. She turned another corner and found she was going the wrong way again.

The water was up to her knees. She lost her balance, and heard herself cry out in fear. She knew, with the remorseless logic of dreams, that if she fell in, she’d never get out. Her flailing hand caught hold of something. It was a tree branch, the sakaki tree from the shrine. She quickly pulled herself up, climbing to a safe height.

The water was still rising, and now it was below her, it seemed as if it had suddenly become much deeper… as if she was leaning out over a great ocean. Somewhere beneath the rushing, tumbling green she saw a bright light blazing, until it faltered, and went out.

She heard a bird shriek overheard, the piercing cry of a hawk.

You are awakening. The voice was like the wind through leaves. Come to me. Come back to the shrine, Sol…

Akemi tried to speak, but her voice wouldn’t work. The water lapped her dangling feet. She grabbed hold of a branch to climb higher, and it snapped in her hand.

She fell, and the water boiled up to meet her, and she screamed—

— and woke up with a gasp, too scared to move, the feeling of the scream in her throat. But there was no sound from the rest of the apartment, no indication she had made any real noise. Akemi reached shakily for the light and turned it on. It was five in the morning. It was only a dream.

It was raining a little outside. That was probably where the water theme had come from. The rest of it… just things in her brain, getting mixed up together. She should just turn the light off and go back to sleep. It was only a dream, and she wasn’t scared of anything, not heights, not spiders, not the ocean rising remorselessly to swallow her…

She left the light on.

When Akemi stumbled groggily into the main room of the apartment for breakfast, she found her mother, Izumi, standing at the kitchen sink. She was trying to bleach the green stains out of Akemi’s school shirt while she watched the morning news. Akemi glanced at the scrolling headline. The police were still looking for the person who’d attacked that schoolgirl a few weeks back. She’d been in a coma ever since, though the authorities hadn’t been forthcoming with details.

“I want you to start coming straight home from school after class, before it gets dark,” Izumi said. One glance at her face told Akemi that this was more about the shirt than the news story. “No messing around with Hana, you’re too old for that kind of thing, and you’re a bad influence on her. It’ll do you good to get some more studying in anyway.”

“I’m not missing track,” Akemi replied, scowling. “And I’m not a bad influence—”

“Running around like a lunatic won’t get you into a good university.” Izumi gave the wet shirt a savage squeeze. “I’m not going to stand back and watch you let yourself down again.”

Akemi clenched her fists. Two years on, and her mother still wouldn’t let her forget how close she’d come to failing the entrance exam for Cross High. Never mind that it had been Hana who’d pulled her through it. In the wake of the divorce, the only reason Akemi had cared about the exam was because she couldn’t bear the thought of them going to different schools.

“I’m not missing track,” she said again. She groped for something to bolster her argument. “Exercise is good for the brain. All our teachers say so.”

“You get plenty of exercise,” Izumi said. “That’s one thing I’ve never worried about, the way you dash around.”

She pulled the plug and drained the water out, holding the shirt up critically. Akemi could see the faint marks even from here.

“It’s no good, I’m going to have to buy you a new one. I’ll need to work some extra shifts this week.”

Guilt and shame engulfed Akemi. She pushed them angrily away.

“We could just ask—”

“We are not asking your father for money.” Izumi’s voice was quiet and cold. “Not ever. And certainly not for something like this.”

That was the way Izumi always referred to him now: your father. Never by name. As if somehow, he was Akemi’s problem, Akemi’s fault. As if he had been cleanly erased from Izumi’s life, and she was irritated that Akemi kept reminding her of his existence.

Akemi grabbed her bag and started for the door, because her other options were to start shouting, or burst into tears.

“Fine. I’ll see you later.”

“You haven’t had breakfast.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I mean it, Akemi. Come straight home tonight.”

If you’re picking up extra shifts, you won’t even be here, Akemi thought viciously. Just like you’re never here when I need you.

She waited until she had her shoes on and the door open to reply.

“I’m not missing track.”

Third time was the charm, right? Especially if you immediately shut the door behind you and ran for it.

The rest of the day followed the pattern set by the morning. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Akemi had somehow completely forgotten about the History homework, which meant a nasty lecture from the teacher, who had never liked her. At lunch time it rained unseasonably hard, so they had to stay at their desks to eat lunch. Akemi almost started a fight with a boy from another class when he wouldn’t stop trying to get Hana to go on a date with him.

And she couldn’t get the dream out of her head. She felt agitated and on edge, like she was still trying to get away from the rising water. Even beating her own record at track couldn’t dispel the feeling. A part of Akemi wanted to defy her mother by heading into the city centre for ice cream, but another part was relieved when Hana said she needed to go straight home today.

They parted ways at the Sanjo Junction, like they always did. The road from the station met the district highway in a T-shape. Hana headed east along the highway while Akemi crossed the footbridge and took her usual shortcut diagonally through the park on the other side.

She’d walked through it so many times she barely saw it any more. It wasn’t much more than some grass, a few solitary trees, a lot of dry, sandy dirt, and a small play area by the drinking fountain in the centre.

It seemed… darker than normal. Akemi’s steps slowed and she looked around her, frowning. The streetlights nearest the edge of the park were unlit, she saw now, and the light from the rest of the city was strangely muted. All at once this innocuous space she knew by heart seemed like part of another world, and not a welcoming one. Akemi shivered and began to hurry homeward with renewed vigour.

That was when she heard the scream.

The east side of the park was bordered by a canal, with the highway crossing over the water on a concrete bridge. In the angle between the bridge and the canal bank was a large triangular space that children and rough sleepers had once frequented, until it was blocked off by a chain-link fence. But the fence didn’t stop the determined and inquisitive – Akemi should know – and the scream had come from there.

Akemi was running towards it before she even had time to think. She grabbed the fence, intending to climb it. It peeled away in her hands: someone had cut through the links on one side. She hauled it out of the way, ducked through the gap, and clambered up over the concrete lip of the bridge’s foundations.

There were two people in the angled, tunnel-like space, frozen in a tableau that was lit by an eerie pale light. A girl was crumpled on the slope, her hand clutched to her chest. A man stood opposite her, arm outstretched, muttering something under his breath. He was holding a knife… or rather, a dagger. The blade was long and black, its edges wickedly sharp. It looked like something Akemi had once seen in a museum, displayed alongside a human skull. It was glowing with a faint and eerie radiance.

“Stop!” she yelled, even as it hit her that she was way out of her depth, that he could just as easily stab her with that knife like he must have stabbed the other girl. “Get away from her!”

The man turned towards her with a scowl. He was wearing some sort of black hooded coat, obscuring everything but his face. It was dark behind him, so dark she couldn’t see the other end of the tunnel, even though she knew it opened out onto the canal bank beyond the highway.

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’ll call the police!” Akemi fumbled for her phone, realising that she should have done it before she came in here. “Don’t you dare move!”

The man looked her over, scowl twisting into a dismissive grin. It wasn’t a coat he was wearing, she realised. It was a cloak, long and black, its folds undulating like an oil slick.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Try it. Just stay out of my way, I’m busy.”

He turned his attention back to the girl and began speaking again. Akemi couldn’t understand the words: they weren’t Japanese, and she didn’t think they were English either. The light around the dagger grew brighter, creeping out towards the girl and surrounding her in a foxfire shroud. Somehow the radiance did nothing to dispel the darkness, but now a red glow sprang up behind the man. With a shock of disbelief, Akemi saw that it was coming from a symbol inscribed on the concrete pillar, a set of fiery lines that curled and swept together to form a strange and meaningless sigil.

She hit the emergency dial button on her phone. It beeped at her. No signal. She started to back away, intending to get out from under the concrete, but the girl was still lying there, and the light that poured from the tip of the dagger made Akemi sick to her stomach, like she was watching someone drown.

“Help!” she shouted as loud as she could. “Someone help!”

“No-one can hear you now this haunt is active,” the man replied, shooting her a nasty, self-satisfied smirk. “You should have run while you had the chance. Now you’ll never leave. Too bad, so sad. When the Spectres eat your soul, tell them Archduke Neikos sent you.”

Akemi’s fists clenched, defiance racing to overcome her fear.

“Archduke Knickers? What sort of stupid name is that?”

The smirk fractured into a snarl.

“What sort of stupid little girl are you? Walking in here on your own?” Neikos retorted. Then he seemed to recover his composure. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. I’ve got better things to do.”

He rattled off one more phrase in the unknown language, and the dagger’s light flared brilliantly for one more second before suddenly contracting. It drained away from the girl and from the blade like water, coalescing at the mid-point between the two, compressing into a glittering object that hovered in the air.

Neikos stepped forward, hand outstretched to take it. And suddenly, from the deep shadows at the other end of the tunnel, there was movement. Another figure rushed forward, also hooded and swathed in a cloak, and dived towards the bright object. Neikos shrieked a curse and tried to snatch the thing away, but the new arrival moved as fast as a bird of prey, and Neikos’s hand closed on air.

The figure didn’t stop, diving past Akemi without so much as a glance in her direction. Neikos whirled, spitting out more words in that other language.

There was a manhole cover set into the concrete at his feet. It began to rattle and shift as if something were trying to get out from underneath it. Inky black shadows oozed out around its edges, spreading across the floor, resolving into claws and teeth and malice, scrabbling up the walls, and launching into pursuit of the thief. Akemi flinched back as they passed her. The sigil on the wall was crawling with a fire as red as blood, but everything else was getting darker and darker, the space under the bridge filling with a deep blackness like a moonless night.

She looked back at Neikos, but he was gone, swallowed up in the shadows. She couldn’t see the girl. She could barely see her hands in front of her face. Even the red symbol was starting to disappear into the darkness.

Now you’ll never leave.

All around her were small sounds, slithering and shuffling that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Akemi closed her eyes tightly as if that would help her cope with the darkness. She had been facing the girl. If she took a few careful steps forward…

Hands seized her from the shadows. Hands? They had too many fingers with too many joints, and sharp claws dug into her skin. Akemi screamed, more from shock than pain. Her eyes flew open, but there was nothing to see but blackness. The inhuman hands tightened, wrapping around her arms as she struggled, hooking cruelly into her hair, and she could hear a chittering sound like warped laughter.

“Help!” she yelled again, but the way the cry fell dead into the still air told her that Neikos had spoken the truth. No-one would hear her. No-one was coming.

Maybe it’s another dream. Maybe I’ll wake up…

The hands were dragging her down, into darkness like deep water, into oblivion. They’d left her here to drown, Neikos and that other person. They’d left her behind like she didn’t even matter.

You are awakening.

All at once, every scrap of fear in her blood turned to anger, like kindling roaring into flame, red and gold and too fierce to deny.

“Let go of me!”

Fire leapt to life all around her as if someone had thrown a match on a pool of gasoline. The things holding her shrieked and released their grip, and the ring of flame leapt higher, a wall of heat and light that pierced even the unnatural darkness. In the split second of illumination, Akemi saw them, the things Neikos had called Spectres: twisted nightmares, some like caricatures of people, and others with too many legs and too many eyes and too much hunger to ever be satisfied.

But where the flames touched them, they burned, crumbling to ash in a heartbeat, and all the shadows thronging that place flinched away from her, and their fear was a balm to the wounds of her own terror.

The fire was already dying down, but its light was enough to show her the way out, the edge of the concrete and the sagging chain-link fence. It seemed close, but the short distance was somehow stretched out, and after a few steps she began to run, desperate to reach that point of escape before the last of the embers flickered out.

The fence was cool under her hands as she ducked through the gap. Outside was too dark, unnaturally dark like the space under the bridge, but here the shadows had less hold, more like a dark fog than absolute night. She stumbled up the bank of the canal and through the park. Only when she reached the highway did the last tendrils reluctantly let her go.

It hit her then that she’d left the other girl behind, forgotten in her own terror. As if she didn’t even matter, either. Guilt hit Akemi in a wave so powerful it brought her to her knees, her shaking legs no longer able to hold her up. Tears started in her eyes as she stared into the deep darkness of the park, and knew that she couldn’t go back in there. Not even to try and help that other girl.

Coward, she thought viciously, closing her eyes and clenching her fists. Coward!

And just like that, the anger was back, a towering rage that drove her to her feet again. She stared into the darkness for a few more seconds, remembering that smirk on Neikos’s face. The feeling of helplessness as the shadows dragged her down. And the dream that had been echoing through her head all day, the voice that had called out to her.

She turned her back on the park, dashed a hand across her eyes to wipe away the tears, and headed for the shrine.

“Okay,” Akemi said, “new plan. We do whatever Hikari tells us, and maybe we don’t get murdered by a tent.”
“Fine with me,” Shoichi muttered, still rubbing his head.

No idea if this scene will make it into the final version. It might be too silly and fillerish. But for now, at least, I am enjoying the Great Battle of the Celestial Guardians Versus Shoichi’s Tent. (It goes a lot better for them once they let Hikari at it. She’s good at instructions and assembling things.)

It wasn’t perfect. There are a few things I want to dig into. Some of those things are inevitable consequences of the realities of making films, and although they sadden me, I think the film does the absolute best it can with those realities. Others I’m a little more critical of. Overall, though, my feeling at the end of the film was satisfaction. A closed loop, a complete story, a victory that came at appropriate cost.

Longer version below the cut. Spoilers abound.

Let’s start with talking about those realities of film making. One of the reasons I generally prefer written fiction to either TV or movies is that characters don’t have to be “written out” for external real-life reasons. In theory, an author is free to keep their characters around for as long as they want (in reality, as we all know, this does not stop most authors from gleefully murdering them anyway).

In film and TV, you’re much more at the mercy of the fact that actors have real lives that do not always allow them to keep on playing your character for as long as you want. Not only that, but the costs of employing high-end stars in major roles over and over again add up to a lot, so having them “retire” into minor roles is not usually feasible.

Which is why I went into Endgame fully expecting the Big Six to be taken “out of play” in one way or another. I hoped they wouldn’t all die, but I didn’t count on it. They had pretty much all reached a point, in terms of their character arcs, where they were played out and ready to step out of the spotlight. And doing that without killing them off was always going to be tough, both taking into consideration the characters (would they really sit out the next end-of-the-world event? Really?) and the real-world considerations (availability and affordability of actors in future films).

My take on their options before I saw the film: Tony and Steve had to die, no question. Neither of them would ever be able to “retire”, but both had run out of rails, and RDJ and Chris Evans have been doing this for a decade and are Very Expensive at this point. I was undecided on Nat, but thought she would die due to, again, it being very hard to imagine her doing anything other than being an Avenger, and Scarlet Johansson also being Very Expensive. I hoped Clint wouldn’t die, but was afraid they’d do it for pathos. Thor and Bruce I was uncertain about, but I thought Thor had a 50-50 chance of biting it (again due to character arc completion and actor availability – Chris Hemsworth is a very sought-after man these days).

So in many ways I was actually pleasantly surprised, at least from the perspective of a) narrative satisfaction and b) expectations driven by real-world factors. Of course, the fan part of my brain would never be happy with anything other than “all the characters live forever without ever changing”… but I never expected that outcome, and hey, we have fanfic for that.

Let’s look at some of these character finales in more detail.

The Big Six

1. Tony

Apart from fan-brain crying into its pillow because Tony Should Live Forever And Also Be Banging Steve, I have zero complaints about Tony’s death. Narratively, it was perfect. His arc was always about going from self-centred to self-sacrificing, and we already had it in miniature in the first Avengers film. He was never, ever going to be able to sit back and let other people save the world. Not only that, but he’d progressed from someone with not all that much to lose, to someone with everything to lose, not just his wife and daughter but his friends and found-family, and he was willing to give it up anyway. Beautiful. On a meta-narrative note, closing off this magnificent era of the MCU with his death is only right and proper, given how Tony’s been the heart of the franchise since that first “I am Iron Man”, and I couldn’t have asked for a better, more moving sendoff.

I am also heartbroken in the best possible way by Pepper making sure the last thing he saw was her smiling and telling him that they were going to be okay. Despite aforementioned Tony/Steve shipping, I have loved Pepper since the first Iron Man movie and I love her relationship with Tony. She knew him so well, and she knew exactly what he needed, and she didn’t hesitate to give it to him.

