For the first time in her life, she is truly heard.
A piercing cry rings forth from the skies. The screech is less heard with her ears than with her entire body. The scream cuts through her skin, sharp enough to reach bone. The force lifts the hairs over her body. She opens her eyes and sees the reptilian beast slide to a stop in the mud, coming to rest no more than an arm’s length from her. Panicked, the beast twists and writhes to turn its massive bulk, to return to the safety and succor of black water.
Before it can, branches shatter overhead. A shadow dives through the canopy and crashes into the beast. Sickle-shaped claws cleave through hard scale. Bones break under the impact of a creature as large as a hay cart. Leathery wings snap outward, striking her broadside, knocking her from her child.
She is flung far and crashes into the twisted trunk of a tree. She collapses amidst the tangle of its roots. From her side, she watches those heavy wings beat once, lifting the creature back into the air. The reptilian beast is carried aloft. Impaled claws rip it into halves and fling its centuries-old body back into the dark waters.
Then the winged creature lands in the mud.
It swings toward her, revealing its malignant splendor. It holds high its leathery wings, thin enough at the edges to see the sparkle of patchy sunlight through them. It keeps its head low, close to the ground. Large tufted ears swivel toward her. Its long slitted nostrils fan open wider, rippling, testing the air. It hisses at her and raises a furred ridge along its short neck and arched back.
She knows this beast, all of Azantiia knows them, the terror of the swamps, the dreaded M?r bats, the poisonous denizens of the shrouded volcanic mountain—The Fist—at the heart of these drowned lands. Stories abound of these creatures—though few had ever lived to tell a tale of such an encounter. No hunter had ever returned with such elusive, dangerous prey. Not even their bones had ever made it into one of the castle’s bestiaries.
With her heart choked in her throat, she studies the monster before her.
Merciless eyes, as cold as black diamonds, stare back at her. A continual hiss flows from its throat. Her hairs shiver to a sound beyond hearing. She feels it in her teeth, in her skull, playing across the surface of her brain, like an oil fire on water. She knows she is being studied more deeply than any eye could discern.
Its lips wrinkle back in threat, exposing long fangs, glinting with a sheen of poison. It stalks closer to her, knuckling on its wings.
No, not closer to her—but toward the baby in the mud.
Tiny limbs paddle at the air, as if beckoning the beast.
She tries to move to her daughter’s defense, but she has lost her knife. Not that it mattered. She has no strength left to even crawl. Her body is as cold as the mud under her. All that is warm are the tears coursing her cheeks. Knowing there is nothing more she can do, she accepts the inevitable and sags into the tree’s roots.
Darkness embraces her.
Before it consumes her, she stares one final time upon her child. While she failed to give the girl a life, she had given her a gift almost as precious.
Her freedom—as brief as it might be.
She takes solace in this as the shadows erase the world.
But another was not so easily satisfied.
As she fades away, she hears her babe’s first cry, lustful and angry. She can do nothing to comfort that wail at a life cut before it has begun. Instead, she offers her final counsel, a lesson hard learned.
Better to die free, my daughter.
ONE
THE BECLOUDED GIRL
A curse allesweis growes from a wyssh.
—Proverb from The Book of El
1
NYX SOUGHT TO understand the stars with her fingertips.
Near blind, she had to lean far over the low table to reach to the heart of the orrery, to the warmth of the bronze sun at the center of the complicated astronomical mechanism. She knew the kettle-sized sphere had been filled with hot coals prior to the morning’s lesson, to mimic the life-giving heat of the Father Above, who made His home there. She held her palm toward that warmth, then took great care to count outward along the slowly turning rings that marked the paths of inner planets around the Father. Her fingers stopped at the third. She rested a tip there and felt the vibrations of the gears that turned this ring, heard the tick-tick-ticking as their teacher spun the wheel on the far side of the orrery to drive their world to Nyx’s waiting hand.
“Take care, child,” she was warned.
The device was four centuries old, one of the school’s most precious artifacts. It was said to have been stolen from the courts of Azantiia by the founding high prioress and brought to the Cloistery of Brayk. Others claimed it wasn’t stolen, but crafted by the prioress herself, using skills long lost to those who lived and taught here now.
Either way—
“Better not break it, Dumblefoot,” Byrd blurted out. His comment stirred snickers from the other students who sat in a circle around the domed chamber of the astronicum.
Their teacher—Sister Reed, a young novitiate of the Cloistery—growled them all to silence.
Nyx’s cheeks heated. While her fellow students could easily observe the intricate dance of spheres around the bronze sun, she could not. To her, the world was perpetually lost in a foggy haze, where movement could be detected in shifts of shadows and objects discerned in gradations of shimmering outlines in the brightest sunlight. Even colors were muted and watery to her afflicted eyes. Worst of all, when she was inside, like now, her sight was smothered to darkness.
She needed to touch to understand.
She took a deep breath and steadied her fingers as the small sphere that marked their world rotated into her hand. The bronze ring to which it was pinned continued to turn with the spin of the wheeled gears. To keep her fingertips in place atop the fist-sized sphere of their world, she had to scoot around the table. By now, the bronze sun had heated one surface of the sphere to a subtle warmth, while the opposite was cold metal, forever turned from the Father.
“Can you now better appreciate how the Mother always keeps one face perpetually gazing at the Father Above?” Sister Reed asked. “A side that eternally burns under His stern-but-loving attention.”
Nyx nodded, still circling the table to match the sphere’s path around the sun.
Sister Reed addressed both her and the other students. “And at the same time, the other side of our world is forever denied the Father’s fierce gaze and remains frozen in eternal darkness, where it is said the very air is ice.”
Nyx did not bother to acknowledge the obvious, her attention fixed as the Urth completed its circuit around the sun.
“It is why we live in the Crown,” the sister continued, “the circlet of the world that lies between the scorched lands on one side of the Urth and those forever frozen on the other.”
Nyx ran her fingertip around this circumference of the sphere, passing from north to south and back again. The Crown of the Urth marked the only hospitable lands where its peoples, flora, and fauna could flourish. Not that there weren’t stories of what lay beyond the Crown, terrifying tales—many blasphemous—whispered about those dreaded lands, those frozen on one side, scorched on the other.
Sister Reed stopped turning the wheel, bringing the dance of planets to a rest. “Now that Nyx has had her turn to study the orrery, can anyone tell me why the Mother Below eternally matches her gaze with the Father Above, without ever turning her face away?”