She thought for a moment before she shrugged. “Guess that’s the end of what I have to say.” Then she marched off the platform.
Not everyone in the world had access to the Dreamway. Outside Everwood, most couldn’t draw from it freely, and only received messages when Emriss went through the great expense of sending them. The factions that could be reached by such transmissions typically took responsibility for disseminating them to lesser organizations. They were usually the ruling powers of their territories. The Monarch factions.
Like the Akura clan.
Mercy didn’t know where the message was coming from; she only knew that her family was getting messages from Everwood by every channel possible. At first, she assumed they were related to the Silent King.
Then someone said Yerin’s name, and she found a messenger construct relay of her own.
Yerin’s speech flowed into Mercy’s memory as though she’d been there herself, but she stiffened in shock at the content.
Shock. Followed by confusion, dread, and the first sparks of anger.
Mercy spoke into the air. “What is this all about, Mother?”
22
In the starry world of the Soulforge, Lindon hammered his will into shape.
Genesis, his double-headed hammer, cracked down on the ball of dead matter that resembled a bundle of skeletal hands all clasping one another. With each blow of the hammer, Lindon drove in a silver rune from the Rune Queen and bound it with his intentions.
When the script was complete, it slowed the time inside the sphere to a crawl.
Lindon didn’t have the knowledge or experience to alter every single law of a pocket world. He couldn’t craft it to his exact specifications.
But he didn’t need to do that. Reigan Shen had done it for him.
Ziel stood with him, supplementing his will and providing detailed instructions on the operation of the ancient script. Without him, Lindon and Dross would have been forced to spend more valuable time simulating and practicing this operation.
“Will you be able to finish everything before the Dragon gets here?” Ziel asked.
“Pardon, but the Weeping Dragon isn’t coming here. It’s headed wherever I am, and I don’t intend to be here.” Lindon paused for a moment when he finished one line of script to take a breath. “And I don’t need to finish anything but this. In here, we’ll have plenty of time.”
Ziel shook his head. “I just can’t believe you did it.”
“That was the easy part.” Lindon returned to hammering. “They didn’t know what we were after, so their defenses were light. But we’re still missing the most critical component.”
Yerin stood at the entrance to the Soulforge and she gave one decisive nod.
Ziel sighed. “It would make more sense to do this after entering the time-locked pocket world. We don’t have forever.”
Lindon hammered the final silver sigil into place, and the web of scripts around the ball shone silver. The entire space was filled with a triumphant, radiant note.
“That’s why we’re going…” Lindon tossed the ball to Ziel. “…now.”
They left the Soulforge, and then he and Yerin vanished.
While Malice observed the situation from one of her floating cloud fortresses, her irritation had reached its peak.
Her peers were incompetent.
They had allowed one Sage and one Herald to walk straight into their strongholds and take whatever they wished, like children plucking candy from the shelves. Now the Dreadgods were coming to her territory, again, as always seemed to be the case these days. Once the Weeping Dragon arrived, she would have the distasteful distinction of ruling over the only continent since the Dread War to have been invaded by all four Dreadgods inside five years.
These children had slapped her in the face publicly with their every action. She’d raised Lindon and Yerin like they were her own, and they’d prospered in her territory. Even represented her in the Uncrowned King tournament. She’d allowed her own daughter, her favored daughter, to shirk her responsibilities and travel with them.
In exchange, they were working to topple everything she’d worked for.
The message in the Dreamway was the flame that would ignite their funeral pyre. It was not an insurmountable problem on its own; the average person wouldn’t see the message, wouldn’t comprehend it, and couldn’t do anything about it if they did.
Over the years, there had been other leaks of information that had been easily controlled. “The Monarchs and the Dreadgods are working together!” was a popular conspiracy theory, especially as most never received a full education on the history of the Dread War.