2. Nat

In an ideal world, I would have loved to see Nat become the official Avengers Head of Admin, sitting at her desk with her peanut butter sandwiches, coordinating everything for the next generation. It was never likely though, not only because of real world considerations, but because then you have to ask yourself what Nat would be doing in her free time, and it’s difficult to answer that question (THOUGH I WOULD BE HAPPY TO TRY VIA FANFIC). Given her origins as an assassin who would kill or die without a second thought, the fact that she died smiling in order to save Clint and the rest of her found-family was profoundly moving.

There is a flip-side to her narrative, though: she’s a woman who can’t have children and has ‘failed’ in her romantic relationship with Bruce. To consider her life therefore essentially over, and to make her more expendable than Clint, a man with a wife and children, is something that raises a red flag with me.

However, I have always loved the relationship between Nat and Clint, how much they clearly love each other and are soulmates, and the fact that this doesn’t necessarily translate into a romantic/sexual relationship (and is wholly compatible with Clint’s love for Laura and his kids – and the bit in Ultron where you see that not only does Nat adore Laura, but Laura adores Nat, was a really big deal for me). It did not surprise me in the slightest that they would fight over who gets to die for the other.

3. Steve

I was 100% expecting Steve to die, so that had a big effect on how I reacted to his ending. As with Iron Man, Captain America was too big a deal to carry on being part of the franchise at this point. The thing that saddened me about his prospective death was that it felt unfair that of all of them, Steve never really had a chance to just take a breath and live his life.

And then he did. And he deserved it so much. He deserved to put the burden down. He had done his service a thousand times over, and more. He stood alone between Thanos’s horde and the world. He closed the circle by returning the stones. He more than earned his right to walk away after that.

There are two things I don’t like about it, though. One is pretty obvious: Bucky. Fan-brain also thinks Steve Should Be Banging Bucky (Or Possibly Already Is) and is therefore pretty devastated by their separation and now-huge age gap. Even non-fan-brain does raise an eyebrow, though. Bucky was so central to Steve’s movies, was his single most important motivator: he essentially fulfilled the role of a major love interest whether or not you care to interpret the relationship that way.  In this very film, Steve knew that the one way to throw off his younger self was to tell him Bucky was still alive.

To have Steve walk way from him like that – even with Bucky’s obvious knowledge and acceptance – jars badly with the rest of the films. One thing it makes me wonder is if there’s supposed to be an implied missing scene in there, one where it’s specifically Bucky who goes to Steve and says, “you know you could just not come back, right? you know you could just stay there with her? and maybe you should?”.

Which brings me to point two: Peggy. I adore Peggy Carter, but the MCU has never sold me on her being The Love Of Steve’s Life. He barely had a chance to get to know her, her life went on without him, and in terms of emotional investment, Steve’s relationships with Bucky, Nat, and Tony all had a ton of convincing weight behind them that his relationship with Peggy simply lacked. Most of that, I’m sure, is because the first Captain America film was so early in the franchise, and was really their only chance to make Steve/Peggy resonate – and that wasn’t their priority at the time. Nonetheless, all the following stories – for both of them, if you include the Agent Carter series – were about letting go, moving on, getting over each other. To suddenly reverse course with a time-travel reunion… I don’t know. It doesn’t sit right with me.

On the other hand, what else were they going to do with Steve, apart from kill him? He could have had his own noble sacrifice like Tony’s, but he’s spent his whole life doing that, making ‘the sacrifice play’, in his own words. He has always given all of himself for others. No, I like that he chose, finally, to walk away, to lay down the shield, to have a life of his own. I just can’t quite swallow the form it took, and at the same time, can’t see how else they could have arranged things, unless he and Bucky got lost in time together or something.

4. Thor

I’m surprised and pleased that he didn’t die! I have mixed feelings about the direction they took him in and the way they used him as comic relief for a lot of the film. Particularly, the whole “he’s really let himself go” aspect of it, with a lot of jokes about how he was fat now… sigh. I would have liked to see his ongoing depression and guilt taken more seriously, and I would definitely have liked to see him actively mourn Loki, given the importance of their character and relationship arc in Ragnarok. I feel a bit cheated by how much of Thor’s plotline here was treated as humourous, especially the “oh no how pitiful he is” moments like when he was rambling on about how Jane dumped him.

On the other hand, I’m glad that they didn’t just wave his physical condition away either. He didn’t suddenly become buff again, and he didn’t suddenly snap out of the fog he’d surrounded himself with, it took a while for him to pull his weight. I love that it was the chance to talk to his mother one last time, not his father, that was handed him during the time travel. I also, personally, find Chubby Thor very attractive, as the god-like sculpted physique that the Guardians of the Galaxy were admiring in Infinity War doesn’t really do it for me. Just saying.

I will also always, always love that his reaction to Steve picking up Mjolnir was to be utterly fucking ecstatic. That he and Bruce clearly still shared a deep friendship after the events of Ragnarok. That he is completely unthreatened by powerful women, and shows open admiration for them at every opportunity (Carol, Valkyrie). And that he is definitely trolling Quill at this point with the macho leadership contest.

I am down for hobo hippy Thor wandering the galaxy to Find Himself. Good ending.

5. Clint

I don’t have much to say about Clint, because I was just SO FUCKING HAPPY that he didn’t die, and got his family back. He has been used as Character Death Bait once already in the MCU, we really didn’t need to go through it again! I have always had a soft spot for him as a character, and wish we’d seen a bit more of him in other films. I shamelessly adored his little Assassin’s Creed cosplay murder spree and frankly find no particular reason to condemn him, given his choice of targets.

I will also never not love his Amazing Quiver of Arrows That Are Just Right For The Task. Very happy with his ending and quiet retirement, and despite the pain of losing Nat, knowing that she got exactly what she wanted out of her sacrifice: him and his family living on.

6. Bruce

I also don’t have much to say about Bruce, except that I was again thrilled that he didn’t die, and I really liked the compromise between him and Hulk, synthesising the two of them. I was a bit surprised and sad that his relationship with Nat apparently didn’t pick up again during those five years (yes, I know he’s big and green now, but I’m pretty sure Nat wouldn’t actually care) or that we didn’t get some sort of closure on it (for example, that her betrayal in Serkovia was something he could never quite get past, or that she could never quite get past).

I’m glad that his newfound balance was never threatened; this was never an “oh no the Hulk might take over again” storyline. It was so nice to see him genuinely quite happy and well-adjusted, and fully accepting of himself as both Hulk and Bruce. I also really enjoyed his argument with the Sorcerer Supreme about the nitty gritty details of time travel, and his declaration that it was almost like he’d been made to take up the Infinity Gauntlet. I hope we might get some cameos from him in the background of future movies, sciencing up a storm somewhere. Can we have him in Black Panther 2 gleeing over stuff with Shuri? Because that would make my LIFE. Very happy with this ending.

Other People Who Died (Or Maybe Didn’t)

First up: I think they made absolutely the right call in limiting the return-to-life-via-Infinity-Stones to only the people Thanos snapped away. Much though it pains me to lose Loki, Gamora, and Vision, if they’d started pulling in random people who died before the big event, it does raise the question of Where Does It Stop (are we going to bring back Quicksilver? What about Coulson – who is actually still alive in the extended universe, but who the Big Six all believe has been dead at Loki’s hand since 2012? What about the people who died in Serkovia? In New York? Howard Stark? Peggy Carter? You get the idea.). That said, I’m also very glad they created some rather clever loopholes for the future return og at least two of those three.

1. Gamora

I was very curious how they were going to deal with Gamora. It seemed unlikely she would stay dead, but equally unlikely they would make some sort of exception for her (particularly when they doubled down on the sacrifice for the Soul Stone being something that could never be taken back, which made sense since otherwise Thanos could just snap her back to life when he had the Gauntlet). My assumption from the end of the film is that she headed off to do her own thing in this timeline, but is likely to turn up again in Guardians 3. It’s a shame that her relationships with the Peter, the rest of the Guardians, and Nebula have all been reset, but on the other hand I was totally confused by wtf was going on with her romantic arc with Peter, so maybe it’s for the best. (I watched Guardians 2 in the assumption that they were now in a relationship, only to realise that somehow that apparently hadn’t actually happened yet?? idek, it was weird). I also loved the reversal of Nebula being the one to bring Gamora over to the other side.

    1a. Nebula – YAS MY BEAUTIFUL BLUE DAUGHTER IS NOW OFFICIALLY A GUARDIAN OF THE GALAXY AND DID NOT DIE (in this timeline)

2. Loki

I never expected Loki to be brought back without caveats, since he died pre-snap, and I’m thrilled that they nonetheless created that nice little loophole with him grabbing the Tesseract and yeeting himself out of there. It’s a good call, since they can choose whether or not to follow it up, and if they do they will also be playing with 2012 Loki, pre-character-growth, which means they can use him as a villain or chaos-maker without having to walk him back.

I would have been Totally Down for 2018 Loki still hanging around the MCU, snarking wildly but slowly learning to Be Occasionally Heroic and possibly bonding with Rocket, but narratively speaking he’d completed his arc, and Mr Hiddleston is also a hot property these days, so I take this as a win.

3. Vision

Never really had much hope for him, since his existence required the Mind Stone and obviously the stones were going to have to be disposed of. One thing I wondered in Infinity War was why no-one suggested trying to upload his brain (I mean, I can think of plenty of reasons why it wouldn’t work, but they could have had a go). I thought perhaps we might get a holo-Vision, or even that his consciousness might now somehow be involved with the Gauntlet itself, but then Thanos destroyed the stones so… we’ll never know.

    3a. Wanda: broke my heart and I hope we see her healing after this (and I really hope they don’t take her on a villain arc or something, which is often fiction’s fate for superpowered women who have suffered a bereavement). I hope Clint adopts her and brings her home to his family. I’m glad she got to unleash her full power at last, and I found her rage and pain cathartic.

Other Assorted Things

I was disappointed by how little Captain Marvel was involved with the film, because she is my One True Love, but completely understand the reasons for it. Narratively she’s too big a gun and is also part of the next gen Avengers; it would be unfair to give her the spotlight during this farewell to the original crew. I was surprised that the end-credits scene from her film wasn’t part of this one, though; it made her arrival to rescue Tony feel a bit out of nowhere, since I was expecting there to be a slightly extended introduction scene with the others first. The MCU is also generally pretty good about not doing stuff that will really confuse you if you didn’t catch one of the stingers, and I think it falls down a bit here. I wonder if the scene was included in an earlier cut and they decided they couldn’t spare the time?

Apart from that, I loved every second that she was on screen and struggled not to screech like a pterodactyl when she showed up with That Haircut. The Women Of Marvel tribute moment made me happy even if it was a bit obvious. I’m sad that we didn’t get any follow up on Maria and Monica and whether either of them was snapped, but like, where would they even have fitted that in??

I was not expecting the main plot of the film to be Wacky Time Travel Hijinks and I am blown away by the cleverness of the conceit. Not only does it make the film much lighter and more fun than you might have expected given the setup, but it creates a beautiful meta-narrative approach to summing up the saga so far and saying goodbye to the Big Six. I enjoyed the fun fanservicey moments, the behind-the-scenes stuff with “oh yeah after the big fight in 2012 there was a ton of admin”, the parallels (Steve in the lift with Hydra), and the gleeful disregard for the usual rules about not changing the past (because something something quantum).

Also they have blatantly opened the door to any multiverse shenanigans they might choose to explore later, possibly including cameos from alternate universe versions of people like Steve, Tony, and Nat, and that’s always fun, even if it does eventually tend to lead to Infinite Crisis Of Infinite Comic Books aka KonMarie Is Coming For Your Alternate Timelines.

And finally, those end credits? Beautiful. Feelings all over my face. Sob.

Some Questions

I’ve spent the last few years unlearning the habit of obsessively picking out “plot holes” in narratives. While there absolutely are plenty of stories with gaping voids that swallow common sense and basic planning, there are a lot more stories where the answer to the question “why didn’t it happen this way?” is “because then there would be no story” and that’s okay. Stories are not real life, and even in real life, people are fallible and don’t always do the logical, sensible, self-consistent thing even if it’s right in front of them.

All the same, allow me a little bit of Fridge Logic:

1. Thanos demonstrated that you could use the stones individually. I feel like there were more things that could have been done with the Gauntlet than just Snap Fingers, Revoke/Restore Existence.

(Most likely answer: ethical concerns about freely using that much power and the unintended consequences. Or, any of the stones would have run the risk of killing the user, even Bruce, so they had to go big or go home, no nuance.)

2. Given that they were time travelling, there was no actual need for the entire team to go and split up looking for the stones simultaneously, or immediately. They could have called Carol back and waited for her; she might have been able to wield the Gauntlet safely. They could have sent the same core team after each of the stones (come on, who didn’t want to see Red Skull’s reaction to Steve showing up?).

(Most likely answer: this is a very common conceit with time travel plots; you still need the sense of urgency, you can’t allow the more ‘realistic’ option of taking your time outside the jumps. If any justification is needed, you could go with the idea that the participants were so swept up in the race to get the stones that they didn’t think about it, or that they were extremely worried about having any of the stones hanging around in 2023 for extended periods of time.)

3. How does Thanos rewinding time with the Time Stone fit into the quantum multiverse proposition? Surely he should just have created another branch – and in that case, surely Strange should have seen that as a future where they win, since the Mind Stone was destroyed in that timeline.

(Most likely answer: SOMETHING SOMETHING QUANTUM DON’T THINK ABOUT IT TOO HARD. Maybe the Time Stone works differently. Maybe Bruce could, in theory, rather than bringing the Missing back into existence, have rewound the last 5 years. And maybe they decided they didn’t dare, especially given that they’d already been time travelling and dicking around with causality. That’s interesting question, though. If the wearer of the second Gauntlet rewound time to before Thanos destroyed the first one, do you end up with two sets of Infinity Stones? Does that cause the universe to explode? Possibly another reason not to attempt it. Though that seems like a GREAT premise for a fanfic AU hmm…)

4. Steve going back and marrying Peggy would have created a new alternate branch of the multiverse, rather than altering the past in this one. So how did he manage to turn up again at the end? He should have been in his own version of the future at that point.

(Most likely answer: see above re QUANTUM, or something about using the Time GPS when he was ready to come back, and he just materialised in a slightly different place for some reason?)

5. I was under the impression that Carol’s powers were not a one-time boost from the Tesseract, but that she was constantly drawing from it as a power source. In that case, shouldn’t destroying the Space Stone have robbed her of her power? I was expecting them to at least use that as a reason why she couldn’t take Thanos out completely – that he was wielding the source of her power against her – but it never came up.

(Most likely answer: Well obviously we don’t want to depower Captain Marvel for all future movies. They could do something clever here with Loki’s theft of the Tesseract in 2012, possibly. Or never mention it again. Or I’m wrong about her drawing from the Tesseract.)

6. Soooo… the world going forward. The desolation of the last five years, the empty cities, the huge changes in society, are all going to still be present. The Missing 50% have returned, but now there’s a five year age gap – we see Peter Parker reuniting with friends at the end of the film, but half their class should be finishing up university now. Not only that, but the Remaining 50% are all extremely traumatised. All are likely to have difficulty readjusting.

Imagine your older sibling vanished and now they’re back, but they’re younger than you (Flight of the Navigator anyone?). Imagine your spouse and children vanished and you were devastated but you’ve found someone new and moved on and had another kid. Imagine you were one of the missing, but find on your return that your loved ones have died in some other way while you’ve been gone. Or because of your disappearance: there must have been plenty of Missing who were driving at the time. Some of them must have come back to find that the other people in that vehicle with them died in the crash that resulted, and in theory Bruce would not have brought them back (though who knows, since he said he tried to bring Natasha back too).

The ongoing impacts on society should produce a nearly unrecognisable world, but is that the world Marvel wants to tell its stories in?

(Most likely answer: either we take the No Endor Holocaust route and just ignore the ramifications – or Tony Stark’s Dying Wish becomes the escape clause for everything. Why isn’t the world more broken? Because Tony can’t stop trying to fix things, and did more with that finger snap than just wiping out Thanos and his horde. I find it unlikely that the MCU going forward will be exploring the huge fallout of the snap beyond “everyone was sad and now they’re not”, but I could be mistaken.)

Final Thoughts

Overall, I’ve often not quite felt the same “end of an era” reaction to popular films as a lot of people. Neither the end of the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter films hit me that way (partly because I prefer the books in both cases). The MCU, though, has been a big, significant thing that I feel a part of.

When “Iron Man” came out I’d never heard of any Marvel characters except the X-Men. I fell in love with the humour and the way that these films consistently make a little fun of themselves while still taking their premises seriously and respecting their fans. The New Marvel Film has been for years now the only event that will reliably get me to the cinema, and I have faithfully sat through the credits of every single one.

I’m sad that it’s over, and I will miss the characters I’ve grown to love who are now gone, but at the same time I am genuinely excited for the next generation, particularly Black Panther and Captain Marvel. I will still be going to see The New Marvel Film, I think. Though apparently Spider-Man is gleefully intending to break our hearts all over again. -_-

The world of Kestrien has three moons, one continent, a hurricane that never stops, and magic coming out of its hypothetical ears. The main narrative takes place in its modern age, nearly 1500 years after a worldwide apocalypse during which one of the moons, Demira, was shattered, and now hangs broken in the sky.

More About Kestrien

Part 4: Before the Fall

Three snippets set on Demira, which was once home to a powerful kingdom (before it, you know, broke). I didn’t write as much for this as the others, partly because it’s full of spoilers for the main narrative. I recommend reading these stories last even though they chronologically take place before everything else. The first (“Poison”) is deep backstory for Zephony, set hundreds of years before the Fall. The other two (“World” and “Treasure”) are set in the Last Days of Demira, which will someday get its own prequel story.

18. Poison

“What is it? I am very busy…”

“I know, my lady…” The boy shifted his feet, clearly terrified though Zephony had barely glanced up at his knock. “But it is urgent. She is dying.”

She? Zephony looked at him again, finally took in the livery he wore. She stifled a sigh and managed to keep her irritation off her face. Better not to throw any more fuel on that particular fire.

“There is nothing I can do for Lady Isri,” she said, with a kindness she did not feel. “She has reached the limit of her natural life. I cannot pull her back from that brink.”

“She does not ask for your aid,” the boy said, the words rapid and well-rehearsed. “She asks that you bear witness.”

Zephony couldn’t quite keep her expression from darkening. Even now, at the bitter end, she tries to sink her claws into me. Either I refuse the request and break my own vow, or I attend at her deathbed and have them whisper for centuries about what took place there.

The boy drew back at what he saw in her face. Zephony put aside her pen, closed the book she had been writing in, and pushed back her chair.

“I will bear witness,” she said, the familiar words ashen on her tongue. “Take me to your lady.”

Isri lay in a twilight-shrouded room within a mansion of empty rooms and forlorn echoes under Demira’s ever-starry sky. Zephony had known this place when it was full of life, and knew that there had been no need for its decline. If Isri had chosen to live instead of fruitlessly pursuing what she could never achieve; if she had not driven away everyone who’d once loved her in the depths of her obsession…

Now she lay all but still with no company but the moonlight and the boy who led Zephony to her side. Her hands lay withered on the sheets; her eyes were closed, the viciousness and determination of her face finally softened amid the thousands of wrinkles. Softened, but not lost: no-one looking at her could think her a kindly grandmother, even now in her last extremity.

Her eyes opened, and her gaze was sharper than Zephony had expected.

“I am hear to bear witness,” Zephony said quietly. “As you have asked.”

“Spare me the posturing,” Isri managed, her voice as dry as dust. “I know you relish the chance to watch me die.”

Zephony sighed.

“No,” she said. “That is something you have never understood. I take no pleasure in this. Nor did I in casting you from the Order. To become Aetheri requires a lifetime of dedication and study–“

“– which I have endured–“

“– and also something in the self, the soul. Something that you lack, Isri. If I’d let you remain in the Order, you would have wasted your life striving for a goal you could never reach. I tried to save you from that fate. It brings me no satisfaction that I failed.”

“You underestimated me.” Isri rose suddenly on her elbow, her whole frame shaking with the effort. Her servant rushed to her side to steady her. “You have always underestimated me, Zephony of Cevelas, just as you have always feared me.”

“I do not fear you,” Zephony said, quiet and cold and certain enough that Isri’s eyes widened just a fraction. “I never have.”

The old woman’s face twisted into an ugly snarl. She hissed something at the servant, who swallowed hard, then reached for a medicine bottle by the bed. He poured a measure of colourless liquid into a small glass, and handed it to Isri without looking at her face. Zephony frowned, suddenly uneasy. Before she could step closer, Isri raised the glass and drank it in one. She choked and spluttered, but there was triumph in her face as she thrust the empty glass back into the boy’s hand and sank down onto the pillows.

“You will,” she said.

Zephony strode across the room and snatched the glass from the trembling servant. The bitter smell burned the back of her nose. For an instant she turned towards the door, thinking to run for a doctor… but the glass had been almost full. The dose was too high and would do its work too quickly. She set the glass down and looked down at Isri with pity.

“You think to convince them I poisoned you? As you were lying here moments from natural death? The court is hardly so naive–“

Isri barked out a laugh that turned into a gasp. Her body contracted sharply in the first of the lethal spasms to come.

“Nothing so clumsy,” she rasped. Her hands clenched tightly on the sheets; the servant backed away, his face white. “Merely a courtesy. Didn’t want… to keep you… waiting…”

It took mere minutes. Zephony tried to reach inside herself, to find some compassion or comfort, to find some way to ease the bitterness that filled this death, but as Isri’s breath ceased, all she felt was anger and frustration and, if she were honest, relief. It was her burden to judge all those who would join the Order of Twilight, to assess whether they would succeed in walking the long, difficult road to becoming Aetheri. To try to forsee whether they would be sacrificing their lives in vain. After so many centuries, her failures were rare. Rare, but all the more painful. She should never have accepted Isri into the Order in the first place. Perhaps if she had not been given that false hope…

Or perhaps it would have made no difference. Perhaps nothing would have. No, she had never feared Isri. But in this moment, she could acknowledge, once and only once, that she had feared what the woman might become, given access to the full power of the Aetheri. That perhaps she had not been as certain as she’d claimed that Isri would not succeed in the ordeal…

“It’s over,” Zephony said aloud. She turned to the boy quailing by the door. “Call the doctor. If you like, I will tell him that she took the poison without your assistance, though I doubt any will fault you for your loyalty–“

But he wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were still fixed on the bed behind her, and now she saw them widen. The aether twisted, suddenly, painfully, and Zephony whirled with a gasp of disbelief just as the final veil tore open.

Isri stood beside the bed, no longer an old woman, but decades younger. Like so many of the Aetheri, her features were a blend of the ways she’d seen herself in her lifetime, and so carried an ageless, disquieting quality. Her eyes were as dark and vicious as they had been in her youth. And she was smiling, and the smile was like a knife, brilliant and deadly.

“I should have done it years ago,” she said, glancing at the bottle of poison by the bed. “More fool me, letting your doubts become my own. Clinging to a few more years of study and preparation. But I know now I needn’t have troubled myself. It was easy, in the end.”

She crossed the room to where Zephony stood frozen.

“You were wrong,” Isri said softly, spitefully, triumphantly.

“Yes,” Zephony replied, her own voice distant in her ears. “It seems that I was.”

1. World

They’d said that looking back at Kestrien from the surface of Demira would shake her to her very core. Zoreste was a little disappointed to find that they were wrong.

It was certainly a striking sight. Kestrien glowed blue and white against the darkness of space, while Dyne smoldered nearby with its unearthly crimson hue. In another part of the sky Alvos floated serenely, pale and dull by comparison. Yet was it so very different from the night sky at home? She’d spent her childhood watching Demira and Alvos rise and set through the seasons. Of course, Kestrien and Dyne were larger, brighter, and closer together, but even their closeness was less than she’d expected. She supposed her schoolbooks were to blame: she had always imagined that Dyne would be so near to Kestrien that it would almost touch, and that both would loom enormously over Demira’s horizon. But she hadn’t allowed for the immense distances involved, too great for her mind to grasp, or for how her own home and its dark companion would appear as flat discs against the black, the complexities of their sibling relationship lost to the casual observer.

Perhaps she was shaken, a little, by consciousness of that incredible distance, if nothing else. How could she be standing on the surface of one of the moons, so impossibly far from home, yet able to return in the blink of an eye if she stepped through the Gate?

A soft step alerted her to someone else’s arrival, but she saw that it was Zephony almost as soon as she registered the sound. No need to stand on ceremony, then. She waited as the other woman crossed the wide white terrace.

Zoreste half-expected her to say something trite, like, I never grow tired of this view, but of course Zephony did no such thing.

“Strange how white and peaceful the storm looks, isn’t it?”

Zoreste looked back at Kestrien. The planet was only partly lit by the distant sun, but Zephony was right; she could see the curving, churning edge of Dyne’s Storm. The clouds of the neverending hurricane were robbed of their immensity by distance. Apart from the dark spot that was Dyne’s shadow, they shone bright and brilliant with reflected sunlight, belying the deep and terrible darkness on the surface below.

“I feel as though there’s a metaphor in that,” Zoreste said as she considered the contrast.

“You and every poet since the Fall,” Zephony muttered.

Zoreste laughed.

“Nothing new under the sun?”

Zephony smiled, but her dark eyes were serious.

“You’re here. That’s new.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“How is the princess settling in?”

“Oh, Sena is Sena, no matter how hard her father tries to turn her into another copy of her sister. She’s already exhausted our attendants with her questions about the farm quarter and the structure of the city. I should send her to you.”

“She’d find me ignorant on those topics,” Zephony replied with just a touch of hauteur. “Mallor might oblige her.”

Zoreste shot her an exasperated look.

“Because letting my princess badger the High Chancellor with endless technical questions about Demiran civilisation will do so much for the delicate relationship between Demira and Verthorn.”

“You might be surprised.”

“Hmph. We’ll see. For now I’ve arranged a tour of the city. Hopefully that will sate some of her curiosity.” Zoreste drummed her fingers on the railing. “She wants to know about the crystal, of course, but she at least has the sense not to ask too many questions about that.”

Zephony gave a short, self-mocking laugh.

“Unlike some people?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Zoreste replied with no attempt at sincerity. “At any rate, Sena is happy enough for now, though like the rest of us, she’ll be glad to go home.”

“Yes.” Zephony’s eyes went back to the gleaming planet with a flash of longing that left Zoreste breathless. “I imagine she will.”

22. Treasure

The doors that Arellia led her to were toweringly tall and seemed, impossibly, to be made of glass, and yet to show nothing beyond them. Light glimmered in their depths like captured stars, and they seemed to glow with their own opalescent light. Sena had never seen anything so beautiful. She made no effort to hide her wonder, and was rewarded when Arellia glanced at her, and Sena caught that almost-smile, the curve of her lips she straightened so quickly.

“And the Crystal is in there?” Sena asked.

“Yes, though not immediately beyond the doors.”

“How big is it?”

The question seemed to catch Arellia off-guard. She frowned, and Sena’s heart leapt to her throat. These last few weeks, she’d begun to feel that they were all wrong, the people who’d told her so sternly that she must be careful at all times to give no offence to the young Queen of Demira, that she must expect only cool formality, and that she was to return the same. Every misstep she’d thought she’d made, Arellia had brushed aside with a warmth that no amount of guarded language could hide. To Sena’s curiosity about the strange world she ruled, she’d responded with interest and something like delight, as eager to share Demira’s mysteries as Sena was to learn them. Sena had long since forgotten to be careful, forgotten that there had been one subject she had been strictly forbidden from enquiring about too closely…

But it was Arellia who’d brought her here, unprompted, Arellia who’d begun to talk of the Crystal… Sena felt a dizzying, clawing fear that had far less to do with political concerns and everything to do with the thought that Arellia might be annoyed or even angry with her…

“Sorry, I–“

Arellia blinked, and for a second Sena saw dismay in her eyes, and if it weren’t so ludicrous to imagine Arellia falling prey to such things, she might have thought that she wasn’t the only one afraid of saying the wrong thing and shattering this small warm glowing thing that seemed to hover between them.

“No, no need to apologise,” Arellia said quickly, and she did smile then, leaving Sena momentarily breathless in her brilliance. “It’s… I suppose it is about this big.”

She held out her hands, spaced as wide as her shoulders, and sketched a sphere in the air.

“But it’s… a part of the chamber it’s in,” Arellia went on. “Mounted, you could say… there are crystal projections from the walls and floor, holding it in place… so it’s hard to say for sure.”

Sena tried to picture it.

“Does it look like the doors?”

“No, though the walls of the tunnels are carved from the same mineral, so they also have that glow–“

“Tunnels?”

Arellia’s face tightened and Sena’s stomach dropped. This time Arellia turned away quickly and gestured for Sena to follow her.

“Spaces for storage, places for the Crystal Mages to rest,” she said briskly. “Things like that. Would you like to visit the Frozen Garden? I remember you asked the other day…”

“Yes,” Sena replied, keeping a wobble out of her voice only with effort. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, forget I said anything, I won’t ask any more questions, just please don’t look at me like that again…“If– if you’re not too busy, I don’t want to be a burden–“

Arellia turned to her with a look on her face like Sena had spouted a nonsense rhyme, words she could barely comprehend.

“You could never be a burden,” she said, and she smiled again, as if she couldn’t help herself. She reached out tentatively and laid her hand on Sena’s arm, and Sena felt the colour rush to her cheeks. “Let me show you the ice trees and the frost flowers. It’s the best time of day. There will be a thousand rainbows frozen in every droplet, and the grass will look like diamonds.”

The world of Kestrien has three moons, one continent, a hurricane that never stops, and magic coming out of its hypothetical ears. The main narrative takes place in its modern age, nearly 1500 years after a worldwide apocalypse during which one of the moons, Demira, was shattered, and now hangs broken in the sky.

More About Kestrien

Part 3: After the Fall

These stories take place between the Fall of Demira and the modern age, and follow two immortals, Zephony and Akana, who are kicking around during that time. (Akana is the one doing most of the kicking.)

4. Oracle

Voices outside the tent pulled Zephony away from her writing: whispering, and a soft singing with which she had recently become all too familiar. Someone hesitantly struck the chime hanging by the tent-flap. Zephony sighed.

“Come,” she said.

The flap was tentatively lifted and the Chief herself stepped inside, a tall, broad woman with hair so blond it was almost white. Zephony was unsurprised to see that she was decked out in her ceremonial robes.

“Oh sage,” the woman began, using the more formal mode of the local language, an odd blend of ancient Ivereth and whatever dialect had been spoken in this place before the Fall of Demira. “The weather has turned too soon and the crops are in danger. We would ask you to look upon the future and give us guidance…”

Zephony had to bite her tongue to keep herself from snapping. It was easy to forget that the things she had experienced and explained a thousand times were new every day to someone, somewhere in the world. She’d only been with this settlement for a few months. They were still in awe of her, still unable to fully grasp the nature of her existence. She estimated she had at least a couple of years before awe turned to suspicion and distrust. Maybe longer; they seemed more willing to welcome her than some tribes she’d encountered in the last two hundred years.

“Be seated,” she said.

She had begun communicating with these people in Ivereth, and they’d been able to piece together enough of her speech to teach her their own tongue. Her natural aptitude for languages and preternatural memory had given her enough fluency to talk on the day to day matters of the village, but she didn’t think they were fully grasping some of the more complex ideas she was trying to teach them. Particularly when it came to the things she couldn’t do.

“I cannot foretell the future,” she said, for what felt like the hundredth time. The Chief simply looked at her hopefully. Zephony sighed again. “My knowledge is of the past,” she went on. “I can look at the patterns of history. I can tell you what has happened before. I can suggest what might happen again based on those patterns. Do you understand?”

There was a pause.

“The crops?” the Chief asked hesitantly. She was a blunt woman whose strength was physical and whose prowess as a leader came from her ability to fight off outsiders, predators, and dae alike. She was clearly uncomfortable dealing with the spiritual matters her position required of her. Zephony liked her, even if she sometimes found her exasperating.

“I doubt the seasons are turning yet,” Zephony said. “I know this cold patch is alarming, but the long-term trend in this region is towards a longer growing season. The skies are finally beginning to clear and the storms are retreating towards the coasts. I think there will be a few more weeks for the crops to ripen after this bad spell. But I am not the Chief of this village and I do not bear the weight of its people’s lives. You must decide whether the risk can be taken.”

The Chief regarded her for just long enough that Zephony wondered if she’d fully understood. But then the woman nodded, and rose to her feet.

“You say the weather will turn again.”

Zephony began to interrupt, but the Chief held up a hand.

“You say it may turn,” she corrected herself. “It is not certain. Yes?”

“Yes,” Zephony replied, hoping it was enough.

“Our thanks, sage.”

The Chief bowed, and left the tent. Zephony ran the conversation over again in her mind, wondering if there was anything else she could have added. She wanted to help these people, if they would let her, but two centuries into this dark age, she still had so little to offer. What need had they for the history of Demira, the records of Cevelas, for stories of civilisations so far out of reach they might as well have been fairy tales? What need had they for her treatises on crystal magic, her analysis of the political decay of countries whose names were already forgotten, her memories of times when the skies had been clear and life had been easier and wonders of technology and magic had filled the world?

These people needed practicalities, things she’d never thought to study, back when she’d been the First Aetheri of Demira, so wrapped up in her own high ideas that she never cared to discover how crops should be properly rotated to avoid exhausting the soil, or how large a population could be supported from a given water source, or what might be done for sickness in the absence of advanced medicine. They needed spells and rituals that would still work amidst the aether storm that raged even now, they needed ways to fight back the daé that thrived in its chaos, and they needed leaders who would bear the burden of weighing their lives in the balance.

She picked up her pen and returned to the book before her. At least she could record their history, their names, their struggles. At least if this island of light vanished into the storm as so many others had, there would be a trace of it left. And at least she could give them the smallest sliver of hope. She could tell them that things had not always been like this, and perhaps not always would be.

She glanced at the small window cut in the tent. She could just see the bright circle of Demira rising over the horizon. The cracks in the shattered moon were visible even through the gossamer silk.

Perhaps the world wouldn’t always be like this… but neither could it ever again be what it once was.

6. Attack

Zephony was too far away when she heard that they were burning the Estreides Quarter in Vende. Even sinking as low into the aether as she dared, rushing like a wind through a world of mists and shadows, smoke was already hanging in a bitter cloud over the city by the time she arrived. Her heart clenched with anger and despair and pain, as it always did, when she was forced to watch these… these ignorant savages hunt down and persecute the magic users in their midst.

She caught herself, closed her eyes, tried to reword the thought. Not savages, though they were certainly ignorant. Ignorant, and afraid, and convinced that it had been magic and its works that had shattered Demira and all but annihilated the rest of the world in the blink of an eye. Could she even truly say they were wrong?

There were refugees already hurrying along the main road away from the city gate. She paused to speak with them, made sure they knew which towns would shelter them. She caught the gist of the spark that had ignited this latest inferno: a child manifesting unquestionable innate power. Something that these people did not believe in, they who were convinced that magic could only be learned and taught, that someone, somewhere must have corrupted the child for her to have such power.

Zephony hurried towards the gate. There wasn’t much she could do, but there would be something, at least. Some lives she could save, perhaps. Some homes she could protect. Some people she could help to safety. There was always something, and if it never felt like enough, at least it was more than–

The blast wave threw her off her feet. Even as she hit the ground, pain crashing through every part of her body, she was reeling herself back into the aether, abandoning the physical world instinctively. The aether itself was rippling under the force of the explosion: clear evidence, as if she’d needed it, that magic was involved. The shadows streamed past her, the echoing half-voices of people screaming and running away, and then it was over, and the aether fell still.

Seconds later she was standing on the road again, staring at the place where Vende had been.

There was nothing left. The remnants of the city could barely even be called rubble; the stone and brick and wood of the buildings had been torn to such small pieces it was like a blanket of gravel over the ground below. Zephony could see right through where the city had been, could see the slight rise that had held the Duke’s palace, the wide course of the river, now choked with debris, the whole footprint of Vende laid bare like a life-size map of a place that no longer existed.

The last time she’d seen such devastation… she pushed those memories from her mind and concentrated on the more urgent question: how had this happened?

She began to walk across the shattered plain, hoping to find some clue. And then she was brought to a halt again, shock coursing through her, at the sight of a figure in the distance.

It was a woman, young, maybe young enough to be more properly called a girl, though it was hard to say through the clouds of settling dust. She wore simple clothes, the tunic, leggings, shirt, and boots of the labouring class. She could have passed for any citizen of Vende, were it not for her striking hair. Streaming past her waist, it was divided sharply between two opposite colours: pitch black on her right, and stark white on her left.

It reminded Zephony instantly and terrifyingly of the curse of the Crystal Mages, though the slow creep of white into their hair had never been so uniform as this stranger’s was.

“Who are you?” She didn’t intend to speak, but the words escaped before she could contain her fear and confusion. “How did you–“

The stranger turned to look at her, and Zephony gasped: her eyes were a vivid purple, an impossible colour, one with a significance that could not escape her.

“This isn’t a good time,” the stranger said.

She spoke in perfect Ivereth, but by now Zephony was almost expecting something of the sort, and it only threw her off balance for a moment.

“You’re– you can’t be from the Order, I would know you. Who are you?”

“None of your business.”

“Did you do this?”

“Apparently.” The stranger looked around her, a strange and chilling mix of satisfaction and regret on her face. “I didn’t intend to, if that means anything.”

“You’re Aetheri, you must be–“

“Oh, I must, must I?” The stranger shot her an irritated look. “You haven’t changed, Zephony. Still a know-it-all, still jumping to the wrong conclusions.”

Zephony took a deep breath, fighting for calm against shock, anger, and dismay.

“How do you know me? Do I know you?”

“Unlikely.” The stranger smirked. “Extremely unlikely. Anyway, if you’re done with the interrogation, I have things to do.”

She turned on her heel and began to walk away. Zephony clenched her fists, and for the first time in a long time, reached for power, conjured a spell of containment, a ward of gleaming silver in a circle around them both.

The woman paused, tossed a withering glance over her shoulder, and said, “You’ll have to do better than that.”

The ward dissolved like cobweb. Its flying strands whipped Zephony across the face, tangled in her hair, then dissolved into the aether. The woman kept walking.

“Who are you?” Zephony demanded, taking one halting step after her.

“You can call me Arcana,” the stranger replied, with a dark laugh at some joke Zephony couldn’t fathom.

Then she vanished, diving into the aether with an ease that Zephony could not match. She followed for a few moments, pushing herself to her limits, but the stranger – Arcana – was too fast, and went so deep Zephony had to pull back for fear of being swept away by the currents.

She resurfaced in the ruins of Vende, almost gasping for air, so shocked she felt herself begin to shake with delayed reaction. She looked around her at the silent graveyard that had been Vende. Remembered the street stalls in the market, the children playing in the back alleys, the voices of the people now forever silenced.

She’d called them savages, in her heart, not so very long ago. But she would never have wished such destruction upon them. And worst of all, she had no idea how to prevent it from happening again.

24. Watching

Zephony was almost five hundred years old before she discovered that she could teach others to become what she was, what the philosophers had come to call Aetheri: one who could move through the aether, whose physical form was a projection of their will, and who therefore would neither age nor die. And in the end, it wasn’t even her own initiative that made the breakthrough. She had just assumed she would always be the only one, that the circumstances of her transformation had been so unique, so unlikely, that they could never be repeated. The idea that she might be able to teach it, that someone with sufficient dedication and determination might be able to learn from her and eventually, at the moment of their natural death, complete the transition… if not for Dornan, she doubted she would ever have arrived at it.

But Dornan had loved her with a love that poets wept for, and had been unable to bear the idea that Zephony would be eternally the only immortal, alone in the crowd until the end of time, and he had dedicated his life without a thought to accomplishing the impossible. And from anyone else such devotion, unasked-for, and born of a love unrequited, would have been painful, terrifying, suffocating, or all three – but Dornan had been a man like no other Zephony had ever met. She could never love him the way he wanted her to, but she did love him as a dear companion, respect him, and welcome his company, and because he was who he was, he accepted what she could offer, with grace and consideration.

And if he had succeeded in becoming Aetheri, it would have brought her such joy, she thought sometimes she might never have been the same. But when he failed, it felt inevitable, and though she mourned him so deeply her soul felt shaken, there was a part of her that had never dared expect another outcome.

And yet. And yet. Though Dornan failed, he came so close… unlocked so many secrets of Zephony’s strange existence, found so many avenues to explore, and at the moment of his death, she’d felt the aether shake as he tried to tear the veil… even as she grieved, she began to realise that he’d left her a gift beyond measure: the knowledge that it could be done. And the knowledge was not hers alone. Others were willing to try – more than willing, eager – some desperate for immortality, some fascinated by the aether, some simply drawn irresistibly to the unknown.

To start with, she attempted to teach anyone who wanted to learn. She was still so isolated, in those days, still holding herself apart: she had no interest in or affinity for judging whether a given person should or should not be permitted to try. And the process was so gruelling, so long-lasting – an entire lifespan, dedicated to nothing but preparing for one’s death, with no guarantee of any reward but oblivion – that those candidates with less high-minded motivations tended to falter long before they neared the end of the road.

Merl was the first to succeed. Merl who’d been such a quiet little thing, the girl with the shadowed eyes, who had somehow always looked the same to Zephony even by the time she was old and grey and frail. Where others were loudly determined or arrogantly certain, she simply worked and worked and worked, and when she drew her last breath, and tore the veil as if it were tissue paper, Zephony was as unsurprised as she was shocked to her core.

It seemed obvious to her then what the Order of Twilight would become. In her self-absorption it never occurred to her that anyone could want anything else. They would stand aside from the ebb and flow of time. They would watch, listen, learn, record. They would be aloof observers, lofted high above the petty concerns of those bound by mortality. They would be wise. They would be patient. And above all, they would be passive. The idea of meddling in the affairs of a world that already seemed distant and unimportant was so distasteful to Zephony, she never considered for a moment that others might not feel the same way. That perhaps her isolation was the echo of the trauma she’d suffered, torn from her world and from mortality, and that others who still felt intimately connected with Demira and its future might not be content to stand aside in silence.

And maybe she was wilfully blind, when some of the members of the Order did begin to meddle, here and there, with a light touch and a benevolence she could not fault. Maybe she convinced herself that each incident was one of a kind, never to be repeated. Maybe she clung to the idea that they’d grow out of it, as if she were more mature and full of understanding than them, rather than ignorant, in her own way, and childish, and close-minded.

Maybe that was why she made such a fatal mistake with Isri. Why she looked at that fire and spite and ambition and thought she saw a passion that could be channelled. Why it took her long enough to realise her error that Isri was already committed to her course, and refused to abandon it even when Zephony expelled her from the Order. And maybe everything that came after could be laid at her door. There were nights when she looked at the shattered moon and wondered if the Fall of Demira could be laid, ultimately, at her feet, the grand accomplishment of her works in those thousand years before she had been humbled.

But there were other nights, when she watched the stars wheel and the moons rise and set, where she also considered that perhaps it might have happened anyway, that the Fall had been inevitable, and then, at least, she could comfort herself: not all was lost. If she’d done nothing else with her time on Demira, she did that: preserved its memory, that would otherwise have been as lost as Cevelas in the dark ages that followed the Fall.

And if she’d done nothing else with her time on Demira, she had done one other thing: she had learned. She had learned the hard and painful way that there was no honour in silently watching, no maturity in her refusal to involve herself. They’d taught her that, all of them, one after another, in their different ways: Ressan, Dornan, Isri, Mallor, Zoreste, Arellia, Sena… they had made her understand, at last, even if the understanding had come only with the end of the world.

She would never forget that lesson. And she could never repay that debt. But she could try to make an accounting of it, word by word, page by page, an apology in every sentence, that it had taken her so long to remember that she was still human.

13. Defend

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Zephony could see the lights of the refugee encampment from here, a haphazard collection of makeshift tents amidst the high prairie grass. How long until this particular madness ebbs?

The virulent persecution of magic users showed no sign of fading even five centuries after the Fall. They were known now as the Estreides, demon-touched in a language already half-lost, leaving only its malice behind. They bore no outward mark that differentiated them from other members of society, and perhaps that was a part of what terrified their persecutors: these people they so hated could walk among them, unseen, if their vigilance was ever relaxed.

And yet their skills were needed. Wards and rituals to fend off dae were the most sought-after, along with small magics that were technically outlawed but still often sought: fortune-telling and the dispensation of luck, good or bad. Zephony had never found any evidence that the future could be predicted or that the laws of chance could be influenced by even the strongest sorcery, but she understood the endless need people had for some illusion of control when they felt helpless. And so the Estreides were tolerated, confined to their own communities, watched with distrust, and kept under tight control. A child born into an Estreides bloodline would never escape that stigma, even if they practised no magic of their own. And as for those natural talents who sometimes arose elsewhere in society… well, that was when fires would be lit, and blood would be spilled, and the poor souls accused of corrupting pure blood would be driven out.

It had been particularly bad in Deshtar this past season. Zephony doubted there was a single Estreides left in the city, which would eventually become a problem for the righteous citizens, even here in the sheltered heart of the continent, as far as it was possible to get from the Sea of Storms. Sooner or later, the Estreides would return. And the cycle would begin again.

She approached the camp silently. They would have guards posted; she slipped under the surface of the aether so that she was barely visible as more than a breath on the night air. She didn’t expect them to welcome strangers right now. Some might know her name, but she hadn’t been in these parts for a number of decades. It was hard to say what her reception would be like.

“Stop right there.”

Zephony stumbled mid-step, looking around for the speaker who could apparently see her. Had they posted a Sensitive on guard duty?

“I’m a friend,” she said.

“Not many of those around at the moment.” The voice came closer. “You’d better explain what you’re– oh, it’s you.”

The speaker struck a light practically in front of Zephony, the small flame illuminating the scowl on her face. Zephony recognised her in a heartbeat. Even if the black-and-white hair hadn’t been so distinctive, the face was etched onto her memory, along with the questions that clung to it.

“Arcana,” Zephony said after a moment.

“What? Oh. Yeah. I guess.”

“What do you mean, you ‘guess’?”

“It’s Akana now. Spent a bit too much time in Vorlost, got used to their weird way of saying it.”

“Are either of those even your real name?”

Akana smirked.

“Real as it gets. I take it you’re here to meddle?”

“I’m here to offer help, and to record what’s happened,” Zephony replied, clenching her fists. “And you? Are you here to finish destroying these people?”

“Me? I’m just on guard duty. Can’t you tell?”

Zephony studied her. She was wearing leather armour over what looked like traditional Vorlosti garb – too warm for these latitudes, but it didn’t seem to affect her – and a longsword hung at her belt. It looked like Shillari work. Her boots were laced in the Nekhenese style, but the hide was clearly Merreshana elk.

“You get around,” Zephony observed. “I’ve heard rumours of you here and there. Dark ones, usually. What are you doing defending an Estreides camp on the high plateau?”

“They asked me to,” Akana said. She grinned at Zephony’s skeptical look. “They asked really nicely.”

Zephony glared at her for a long moment. She had a thousand questions, and she’d been searching for the answers for nearly three hundred years, and now here was Arcana – or Akana – or whatever her name really was – and she was none the wiser and already had several more questions. And Akana clearly knew that, and thoroughly enjoyed the situation.

Fine. She wouldn’t give Akana the satisfaction.

“May I enter the camp?”

Akana seemed to think about it, tapping her fingers on the hilt of her sword.

“Yeah, sure, why not.” She stepped aside and waved vaguely towards the tents. “Go write in your book.”

Zephony nodded in acknowledgement and continued walking, even though turning her back on Akana made her shoulderblades itch. There were other ways to uncover information, and she was nothing if not patient.

“Oh, hey, Zephony?”

She glanced over her shoulder. Akana was still holding the little flame, its light throwing eerie shadows over her face and creating an unsettling glow in her purple eyes. Then she smirked, as if she knew exactly what effect she’d created and couldn’t quite help relishing it, and then the light went out.

“Whatever they tell you about me will be wrong. But they get very creative, sometimes. Have fun.”

14. Vacant

The Sanctuary Sea was restless, a cloudy sky hanging low over choppy waves. A few brave fishing boats were attempting to bring in a catch despite the warning signs that another storm was on its way. Zephony thought she had a few hours. She had no desire to be caught by the tempest either.

There were limits to where one could travel through the aether. She was held to the surface of the planet by gravity, for example, though falling could do her no harm if she was in an incorporeal state. She could travel deep into an active volcano but she wouldn’t be able to see much when she got there, so what was the point? She could sink into the solid ground itself, but only to a certain extent; as she went deeper, the stone and metal of the planet would begin to resist her, a dangerous, suffocating prison that could trap her if she remained for too long within its grasp. And of course, she couldn’t cross the Sea of Storms. The vast power of Dyne’s Storm churned up the aether as surely as it raged through the atmosphere of the planet. Even she would be swept away if she went too close to that hurricane.

The Sanctuary Sea was another matter. Protected to the east by the curving windbreak that was the high-backed island of Thari, the waters here were manageable – though never tame – and had been the biggest centre of maritime industry on Kestrien for centuries.

But Zephony’s memory went back more than centuries. Silently, invisible to anyone with normal sight, she stepped into the rolling waves on the shore, and sank deeper into the aether, and followed the downward slope of the seabed like she was riding an ancient current. It quickly grew too dark to see anything beneath the water, but she pressed on, knowing the way too well to falter.

The glow rose ahead and beneath her, faint at first, brightening as she approached. Lantern Jellyfish, clustering thickly in the deepest part of the Sanctuary Sea, ready for their annual breeding season. Perhaps there was an arrogance to timing her arrival so they would be there to provide light, but Zephony thought of it more as respect for the graveyard she had come to visit. It seemed wrong to her to conjure light in this place, either with magic or through technological means.

After almost three thousand years, the ruins of Cevelas were little more than shapes and rises in the seabed. Silt had buried them metres deep, and the salt water had eaten away at anything that protruded. If you didn’t know where to look, it would be easy to miss them – assuming you had a way of travelling beneath miles of water in the first place, which thus far, no archaeologist of the modern age had acquired.

Zephony drifted through the aether as though she were swimming through the water. She had been able to see landmarks here, once, but now even she struggled to recognise what part of the city she was in. The pattern of the streets was lost. She had used the Library for a long time as her reference, but some shift in the seabed had hidden its great walls and shattered dome a few hundred years ago. Just as she was wondering if this was the time she was forced to admit defeat, to acknowledge that there was nothing left here for her to mourn, she found the ruins of the Great Gate, unexpectedly exposed, the silt blown away from its massive curved rim and the steps that had led up to it.

At once the murky ruins aligned themselves to her memories. She had travelled almost directly up the Grand Boulevard, in fact. The same journey she’d made when she was a child too young to understand why they’d left their home. The same journey she’d made in the last hours of Cevelas, rushing to find Arna, to beg her to escape while she still could…

And here her life had ended, even though she had not truly died. The Gate had been her prison, trapping her in the moment she fell through it, holding her in the aether for almost two hundred years before finally spitting her out on Demira, the first Aetheri, the first who could shed her corporeal form and walk the aether at will.

“It’s been a long, long road,” Zephony said quietly, watching the silt swirl in the light of the Lantern Jellyfish, feeling the weight of time and water and loss. “And every time I think I see the end, it doubles back, and I retrace my steps, and I’m no closer to knowing how to change the pattern.”

She tried not to talk to the dead; they didn’t answer, and it wasn’t good for her peace of mind. But in this place, she still remembered the last moment she’d seen Arna, the desperation and love that had driven her adopted mother to try and get her to safety, and it was hard not to think she sensed some tremulous ghost just beyond the edge of sight.

“I still miss you,” she said to the darkness and the ruins and the ghost that wasn’t there. “I always will.”

23. Respite

“Seriously?”

The circle was still glowing with power, though the lines were beginning to fade now the summoning was complete. Its occupant was glaring at Zephony, arms folded, purple eyes narrowed.

“If you’re expecting three wishes, you’re going to be sorely fucking disappointed.”

Zephony managed not to smile, although she was feeling extremely pleased with herself.

“Just testing a theory.”

“Oh for…” Akana glared harder. “Don’t you ever stop? Would it kill you not to know something for once in your life?”

“Quite possibly.”

That earned her a snort of laughter.

“Can’t wait to hear what you think you’ve figured out this time,” Akana muttered. She turned on the spot, looking around her at the high ceilings and carved wood. “Where the hell are we, anyway? Your secret underground lair?”

“Something like that.”

Zephony began to collect the implements she’d used for the ritual. The circle was now only chalk, except for its outer boundary, which still glowed to indicate its function as a barrier. Akana watched her intently. She didn’t seem concerned about being trapped, but then, she rarely seemed concerned about any danger to her person. Zephony hadn’t figured out yet if that was bravado or backed up by truth.

“Oh.” Akana looked up again at the ceiling, her scowl fading into surprise and curiosity. Zephony froze. For a second there was a familiarity to her face that rang like a bell she couldn’t quite hear… “The Hall of Stars? It survived the Fall?”

Akana glanced her way and whatever she saw in Zephony’s expression, it brought the scowl back full force.

“Well?”

“Yes,” Zephony replied, shaking away the uneasy sensation. “Barely, and I was unable to access it for nearly a hundred years, but it survived.”

“And you’re the only one left,” Akana went on, watching Zephony closely. “Haunting the halls of the Order of Twilight like the ghost of your own past.”

Zephony put away the last of the implements. “It serves as a library now. I keep my records here.”

“So this is where all your little books end up. Convenient. Can’t burn down another dimension, or whatever this is.” Akana walked to the edge of the circle and prodded the boundary. Zephony noted that her boot rebounded as if hitting glass. “What now?”

“According to the Estreides, once summoned you can be given commands.”

Akana laughed with genuine amusement, which was worrying.

“I don’t take orders,” she said. “Sometimes I do favours. Depends what they are.”

“I’ve heard stories.”

“I bet you have.” Akana paced around the edge of the circle. “You know, it’s not always about vengeance. Sometimes I find lost kids and puppies and shit. But that doesn’t make such a good threat, does it?”

“The stories say the Estreides have a patron dae of great power, whom they can summon in times of need. Dyne’s Daughter, they call her, or the Lady of Last Light.”

Akana bowed theatrically. “I didn’t choose the names.”

“You like them, though,” Zephony observed dryly.

“Hell yeah. Are you mad I stole one of yours?”

Zephony blinked.

“What?”

Akana smirked at her.

“They used to call you Dyne’s Daughter,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Me?” Zephony knew it was ridiculous to be affronted, but she couldn’t help herself. “Why would they name me after the herald of death?”

“Because you turn up whenever things go to hell,” Akana replied with obvious enjoyment. “They’re like, oh shit, it’s Zephony, better pack a bag and get out of town.”

“That’s– I try to help them–“

“Right, but seeing you around isn’t usually a good sign, you know?”

Zephony started to argue, then paused.

“I suppose they have a point,” she said begrudgingly. “All the same…”

“Oh, relax, like I said, they call me that now. You’re the Watcher or the Chronicler or other stuff like that. You know you had a little cult for a while? People carrying books around and writing everything down like you do. Then they got caught up in one of the purges and someone built a nice big bonfire with all that paper.”

The tone was offhand, edging into cruel, but it couldn’t quite hide the anger behind the words.

“I didn’t know,” Zephony said quietly. “Can you tell me more about them?”

“What’s in it for me?”

“I’ll release you from the circle.”

“Hmm.” Akana fixed her with a look that had Zephony suddenly on alert. “No, I don’t think that’ll cut it.”

She stepped forward. Zephony saw the shimmer in the air where the barrier tried to hold her, and also the fraying of intangible threads as Akana pushed through. The circle flared once, then faded to chalk behind her.

“You shouldn’t be able to do that,” Zephony blurted out before she could stop herself. “No dae should–“

“Looks like your theory’s wrong.” Akana strolled around the room, examining the carved wooden panelling. “You don’t mind if I make myself at home, do you? I could do with a break, away from it all.”

Zephony fought back rising alarm.

“I could banish you–“

“Nope.” Akana turned a wide, smug grin on her. “You really couldn’t. Didn’t think this through, did you?”

Zephony forced herself into composure. As usual, the only defence against Akana’s needling was to refuse to let her know it was working.

“It’s been a long time since I had a guest,” she said. “My hospitality might be lacking somewhat. But if you require sanctuary, you are of course welcome here.”

“Great.” Akana made for the door. “Let’s take a tour, shall we?”

28. Reborn

Almost every culture Zephony had ever encountered believed in reincarnation, one way or another. There were occasional outliers, but for the most part, the conviction was strong, whether dressed up in ritual and legend, or quietly accepted as the natural cycle of the world. Avarra had believed their gods judged the souls of the dead, Cevelas had scorned their faith and avowed that the ebb and flow of souls was eternal and random, Demira had taught that the cycle of reincarnation was one of learning, moving away from chaos towards perfect order…

And in three thousand years, she’d never found proof one way or another. She’d seen ghosts, of course, but they were only echoes, memories caught in the aether, repeating malice or grief or desperation with no true awareness. She’d seen uncanny resemblances, people who could have been the twin of someone who’d come before them. And sometimes, she’d met people who reminded her so strongly of someone she’d lost long ago, that she wondered…

But couldn’t it just be that there were only so many personality traits and physical features to go around? That certain patterns were bound to recur? That she herself might be drawn to those who resembled the people she’d loved before?

It was impossible to know. She’d lost count of the times she’d investigated claims of memories from another life. They’d all been false, one way or another, though she had discovered some interesting truths along the way. If souls were indeed reborn after death, as far as she could tell, they didn’t take any recollections from their previous existence with them. But in that case, could they even be said to be the same person?

Maybe it was foolishness to think that she would ever know for sure, one way or the other. Maybe it was pointless even to entertain the thought. Maybe all she was doing was laying a trap of grief for herself, with the thought that they might return and she might never even know.

And yet… sometimes she could swear she saw Dornan’s smile, heard Zoreste’s laughter. Caught Arna’s frown on the face of someone studying intently. And sometimes, believing she would someday see recognition in one of those faces was all she had to hang onto.

29. Grave

It was raining in the unpleasant way that only the foothills of Gharn seemed to manage: a blend of fog and drizzle that wasn’t enough to soak the unlucky traveller, but brought with it a prevailing damp that worked its way under the thickest of layers. The town was quiet now, order restored, guards patrolling the streets. Zephony followed the rumours until she arrived at the cemetery, a grey space of grey stones under a grey sky, every surface beaded with raindrops, the ground muddy and recently marked by dozens of footprints.

The newest grave was near the back, behind a stand of trees. Akana was sitting under them, knees drawn up, either staring at the freshly carved headstone or past it into nothingness.

“This isn’t a good time,” she said, sending Zephony back to the moment they’d first met. She wondered if there was more linking the two events than the words, but she didn’t voice her curiosity, just made her way to where she could read the engraving on the stone.

“She was just a kid,” Akana muttered.

The name meant nothing to her. The distance between the dates of birth and death was barely more than ten years. Zephony felt a familiar wash of sadness and despair sweep over her.

“She was Estreides?”

“No.” Akana’s voice was flat. “But, you know, she looked at a ghost the wrong way one time, and then there was trouble, and then some fucker decided she was cursed…”

Zephony regarded her for a long moment.

“And you couldn’t save her.”

She saw Akana’s fists clench in answer.

“I don’t understand you,” Zephony said quietly. “I have seen you unleash such power… I’ve seen you do things no dae, no human, no Aetheri should be able to do. And yet at other times… it’s as if you’re shackled. You fumble with spells and rituals like the rest of us, and you struggle to draw even enough from your soulspring to light a fire…”

“Did you come here to rub my face in it?” Akana snarled. “Get lost, Zephony.”

Zephony watched her in silence. Akana glared for a few more seconds, then looked away. She hunched closer over her drawn-up knees. She looked tired, Zephony thought, for the first time in the hundreds of years of their acquaintance.

Zephony sat down beside her and took a small leather book out of her bag. It was lightly warded to protect it from water damage; the rain dripping from the trees above rolled off its pages. A similar cantrip would have protected Zephony from the discomfort of the wet ground and the damp air, but she forbore to cast it.

“Tell me about her.”

Akana snorted dismissively.

“She was nobody,” she said. “She didn’t matter.”

Zephony wrote down the name that had been on the headstone, and the too-scant years the child had lived.

“Tell me about her anyway,” she said.

19. Void

“There are some wounds you don’t heal from.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Believe what you like.” Akana shrugged, gaze still fixed on the distant fires. “It’s true. Doesn’t matter if it’s ten years, a hundred, a thousand. Some things mark you, and you will never be the same. You of all people should know that.”

Zephony looked away.

“Some things mark you,” she agreed, “but that doesn’t mean the wounds don’t heal. They leave scars, but–“

“No.” Akana’s voice was as certain as stone. “Not wounds like these.”

“Then what do you suggest the wounded do?”

“No idea. Lie down and die? Burn down the world? Scream until the stars fall?” Akana turned and began to walk away. “I’ll let you know if any of those work out.”

30. Memory

One of Miyori’s earliest memories was of crying in the middle of the night, but trying to keep her sobs confined to whimpers. She couldn’t have been more than three or four years old, but she’d already learned better than to get her parents’ attention. Having them in the room with her didn’t make the whispers go away, or stop the pressure that built up in her head, or make the shadows that flitted from corner to corner vanish. And they didn’t like it when she tried to tell them about it. They told her to stop making up stories. They told her there was nothing to be afraid of. They told her it was her imagination, and it couldn’t hurt her.

When someone leaned over her bed, she just closed her eyes and curled up tighter, trying to believe that it was only another phantom. Then the figure sighed, and turned on her bedside lamp, and Miyori’s eyes flew open in shock and fear.

“That bad already, huh? This isn’t a good place for you.”

It wasn’t exactly a kind voice, and the stranger certainly didn’t have a kind face; she was scowling down at Miyori like she didn’t like what she saw. It should have made Miyori more afraid of her, but in fact, as soon as she’d seen the stranger’s eyes, the fear had gone away. They were like no eyes she’d ever seen before: a bright purple, her favourite colour. She sat up, momentarily distracted from the voice that was begging for something from just inside her wall.

“Know who I am, girlie?” asked the stranger, still looking down at her.

Miyori started to shake her head, then stopped. There was something in the depths of her mind. She didn’t know where it came from.

“Akana?” she said, uncertainly.

“Hmm, not bad. Maybe you’re learning.” Akana sat down on the edge of the bed. “They bothering you? The whisperers?”

Miyori’s eyes filled with tears again and she nodded.

“They don’t stop.”

“Yeah, that’s their thing.” Akana shook her hair back over her shoulders, and Miyori realised for the first time that it was two different colours, black and white. Like a magpie, she thought. She liked magpies. “Okay, you’re a bit young for this, but you’re too close to the Sea of Storms and you need to learn the basics now or you’ll go crazy by the time you’re eight years old…”

Miyori blinked at her, not really understanding anything. Akana grimaced.

“See, this is why I don’t normally do this,” she said. “It’s easier when you can form a coherent sentence… but whatever. Let’s see if we can make it work.”

She reached out a hand. Miyori shrank back despite herself. Akana sighed.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Hold still. This will help.”

Miyori stayed as still as a statue while Akana pressed one fingertip against her forehead. All at once, the whispers stopped. Silence rang in Miyori’s ears for the first time in… months, and she gasped with shock as much as relief.

“See? Told you.” Akana dropped her hand. “Now, I can teach you to do that yourself, but it’s gonna take a lot of practice–“

Miyori put her hands to her ears and took them away again, then stared intently at the wall.

“It’s gone.”

Akana made a face. “Yes. Yes it is. Damn, I’m going to have to stick around for a while, aren’t I? You’re not going to get this for a couple of years. And I don’t suppose your parents will like it if I rock up at the front door, so I’ll have to do the ghost thing, ugh… hey, are you falling asleep?”

Miyori blinked. She hadn’t meant to. But the silence was so sweet, so total, and with Akana sitting there grousing about things she didn’t understand, she felt so safe… sleep was a heavy weight on her eyes and in her limbs.

Akana sighed. Not unkindly, she gave Miyori’s shoulder a push so that she flopped down onto the mattress, then pulled the blanket up over her.

“Fine. Go to sleep. I’ll keep things quiet for you until morning. But after that, there’s work to do, you hear?”

Miyori nodded sleepily against the pillow because it seemed like that was what she was supposed to do. Akana reached over and turned out the light, then got up from the bed, and for a moment Miyori panicked and tried to reach for her.

“Don’t worry.” There was something like gentleness in her voice for the first time, and something like sadness. “I won’t be far away. I won’t ever be far away, even if you can’t see me.”

If she said anything else after that, Miyori didn’t hear it, or didn’t remember it. For the first time in months, she slept without dreaming other people’s dreams, or hearing the voices of ghosts.

The world of Kestrien has three moons, one continent, a hurricane that never stops, and magic coming out of its hypothetical ears. The main narrative takes place in its modern age, nearly 1500 years after a worldwide apocalypse during which one of the moons, Demira, was shattered, and now hangs broken in the sky.

More About Kestrien

Part 2: City of Light

The city of Vanrillion has been isolated since the Fall of Demira, its tunnels and halls delving ever deeper below the ground. The surface world is lost to them, and the once-great city is shrinking in on itself. Many within make a living of scavenging old technology and old magic. Sometimes they find things better left undisturbed.

5. Infected

“I don’t like the look of it,” Skye said. “It’s been shut too long.”

The door was encrusted with pearl moss, the globular structures that gave it its name gleaming wetly in the lantern light. Without the map they’d been following, it would have been impossible to tell there even was a door here. The corridor was dark apart from their lantern, even its emergency lighting long burned out. It was unpleasantly warm and humid, this far down into the city, and there were constant small noises in the dark, as creatures of the depths hurried away from the unexpected illumination that had entered their domain.

Linette reached out to touch the slimy coating. Skye winced, even though she knew the stuff was harmless. It was just so jelly-like and fibrous. She’d rather run her fingers through almost anything else.

“Not part of the last Retreat after all, then?” Linette said after a moment.

She began to dig her fingernails into the moss, pulling pieces of it away. Skye turned to inspect the rest of the tunnel, and told herself it was because she might find some clue there as to the door’s destination.

“Can’t have been. That stuff takes at least a century to get that thick.” Which probably meant Linette was committing some sort of ecological war crime by scraping it off the door, but Skye couldn’t pretend to be sorry. “The last Retreat was only thirty years ago.”

“So from one of the earlier ones then.”

“Maybe. But we’re higher up than you’d expect. They shouldn’t have been sealing anything off in this sector before the last Retreat.”

She looked back at the door. Linette had cleared away enough of the moss to reveal the handle. An old, rusty chain ran through it, anchored on either side of the door. Skye frowned, peered closer. There was something on the discoloured metal surface, markings…

“Linette, stop.”

Linette drew back from the door at once.

“What is it?”

“Something else I don’t like the look of.”

Much though she hated to do it, Skye stepped closer to the door. She could see the line of something, a place where paint or tape had once been. She reached for the small shovel that hung at her belt, then stopped, realising that she would scrape away the residue as easily as the moss. With a grimace, she prodded gingerly at the stuff with her free hand. Linette had created loose edges with her scratching. Skye was able to tug the slimy gunk away in long strips. It flopped coldly over her hand and she shuddered. But it was enough to confirm her suspicions. Especially when she went to where she knew the next part of the symbol should be, and pulled away the moss, and found the same traces there.

She snatched her hand back as if the door was hot, then grimaced at her own reaction.

“It’s a plague sector,” she said.

Linette recoiled half a step before she, too, controlled her reaction.

“It’s not on any of the maps.”

“It must be an old one. Maybe even from the First Epidemic.” Skye wiped her hand on her trousers, eyeing the door. Now her initial reaction had passed, she felt the beginnings of excitement stirring in her stomach. “Old enough that anything infectious will have long turned to dust. And there could be good things in there, if it was sealed off in a hurry.”

“They will have died badly,” Linette said quietly.

“You think we shouldn’t?”

Linette came back up to the door and laid her hand against it. She closed her eyes, even though it barely made any difference to her in this low light.

“No,” she said after a moment, “I think we should. Someone should. Who knows how long they’ve been in there?”

“Long enough that there won’t be anything left but bones,” Skye said, moving to inspect the chain that held the door in place.

“And ghosts,” Linette said. “Don’t forget the ghosts.”

17. Fungus

Skye had never seen the stars, but she had some idea of what they looked like: bright points of light against a black backdrop. Her first impression when they shifted the last of the rubble blocking the passage was that she was looking at the night sky. She froze in instinctive terror, before rational thought caught up. They’d been digging on Level 184. There was no way they could have reached the surface, and even if they had, Skye knew that the stars had not been visible there for a long, long time.

“What is it?” Linette asked. “I can feel there’s open space…”

“A natural cave,” Skye said. “Wait here.”

She edged through the gap they’d created. The air in the cave was surprisingly cool and fresh for being so deep underground. There must be some distant egress to the surface, hopefully one far enough away that no storm taint could work its way down. Skye kept one hand on the rocky wall as she made her way to the nearest of the little lights that had so startled her. As its shape became clear to her, so too did the scale of the space they’d discovered.

“It’s huge,” she said. She bent to examine the small, cup-like growth on the wall, glowing a cold blue-white. “And it’s full of Heaven’s Tears.”

Linette made a startled sound.

“I thought they were rare–“

“They are.” Skye turned on the spot. “But they’re all over the walls here. Can you see?”

Linette clambered out into the cave, tilting her head up and then looking from side to side.

“No,” she said with audible disappointment. “Just a faint glow.”

Skye moved to her side, took her by the arm, and led her over to the wall. Linette bent close to the Tear, squinting to improve her limited vision.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “How many more are there?”

“Tens of thousands.”

“Oh.” Linette sighed. “I wish I could see them.”

“Yeah,” Skye said, sadness seizing her in a way she seldom permitted. “I wish you could too.”

27. Prey

The tiny cries were faint with distance, but too piercing to be ignored. Skye followed them to a debris-strewn dead-end corridor, and found herself looking down at three pairs of wide, terrified eyes. Behind her, Linette made a soft noise of her own.

“Kittens?”

“Looks like it.” Skye moved to let Linette kneel beside the little creatures, scanning the area for danger. She couldn’t miss the trail of blood that led from the kittens’ nest. There was a lot of it, and it had had time to dry out. “I doubt their mother is coming back.”

“Oh no.” Linette was scooping the kittens into her arms, despite the tiny hisses and wildly waving paws. “Shh, it’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you.”

One of the kittens responded to that by biting her finger, but Linette just winced and put up with it. The trio of kittens were an assortment of colours: one tabby, one black, and one black and white. Two of them had already given up the fight, either too scared or too weak from hunger to do anything but accept their fate. The third, the black and white one, was making a spirited attempt at defending its siblings, but it was so shaky on its small legs, it was having trouble keeping its balance against Linette’s chest.

“We’d better get them some milk,” Linette said.

Skye had been pretty sure that was coming from the moment she’d realised what was making the noise, and had already resigned herself to losing the argument, so it seemed easier just not to have it. Besides, it might be useful to have a cat around to deal with their ongoing rodent problem. She wasn’t sure about three cats, but it would be unthinkably cruel to take just one kitten and leave the others behind to die.

Linette rose carefully to her feet. Skye looked down at the kittens in her arms, then tentatively stroked the head of the black and white one. She got another tiny hiss for her efforts, but it seemed less certain, and she was almost sure she could hear the beginnings of a purr from one of the others.

“Maybe Kiera would like one,” she said. “Come on, let’s get going. We might be able to get some fresh goat’s milk in the market. Otherwise it’ll have to be powder.”

12. Villainous

The riot started on Level 137. Skye didn’t know what set it off. Maybe the city guards pushing someone around. Maybe a food shortage. Maybe nothing at all. The tension had been simmering for weeks. If anything, she was just surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. The lockdowns didn’t come quick enough to stop it spreading to nearby levels, or to prevent the violence that inevitably followed, but the trouble didn’t get as far as 143, and although Skye kept her emergency bag in sight at all times, they didn’t have to abandon their rez and take to the tunnels. Not this time, at least.

Afterwards, there were the usual Directorate announcements about the arrests and executions. The usual threat, and the usual arrogance, a message that was always the same no matter how it was packaged this time. Don’t even try. Just do as you’re told. Everything would be fine if you’d just do as you’re told.

Skye thought it was probably easy to believe that if you lived in the Uppers, with their cooler air and their clean wide passageways and their luxuries. But it was a little too much to choke down when you knew the Depths the way she did, when you saw the people wilting from overwork and the desperation in their faces and the way the gangs took everything they could and only looked out for themselves. When you saw what happened to the people who did as they were told: used up, discarded, and left to rot.

“They had to get the Keepers in,” the bartender told her when she stopped by to check for messages from any of her contacts. “The General himself, I hear.”

Skye scowled. “Mezan? Really?”

“Yeah, so they’re saying. They’re saying the Directorate’s pissed that the city guard keeps letting this stuff happened. Maybe we’re going to be seeing more of the Keepers in the Depths for a while.”

“I fucking hope not,” Skye muttered. The bartender snorted agreement and poured her a drink. “How bad was it on 137?”

The bartender looked away.

“Bad,” she said. “Real bad. The numbers they’ve put out, the executions… three times as many people died, I hear. Taken down during the riot. No patience for arresting folks, the Keepers. They didn’t stand a chance.”

Skye grimaced into her drink.

“They keep pushing people like this, it’s going to get worse.”

“Worse than 137?”

“Yeah. Worse than we’ve ever seen.” Skye sighed and pushed herself off from the bar. “Thanks for the drink. Take care.”

11. Lurking

The air vent was a good spot to hide. Although Kiera was getting too tall to be able to stand up inside the hollow space where a giant fan had once been, she could still sit comfortably in the curve of the grate. The splintered light that fell through the slats was enough to read by if she squinted, or to work on some talismans if she was careful, and remembered what Linette had taught her about working with touch alone.

Today she didn’t feel like doing any of those things. She was staring at a mote of dust in a beam of light and thinking about the fact that she was almost sure it was her birthday. The uncertainty was like a big, aching creature gripping her heart in its claws. Was she still thirteen, or had she turned fourteen already? Maybe it didn’t matter, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. You were born at seven o’clock in the evening, Mikhal used to tell her. I remember because I was supposed to be in bed already, but I couldn’t sleep, because I wanted to meet you. No matter what else happened on her birthday, and no matter how their parents tried to push them apart, he was always there at the right time. Even the year she’d been so upset she’d screamed she hated him. Even the year she’d been so afraid of the voices she’d almost forgotten how to talk. Even the year they’d been separated by half a continent, he’d promised, somehow he’d be there, and she had believed him. She still believed him. If he’d ever had the chance, he would have been there.

But by the time that birthday came, Kiera had been in Vanrillion for over a month, and it had been such a mess of terror, confusion, and madness that she’d had no sense of time, no idea what day or date or season it was. By the time she was able to think about such things again, she could only guess at how the months in this dark city corresponded to the ones she was familiar with. There were no seasons in Vanrillion. Even day and night were governed only by the changing colour of the lights. Kiera thought she’d figured it out. But she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t ever be sure.

Voices from the other side of the grate startled her. She tensed, but she knew she couldn’t be seen from the corridor outside. Some of Barr’s gang? No, it wasn’t anyone she recognised. Their footsteps were loud in a way that made her uneasy. Booted feet, she thought, not the lighter sandals and moccasins worn by most citizens of the Depths. The city guard? But this was an empty sector, away from the patrol routes. The guard didn’t come here except in large numbers, and she could only hear two people…

“I’m not seeing anything.” The voice was waspish with frustration. “If you’re wrong again, Raith…”

“I’m not wrong.”

“We’ve been walking for hours,” snapped the first speaker. “I’m starting to think we’re going in circles.”

“That’s the point.” It sounded like Raith, whoever he was, was running out of patience. “We’re moving in circles as I close in on the reading. If you’d been paying attention, you’d see we’ve been going down a level with each pass.”

“I’ve been paying attention just fine,” replied his bad-tempered companion. Their voices were closer now; they must be right underneath her. “I’m sweating like a pig and there’s nothing but trash down here and I don’t get why you’re so damned determined we’ll find an Arc anywhere in these levels. They’ve been picked clean. I’d be surprised if we even find scrap metal.”

“We’re standing right next to scrap metal, Venash,” Raith snapped back. “You want to start taking that vent apart? Be my guest.”

Kiera shrank back, but Venash’s snort of disdain made it clear that the suggestion hadn’t been a serious one.

“You know what I meant.”

“There’s something down here,” Raith went on insistently. “I’m getting energy spikes every time I look at the readings for these levels. If it’s not an Arc, it’s something else we need to worry about.”

“Oh good,” muttered Venash.

Kiera’s heart was in her mouth. Keepers. They’re Keepers. And there’s an Arc somewhere in this sector? I have to tell Skye. If she can get to it before they do…

They were moving on already, Venash still complaining. Kiera listened until they were out of earshot, hoping for some more information, but all she caught was Raith saying it should only be one or two more levels. She’d have to move fast. All other concerns forgotten, she clambered into the air vent passage as fast as she could.

8. Matrimony

When the ball hit the far wall of the Keepers’ rec room for the fiftieth time, Venash snapped.

“For fuck’s sake, Garren, do that one more time and I’m jamming it down your throat!”

Garren smirked at him, tossing the ball threateningly in her hand.

“I’d like to see you try, pipsqueak.”

She threw the ball into its fifty-first impact against the far wall. Venash was on his feet in a second, tossing aside the report he’d been reading. Tal sighed.

“Enough, Garren.”

“Fine.” Garren stuffed the ball into a pocket. Tal made a mental note to find it and confiscate it later. “We’ll all just sit here and sulk, shall we?”

Venash snarled and Tal finally gave up trying to concentrate on her book.

“Because getting into a fight would be better?” She fixed Garren with a pointed look, which she then transferred to Venash. “It won’t get us out of here any quicker, that’s for sure. Sir,” she added, still looking at Venash. Sometimes reminding him he was supposed to be their commanding officer helped.

He clenched his fists like he was going to start something regardless, but after a moment threw himself back into his chair with a muttered expletive and buried himself in his report again. Tal eyed him for a moment, then shot Garren a silent glare. Garren rolled her eyes. Tal allowed her frown to deepen. Garren finally looked the smallest bit sheepish, and glanced away.

“Stop it,” Venash snapped from behind the folder he was glowering at. “I can hear you looking at each other. It’s disgusting. Why don’t you get married already?”

“We’re not the marrying types,” Garren declared cheerfully. “Too many good looking ladies, too little time, right, Tal?”

Tal rolled her eyes and picked up her book again. It wasn’t hard to hide the jab of pain that went through her. She’d been doing it for so long now it almost felt normal.

“Like you discriminate based on looks,” was all she said, after a moment. “Or at all, for that matter.”

“Hey! I resent that!”

“The word you’re looking for is ‘resemble’.”

“Shut up, or I’m stealing your underwear and leaving it on level 32. Right by that really big rot vermin nest. They can use it for bedding.”

“Try it and you’ll find your shoes full of slime mold again.”

“Oh yeah? I–“

The door crashed open.

“Venash,” Mezan snapped. “Get your team ready to move out within the hour.”

He swept his glance over the rec room.

“Where is Raith?”

“He’ll be ready with the rest of us,” Venash replied, barely looking up from his report. “Anything else? You want a coffee while we’re up there?”

“Just be at the elevator shaft on time.”

Mezan paused as if waiting for Venash to get to his feet. Venash pointedly ignored him. Mezan scowled, turned on his heel, and left the room like a gathering storm. The second the door had shut behind him, Venash lost the dismissive attitude and leapt to his feet.

“I’ll get Raith, you get geared up, do not take more than thirty minutes, and I swear, Garren, if you bring that fucking ball with you I’m leaving you for the lizards.”

He was gone with a haste that could almost be called running to obey orders. Tal wondered, as she often did, just how thoroughly Mezan saw through the insubordinate attitude. She figured he had to have at least some inkling that it was largely for show, or he wouldn’t have been willing to promote a brat like Venash, let alone make him second-in-command.

“Who’s married to who again?” Garren muttered as they gathered their belongings and headed for the door.

Tal half-laughed, then grimaced. “Don’t say that where Raith might hear.”

Garren sighed. “Yeah, yeah. Come on, let’s go kill something.”

3. Predator

Skye wasn’t immediately concerned when the light went out. It happened sometimes; the spellwork on the lantern was old and frayed at the seams. She pulled a roll of matches from one of her belt pouches and struck on against the nearby wall.

She heard and felt it catch, smelled the puff of smoke, but not even a single spark broke the darkness that had fallen over them.

Oh shit.

“Linette–“

Linette’s hand closed on her arm, the tightness of her grip forcing Skye into immediate silence. The darkness was absolute, seeming to press against her eyes like solid rock. It was hard not to panic, even with all her experience of the deep tunnels. Linette moved her fingers in a quick succession of pressure points; Skye swallowed hard. It was a signal they seldom used, and one she dreaded more than any other.

She allowed Linette to lead her, slowly moving back the way they’d come. She thought she could hear something now. A faint sound like silk brushing over stone. She struggled to keep her breathing steady and quiet as she visualised the corridor ahead of them. It had to be close, to be able to snuff out the lantern, but it couldn’t be in the tunnel up ahead, or it would have seen them by now. Or… whatever it was that passed for sight, at least.

So it was in one of the two passages she’d seen leading from the intersection ahead, and it could come around the corner at any moment. She tried desperately to remember how far back the last turning was, even as she kept her footsteps slow and sliding, trusted Linette to navigate her around any obstacles that would make undue noise.

She could hear something else now. A faint rise and fall, like whispering voices too far away to be properly heard. Her skin crawled as her eyes strained uselessly against the darkness. What if it had come out from the intersection after all? What if it was toying with them? Could anyone really say for sure how a shadow dae behaved with its prey? Stories from survivors were few and based only on the sketchiest of impressions…

Linette’s finger’s tapped another signal. Left, five more paces.

It felt like five kilometres. Almost as soon as they were around the corner, Linette ducked down, guiding Skye silently after her into a small crawlspace or cubbyhole of some kind. It was clear that there was no other exit; Linette crouched still as soon as they were both inside, her breathing rapid but barely audible.

Skye brushed away the sweat trickling into her eyes. Slowly, carefully, she inched her sword out of its sheath. If it found them, their chances of survival were slim, even with the bright Sunbeam Arc she’d fitted into the sword’s hilt before they set out. But if it were a choice between going out fighting or otherwise…

They waited in silence. The silken sound continued, as if someone were gliding along the corridor wearing a long robe or heavy dress. The whispering grew louder, though it never crossed the threshold into true hearing. And finally, Skye heard something that was almost like breathing, except it was too ragged, each exhalation too long, the gaps between too wide, and its whole rhythm so inhumanly irregular it maddened the mind to try and follow it…

And then it passed them by. For a moment, just a moment, Skye wanted to leap out of their hiding place and attack it from behind. She’d heard that you stood a chance of killing them that way. But Linette’s hand tightened on her arm, no fingertip signal there, just a silent warning.

Skye sighed, and sheathed her sword. Not today, then. Today, they’d have to slink away like rodents, and leave the Depths in the grip of the shadows.

The world of Kestrien has three moons, one continent, a hurricane that never stops, and magic coming out of its hypothetical ears. The main narrative takes place in its modern age, nearly 1500 years after a worldwide apocalypse during which one of the moons, Demira, was shattered, and now hangs broken in the sky.

More About Kestrien

Part 1: The Seagrave Academy

Ever since the Fall of Demira, the people of Kestrien have blamed magic for their misfortunes. Now the island nation of Thari, troubled by the restlessness of the Sea of Storms on their eastern shores, has defied tradition and built the Academy to try and turn sorcery into science.

10. Storm

The storm was a dark wall on the horizon. Clouds stacked higher than the mind could grasp were slowly creeping closer, their tops surprisingly fluffy and pale, but their undersides nearly black. The line between the sea and the sky was a blur of distant rain. The sea had already changed colour, as if anticipating the storm’s arrival. It was a colour Jenna had never imagined, and found hard to describe: too blue to be called grey, too grey to be called green, too green to be called blue…

She’d never known the sea could be anything other than blue, the colour she’d seen in pictures all her life. Even familiarity with the moods of Lake Deshtar hadn’t prepared her for the breathtaking variety of the open ocean. Or for this storm-colour she couldn’t describe, this leaden hue that sent shivers of dread and anticipation through her in equal measure.

The wind, already brisk, was picking up in strength, and she had to squint directly into it to keep her hair from blinding her. She tasted salt on her lips. The roar of the breaking waves on the rocks below the cliff was beginning to make her ears ring. Her hands were cold, even shoved deep into her coat pockets. It was getting darker by the minute, night sweeping to overtake the clouds, laying out the dusk like a cloak for the oncoming storm.

On the periphery of her vision she could see the lights of Farsea coming on, the yellow-white glow begging her to turn her head towards its comfort. She kept her eyes on the sea, knowing that if she looked towards the town, the lights would dazzle her and make it harder to see through the deepening gloom.

The sea was rolling, churning, breaking itself into waves like walls, bigger and bigger by the second. Sometimes they frothed into a white foam that flashed dangerously in the dusk; sometimes they simply rose and rose until it seemed they’d engulf the clifftop and the lighthouse and the whole of Thari. And then they’d be gone between one gust of wind and the next, and Jenna couldn’t see how they vanished, if they sank again or if they somehow heaped on top of each other to assault the cliff with that endless, booming, yearning roar.

Cold drops of water hit her face. Spray, or the first rain? She couldn’t tell. The clouds had swallowed most of the sky. The sea was so dark it tugged at her eyes, gave her a dizzying sense of vertigo, as though it were a starless sky and she was gazing into the abyss.

She didn’t want to leave. She wanted to stand here as the storm arrived, and open her arms to the rain. She wanted the waters to rise and rush over her; she wanted to sea to engulf every scrap of the world she knew; she wanted to hurl herself into the breakers below…

The intensity of it terrified her. And she was starting to shiver. She could watch the storm from her window just as easily.

She turned to leave. As she did, she caught a glimpse of movement, something that made her pause and squint through the darkness to be sure. Someone else out here, waiting for the rain? She couldn’t be sure. She wondered if that other person felt the same call she did, of sea and sky and stone.

Probably just another student smoking something they shouldn’t be, she told herself. The wind struck her hard enough to shake her footing. Well, they can stay out here and get soaked. I’m going inside.

She told herself the pang she felt as she started back down the path was only tiredness. She fixed her eyes on the lights of the Academy and hurried to get back where it was warm.

15. Feast

“That’s… a lot of fish,” Jenna observed as she slid into the seat next to Mikhal’s.

“Welcome to Thari. You get used to it.” Mikhal was Tharil, but had lived in Merresh until he was sixteen, and so had grown up with the same sort of food familiar to Jenna. “At least, most of it. I’m not keen on anything with tentacles, personally. It’s just…”

He made a wiggling motion with his fingers and pulled a face. Jenna laughed. The table was filling up with other students, most of them already helping themselves from the heaped dishes.

“So what’s good?”

“Depends.” Mikhal picked up his plate and snagged a piece of pink-grey, flaky meat from a nearby serving dish. “Do you like salty, very salty, extremely salty, or pickled to within an inch of its life?”

“Are there any other options?”

“That one over there’s been fermented for six months in a hole in the ground.”

“So that’s what that smell is.” Jenna steeled herself and reached for the nearest set of serving tongs. “Doesn’t anyone just put it in an oven?”

“I think that’s regarded as unimaginative.” Mikhal looked at her expression and laughed. “I’m kidding. This stuff is just the appetisers. There’ll be a main course with hot dishes after. I’m not kidding about the salt, though, so go easy.”

“I knew it.” Jenna glared at him without heat. “Who buries fish in a hole in the ground for six months anyway?”

“Ah… actually I wasn’t kidding about that, either.”

Jenna looked at him, then looked at the jellied, greyish lump in the bowl he’d indicated. Another student was in the middle of scooping out a big, wobbly helping with every sign of keen anticipation. She caught Jenna’s eye and offered her the spoon. Jenna tried not to show her horror on her face.

“But… why?” she whispered to Mikhal.

“Surviving on a narrow strip of land between the sea and the mountains does weird things to a culture’s sense of taste,” Mikhal said solemnly. “As for why we’re still doing it, I can only assume nobody’s told us we can stop.”

Jenna eyed him pointedly.

“Shall I pass it to you, then?”

“Oh Dyne no.” Mikhal shuddered. “It tastes like my worst nightmares. I’m a disgrace to my country. Have a crab cake, they taste like real food.”

7. Crawling

It was large. It was almost definitely in charge. It was coming rapidly towards him. And Kerne was pretty sure his back wheel was caught in a rut on the edge of the causeway.

“Uh… nice…. crabby?” he tried, rocking the chair as hard as he could without unbalancing himself. He only seemed to be working the wheel deeper into the mud. “You’re one of the non-aggressive ones, right?”

The crab raised its enormous claws as if in answer. Was it the green ones, the black ones, or the bluebeard ones you had to watch out for? This one was a deep velvety black and taller than a car. The pincers were impressive, but Kerne would really rather be impressed from a distance. Sweat trickled down his face and he raised an arm to brush it away.

The crab paused. Kerne saw its feelers wiggle uncertainly.

“Wait… seriously?” He raised both his arms in imitation of the crab. “Grr! I’m scary! I’m a scarier crab than you are!”

The crab hunched back on itself. It clicked its pincers as if in challenge. Kerne snapped his fingers in response.

The crab began to retreat. Kerne started laughing, which seemed to alarm it even more. It suddenly turned and scuttled off sideways across the mud flats. Kerne watched it go, and only remembered his camera when it was already too far away to be worth the shot.

“Crap. And that was the whole point of the exercise.”

Kerne lowered his arms, took hold of the wheels, and rolled himself forward a few centimetres. It brought him perilously close to the soft mud drop-off, but it was enough to free his back wheel and reverse onto the solid surface of the causeway. From there, he looked over the mud flats. He could see more of the big black crabs in the distance. Oh well, it had worked the first time. He stuck a finger in the corner of his mouth and let out a piercing whistle.

Sure enough, one of them began to lumber towards him. Kerne grabbed his camera. Next time his cousin called him a liar, he’d have proof. And a cool story.

9. Element

“So.” Jarill was the teacher’s name, a lanky graduate student with long, impossibly golden hair that seemed determined to escape from the loose knot it was bundled into at the back of his neck. He didn’t really look old enough to be the one standing at the front of the class. “The six elements. Who can tell me– no, wait. Is there anyone who can’t name the six elements?”

There was a moment of silence. Jenna was briefly tempted to raise her hand, to prove some sort of point about Merreshana culture and how thoroughly they’d cast off superstition. As if that wasn’t the exact reason she was here; as if she hadn’t spent the last five years arguing with her parents over the necessity of re-examining those beliefs. And anyway, it wasn’t true. Everyone knew the six elements.

“Great,” Jarill went on. He turned to the blackboard behind him and quickly wrote with a piece of chalk: Fire, Air, Water, Metal, Stone, Wood. “So as you know, we’re all here at the Academy to try and figure this stuff out in a way that makes sense. Not just dusty rituals and obscure chants, but magic that can be quantified, tamed, and above all performed safely. And it turns out there’s a lot of rules and a lot of patterns and it’s not as littered with dead goats as you might think!”

Half the class laughed. Jenna was getting slightly annoyed by his attitude. It would be nice if the people in charge would take things seriously.

“But if you try to apply too many of the principles of science to the study of magic,” Jarill went on, “you’re gonna have a bad time. Because there are some things that just don’t fit, and some things you have to take on… faith, for want of a better word. For example, the six elements. You know what happens if you take, say, a stick, and break it down as small as you can?”

“You get splinters?” suggested a boy with bleach-blond hair. Jenna belatedly noticed that he was lounging in a wheelchair rather than one of the standard lecture theatre seats.

“You’re not wrong,” Jarill conceded, to more laughter. “But the other thing that happens is, at some point the pieces stop being wood. They lose that… essence of the element. They won’t work if you try to use them in spells. The elements are real, and powerful, and they can be harnessed, but if you start looking for them in the pieces that make up the world, they slip away like minnows.”

Jenna couldn’t help herself. She raised her hand. Jarill beamed at her.

“Yeah?”

“What about the idea that we invented the elements?” she said. “And that we’re just framing the world in that way because we’ve learned about it?”

“Popular opinion in some parts of the world,” Jarill said. He paused and looked at her thoughtfully for a long moment. “Particularly Merresh.” Before Jenna could bluster any sort of response, Jarill went on, “But yeah, that’s a possibility. The question then becomes, does it matter? If you could take someone who wasn’t born in our modern culture, who had a completely different idea of the make-up of the world, would they still be able to command magic? How can we ever find out? The six elements have been ingrained in every culture since ancient Avarra. Even the Demirans accepted them. So unless and until you want to take third year Philosophy of Magic – which I do not recommend if you like your brain not hurting – that’s one of the things you have to take on faith.”

“And!” Jarill cast a glance over the room. “Here’s another one. What elements make up darkness, do you think?”

“Air?” someone suggested.

“Nope, guess again.”

“Stone, maybe?” said a shy-sounding girl with the darkest black skin and hair Jenna had ever seen. “As in underground caves?”

“Nope.”

Against her better judgement, Jenna raised her hand again. Jarill nodded to her.

“None,” she said. “Because it isn’t a thing. Darkness is just the absence of light.”

Jarill made a noise like a buzzer, or possibly a dying chicken.

“Wrong.”

Jenna felt herself redden.

“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?” she demanded. “It’s a provable fact–“

“Sure, if you’re studying physics. But we aren’t, are we?” Jarill tossed his chalk absently in one hand. “Darkness is a force to be reckoned with. I know you’ve all heard stories about shadow dae. Those aren’t just fairytales. And shadow isn’t just the absence of light. You can assign elements to light – fire, air, metal, wood, even water and stone under the right circumstances. Darkness is another matter.”

“So what is it, then?” interjected the blond boy. “Come on, we all guessed, tell us the answer.”

“Ah, well, about that…” Jarill turned and began to write on the board. “Welcome to Metaphysics 101: What is darkness? We just don’t know…“

16. Rites

“Okay,” Jarill said, undaunted by the small explosion that had just coated his glasses with soot, “maybe not quite like that. Third time lucky?”

“Perhaps we should re-examine the basic tenets…” Lukhan mused, leafing through the sheaf of notes on the lab bench in front of him. “I feel like we’re missing something.”

Rhinn stifled a laugh.

“I don’t know,” she said, “it looks like a series of direct hits to me.”

Jarill made a rude gesture in her direction. Rhinn just raised an eyebrow. Jarill’s labcoat was now scorched in several places, and had turned an intriguing shade of purple all along one sleeve.

“It’s supposed to be a spell to conjure a light breeze,” Lukhan went on absently. Rhinn wasn’t sure he’d even heard the exchange. “Why does it keep doing that instead?”

“Maybe you’re pronouncing the words wrong,” Rhinn suggested helpfully.

“Are you impugning my linguistic skills?” Jarill demanded.

“I’m impugning pretty much everything about you right now.”

“You want to take a turn?”

Rhinn flinched despite herself.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

Jarill seemed not to notice her reaction. She often wondered exactly how much he knew – or guessed.

“Then quit backseat driving.”

“Your hair’s on fire.”.

“It’s just smouldering a bit, it’ll be fine. I have lots of hair.”

“Maybe something about the framing device…” Lukhan was saying.

Rhinn and Jarill exchanged glances.

“Coffee break until he comes back to the real world?” Jarill suggested. “Not that you get breaks, seeing as how you’re not supposed to be here…”

“Sounds good.” Rhinn cast one last amused glance at Lukhan’s distant frown. “You’re buying.”

20. Hunger

Everyone in the Academy had enough to eat. Basic meals were provided three times a day on the Terrace for students, faculty, and guests, and additional luxuries – such as coffee, or dessert – could be bought cheaply enough that there was little space for anyone to go wanting.

And yet, Jenna thought, there was something about Rhinn that looked… starved. It wasn’t her tall, gangly frame, though there certainly wasn’t any spare flesh on her. It was something about her eyes, and the way she watched the students chattering, laughing, and sharing tables, while she sat alone. Something about the hardness of her posture, her expression, refusing to invite pity. Something about her silence, in the middle of all that noise.

“She’s the Chancellor’s daughter?”

“Yeah,” Mikhal had said. “I think that’s why people don’t like her. They think she’s reporting back to him.”

“People don’t like her?”

“Apparently.”

“Have you talked to her?”

“No. She doesn’t seem like she wants company.”

Jenna shot him an incredulous glance. Mikhal was normally so good at reading people.

“Let’s test that theory,” she said, getting up from her seat.

26. Sacred

The lighthouse was built of the black stone that formed the oldest buildings in the Academy, but weathering over thousands of years had made it look as though it had been carved from a single spur of rock. Even up close, you had to squint to see the joins between the ancient blocks. Its strange design looked almost mechanical, like a series of rotating drums stacked on top of each other, though it was clear that the stone had never moved since its construction. Even in the middle of the day, the white glow of the lamp was visible against the clouded sky.

Awe washed over Jenna. Stark and silent and unwavering, the lighthouse was an artefact of another age, something so old it was unimaginable, and which had kept its secrets despite the best efforts of priests, sorcerers, and scientists.

“It’s really never gone out?”

“Not according to the stories,” Shanae replied, her soft voice barely audible over the wind. “After the Fall… people took shelter here when the storm was at its worst. Even though it’s right next to the Sea of Storms, the Shield kept them safer than others further inland. It’s the only reason Thari even exists as a country.”

“But it isn’t an ossolith.”

“Not as far as anyone can tell. It wasn’t damaged when Demira shattered, like the others. And it’s said that it was here even before the Age of Demira, that it was built by Cevelas, or even some older civilisation. They say the Demirans tried to lay claim to it when they returned to Kestrien, but the people here knew even then how important it was. They used to think it was the work of a god.”

Jenna frowned.

“And now?”

“We know better than to believe in gods now, of course,” Shanae said with a shrug. “But still no-one knows what keeps it alight, or how it powers the Shield.”

“I’m surprised no-one from the Academy has tried to take it apart.”

Shanae flinched.

“There’s a whole department dedicated to studying the lighthouse,” she said. “But no-one wants to take the risk of damaging it somehow. Without the Shield…”

She trailed off, but she didn’t have to finish. Without the Shield, Thari could not survive, on the edge of the wild sea and its wild magic.

“Even so,” Jenna said, “you’d think someone with more curiosity than sense would have tried it by now.”

“Enough people still see it as holy,” Shanae said. “It would be unthinkable to interfere directly with it.”

As unthinkable as studying magic in the first place? Jenna wondered, but she didn’t pursue the point.

“Let’s head back. The others should be done by now.”

21. Swarm

At first it was only a shadow on the sea; Jenna took it for a distant cloud or approaching squall. But it moved too fast, and cut too straight a path from the horizon. She pointed it out to Mikhal, who frowned as he shaded his eyes with his hand.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It… doesn’t look right…”

Even as he was speaking, Jenna saw that it wasn’t a shadow so much as a low-lying cloud, racing across the waves like a living thing. It was seconds from reaching Thari’s shore. She heard Mikhal’s sudden indrawn breath.

“Oh shit, we should get inside–“

His hand closed on her arm, but before either of them could move, the cloud reared back like a breaking wave. For a breathless heartbeat Jenna thought it was going to engulf the shore like water, but then she saw that the crest of the wave was curving back the way it had come, as if the cloud were striking an invisible wall and being repelled.

A moment later she realised that was exactly what was happening.

“That’s the Shield?” she whispered.

“Yes.” Mikhal was still gripping her arm, but he seemed to have forgotten his intention to pull her away. “Those… those must be dae. Hundreds of them! Right out of the heart of Dyne’s Storm…”

Jenna tried to push away her fear and play things cool.

“I guess that’s a pretty normal sight in Thari, then,” she said.

“No,” Mikhal replied, voice taut. When Jenna glanced at him, he was as white as a sheet, his eyes fixed on the shadows now darting back the way they’d come. “There is nothing normal about hundreds of storm dae swarming the coast. We’d… we’d better tell someone.”

Behind them, belatedly, a bell began to sound from the Academy, frantic and ominous.

“I think they know,” Jenna said.

25. Celebration

In Merresh there would be snow by now, a thick white blanket under blue skies at high noon, the mountain air breathtakingly crisp and clear. It would be cold, so bitingly cold it was like a crystal knife slashing your exposed skin, but there would be a brightness and brilliance to the sensation, a brief sharp shock to be born as you hurried about your business well-wrapped in coat, boots, and scarf.

In Thari the air was clammy and chill, the wind never seeming to drop from its low moan, the rain never seeming to stop. A grey curtain hung between the heavy grey clouds and the restless grey sea, and everything dripped constantly, every overhanging roof and every branch on every tree. The cold was thick and clinging and penetrated even the warmest layers with nasty little tendrils. As they approached Solstice Eve, Jenna spent as much time as she could indoors, hurrying between buildings when she was forced outside, and often longing for a good log fire on a comforting hearth, rather than the Academy’s effective but uninspiring thermal propagation system.

She thought Kerne was kidding at first when he tried to explain the tradition of the Festival of Lights.

“You’re going to go outside, for hours, and stand around a bonfire, while setting paper boats on fire and throwing them into the river.”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

“Will the rain magically stop?”

“Not usually, no.”

“How about the mud, any chance of that clearing up?”

Kerne shook his head.

“Well, count me out,” Jenna said.

“What? No!” Kerne looked scandalised. “You can’t miss it, not when you’ve never seen it before!”

Jenna glared at him, then turned to Mikhal for moral support.

“I mean, it is pretty amazing,” Mikhal said. “Even with the rain and the mud.”

“How can it possibly… you people are insane!” Jenna shot a glance at Shanae, who shrugged. “Even in Merresh we stay indoors for the day, we just go outside to watch the sunrise and sunset, and it doesn’t rain there…”

“Trust us, it’s worth it,” Kerne promised. “Like, there’s hot wine and food stalls and lots of music and things, and there are tents for if it rains too hard–“

“Oh good, yes, that sounds exactly like how I’d want to spend the Solstice, crammed into a dripping tent with lots of muddy people–“

“– come on, you have to at least try it. Just once. You have to see the lights.”

Kerne’s puppy-dog pleading rarely found success with Jenna, but it wasn’t really Kerne who persuaded her. It was the way Mikhal wasn’t backing her up by telling her she could stay behind if she wanted to. Jenna narrowed her eyes at him. Mikhal looked away.

“I always go,” he said, and Jenna had known him too long not to read half a dozen other things in the simple statement.

“Fine,” she said, and tried not to grimace too hard at Kerne’s triumphant response.

Later, huddled in as many layers as she could pack under her coat, fingers frozen even inside her gloves, Jenna’s opinion hadn’t changed much. Oh, she could see some of the appeal, the carnival atmosphere, the lights of stalls and tents, the music, the crowds… but why not do this in the summer? Yes, it was just as likely to rain then, but at least the air would be warmer, and there would be leaves on the trees, and the daylight would last a few more hours. No amount of delicious spiced wine could make it worth it to be out here, and Jenna was just starting to wonder if she could slip away without hurting anyone’s feelings, when Mikhal appeared from somewhere and towed her through the crowds to the river’s edge.

“We’re lighting the lanterns,” he said. “Here, I’ll get you one.”

It wasn’t exactly a boat. It reminded her more of one of the paper balloons they sent aloft in Shill to celebrate the birth of a child. The candle inside was squat and broad, and though the lantern seemed flimsy, its protection charms were evident in the delicate writing around its waterline and the faint pulse in Jenna’s fingers when she took hold of it. They always made it out to sea, Mikhal had told her. Always.

She dutifully lit the candle from the proffered taper, and followed Mikhal to what looked like a huge fishermen’s net in the water, packed with a shoal of the little paper boats. It was pretty, Jenna supposed, but wouldn’t the sky lanterns be just as pretty, and involve less mud? Still, she held her tongue and let Mikhal lead her over to where the others were huddled near the river bank, passing a large bag of deep fried crab sticks back and forth between them. The short, dull Solstice day was waning, the grey light fading. Somewhere to the west, hidden behind the mountains and the clouded sky, the sun was almost below the horizon.

Someone, somewhere, must have been keeping track of its exact position. Just as Jenna realised that she couldn’t see any trace of twilight left in the sky, there was a shout, and then the sound of a gong being struck, and then a rolling cheer from higher up the river. All at once, the lanterns came flooding past like an avalanche of tiny lights. They raced down the river on the current, a stream of light that seemed to go on and on for far longer than Jenna could understand, until she realised that it wasn’t just the lanterns of Farsea, but those of all the other towns further up the river. And when she looked out to sea, she saw them spreading like a wave of tiny stars, their small magic keeping them afloat and aflame, and as she turned, she saw the same blossoming of tiny pinpricks of light all along the coast, the Sea of Storms assailed by a million and more resilient, rebellious flames.

“There,” Mikhal said quietly, by her ear. “Now the days get longer. Now the light starts coming back.”

Jenna’s breath caught. There were drumbeats behind her, music interspersed with feet stamping, the beginning of the Song of the Dead, and it filled her with a rush, the sense of all these people together in this moment as one, defiant against the dark, refusing to be broken as the Sea of Storms broke itself upon their shore all day and all night. The lanterns had spread so far into the waves that it almost looked as though the stars were being reflected in the sea, the stars that Thari hadn’t seen for hundreds of years.

She found Mikhal’s gloved hand and wrapped it tightly with her own.

“We’re going to find her,” she said.

“Yes,” Mikhal replied, his eyes reflecting a dozen dancing lights as he looked out to sea. “We are.”

2. Heroic

Mikhal tried ramming his shoulder against the tree one last time. The sturdy trunk barely flinched, whereas his shoulder tipped over from a mild ache into outright pain. Mikhal grimaced, stepped back, and looked up into the branches.

The Dragonfly Dancer (‘really flies! really dances! for children 4 and up!’) was still securely wedged into place far above their heads. Mikhal had become privately dubious over the last few days as to whether the toy really was suitable for a 4-year-old, given how far it was capable of going, and how little control said 4-year-old had over its course. This latest incident wasn’t doing much to assuage his doubts.

“I think it’s stuck for good,” he said.

Kiera tore her eyes away from the brightly coloured gossamer wings peeking out of the leaves, and looked at him with heartbreaking incredulity.

“Oh,” she said. Tear began to well up in her eyes, but she looked down at the ground and bit her lip. After a moment, she just said, “Okay.”

No, not okay. Not okay at all. Not okay that Kiera was crying. Not okay that she had already learned not to trouble people with it. She was only four! When he’d been four, he’d screamed if he’d so much as bumped his head, and their parents had comforted him, like parents were supposed to. But Kiera… Kiera was already learning not to cry. And not to expect much. And not to get too attached to anything or anyone.

Mikhal looked back up at the tree. It wasn’t that tall, was it? I mean, yes, okay, it was taller than the house, technically, but the dragonfly wasn’t so very high up. And he was nine years old, which meant he was practically a grown up, and definitely shouldn’t still be afraid of heights.

… it was pretty high up, though. Higher than the garden wall. Almost high enough to see into his bedroom window. Mikhal felt sweat breaking out on his forehead. It would be so easy to just take Kiera back inside and pretend nothing had happened. He knew Mother wouldn’t do anything about the lost toy. She’d tell him he shouldn’t have bought it for Kiera in the first place, just like she had every day for the last week. Kiera wouldn’t make a fuss. Kiera tried so hard now not to make a fuss.

“I’ll get it for you,” Mikhal promised.

Kiera turned big hopeful eyes on him. And he’d said it now, so he had to do it. There were a couple of branches low enough that he could jump up, grab one, and pull himself up the trunk of the tree with it. That part wasn’t too bad, he was hardly off the ground. Even the next branch was okay. It wasn’t much different from climbing up the stairs. The rough bark of the tree hurt his hands a bit, but it gave him grip, made him feel he was secure when he levered himself further up.

Maybe I’m not scared of heights anymore, he thought, pleased by the notion. Maybe I grew out of it.

Then he got up high enough to see over the garden wall. The Tharil Embassy was built on one of Deshtar’s many escarpments of rock. Although the entrance to the complex was at street level, the land at the back fell away steeply. It meant that the Consul’s official residence had a view all the way to the shores of the lake. And it meant that Mikhal had a view right down a sheer drop to the rooftops of the Craft Quarter.

Everything seemed to spin for a moment as a hot rush of terror throbbed through Mikhal’s head. He closed his eyes and clutched tightly to the branch. His heart was pounding so heart he thought it would choke him. His arms were shaking. The idea of moving so much as an inch was impossible. All he could do was hold on and hope the drop didn’t leap up and get him…

“Mikka?”

“Yeah?” Mikhal said, trying to keep his voice calm. It came out higher pitched than he’d have liked, but Kiera didn’t seem to notice.

“You’re nearly there.”

He cracked one eye open just enough to peer along the branch. Sure enough, he could see those rainbow wings, fluttering a little in the breeze. Kiera was right, he was nearly there. He wouldn’t have to move far at all, he could just lie along the branch, push himself out with his feet, grab it…

He could feel the view behind him. The rational part of his mind tried to point out that the branch he was on was over the garden, that even if he fell, he’d only land on the lawn. And also, drops couldn’t sneak up on you and drag you down into them.

It was about as much use as reasoning with an angry cat.

“Mikka? Are you okay?”

She looked worried now. No, she looked scared: scared that something was wrong with her big brother, scared that it was her fault. Mikhal took a deep breath. Then he hauled himself onto the branch, pushed with his toes, grabbed the dragonfly, scrambled back to the trunk of the tree, and half-climbed, half-fell out of the tree as quickly as he could.

“Here you are.”

His breath was coming too fast and he felt dizzy and he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just done, but it was worth it. Kiera’s face lit up as she took the fairy figure from his hands and hugged it – careful of the delicate wings – and petted its pink and purple hair like she thought it might have been scared. Mikhal found his legs were wobbly, so he sat down on the grass and tried to think about something other than that long, long drop over the garden wall. Kiera sidled in close to him; he absently put his arm around her.

After a moment, he felt her petting his hair. He was a little embarrassed to admit that it helped.

“I think maybe the dragonfly dancer should dance a bit less enthusiastically from now on,” he said.

“Yeah,” Kiera replied. “She needs to be more careful.”

Mikhal laughed and squeezed her tightly.

“Let’s go inside.”