And she wasn’t going to let anyone stand in her way.
Focus, the Amirante would say over and over during their training sessions. Words to meditate on. Aether is the prime element, the one that binds all the others together and connects each dimension to the next. Every once in a while, an aethermancer is brought into this world—someone who can traverse the aether’s path in specific ways. Rainsingers. Firedancers. Shadowforged. Windcallers. Thunderstruck. Enchanters. And you.
The Lightweave is the thread and you are the spinner. It will do as you command.
So, tell it what you want.
The giant legionnaire was flailing on the ice like a turtle on its back, his bulky armor cracked in several places, blood seeping through. Talasyn narrowed her eyes at him and stretched an arm out to the side, her spread fingers tugging back the veil between this world and others, opening the Lightweave once more. The weapon that appeared in her open palm, summoned from one of several realms of magical energy that existed within aetherspace, resembled the long, wide-bladed daggers that had saved many Sardovian infantrymen’s lives in melee, except that it was fashioned solely from golden light and silver aether. Its serrated edges blazed in the gloom like wisps of sun.
The Shadowforged’s panic was almost tangible, despite his mask. He scrambled backward on his elbows as Talasyn advanced. It looked as though his legs weren’t working, and perhaps, in the time before, a part of her would have quailed at the thought of killing someone so obviously incapacitated and defenseless. But he was one of the Legion and the Hurricane Wars had hardened her, loss after loss whittling away at the child she’d once been until there was nothing left but fury.
And sunlight.
Talasyn plunged the dagger into his chest—or she tried to. In that scant sliver of a second before the tip of the blade met the plate mail encasing his torso, something—
—someone—
—loomed up from out of the darkness—
—and her dagger slid against the crescent’s edge of a war scythe conjured from the Shadowgate.
With her concentration disrupted, the light-woven dagger fizzled out of existence and Talasyn was left clutching at empty air. It was instinct, too, the thing that made her leap back, narrowly avoiding her new assailant’s next sweeping strike.
The coin-bright rays of the seven moons sketched in mottled hues another legionnaire that, while not as statuesque as the giant that Talasyn had just felled, was tall and broad and imposing nonetheless. Over a long-sleeved chainmail tunic, he wore a belted cuirass of black and crimson leather, with spiked pauldrons and scaled crimson armguards connected to black gauntlets, their tips pointed like claws. The fur-trimmed hood of a winter cloak the color of midnight framed his pale face, the lower portion of which was shrouded by an obsidian half-mask embossed with a design of two rows of wickedly sharp, wolfish teeth, captured in an eternal snarl.
The effect was nightmarish. And, while Talasyn had never encountered this Shadowforged before, she knew who he was. She knew what the silver chimera on the brooch atop his collarbone meant. A lion’s roaring head affixed to the serpentine body of a brocaded eel, rearing up on the hooves of the spindlehorn antelope—Kesath’s imperial seal.
Fear stole the breath from her lungs, as razor-edged as the winter on this mountain.
People always said that Alaric of House Ossinast, Master of the Shadowforged Legion and Gaheris’s only son and heir, had the most piercing gray eyes. Those eyes shone a bright and chilling silver with the glow of his magic under the seven moons, looking directly into hers.
She’d been warned about him. She had known that she would one day have to face him.
That day had come too soon.
Then he was upon her with his flickering scythe of smoke and ink, and doubtless her terror was etched all over her face and across her trembling lips. Acting on pure instinct, she resummoned the Lightweave into the shape of two daggers, one in each of her shaking hands. The scythe clashed against the dagger on the right, sending vibrations all the way up her arm as she raised it overhead. She put all her strength into shoving him away, but he was quick to recover, coming at her again.
Oh, it was on.
Talasyn often sparred with the Sardovian regiments’ Blademaster as part of her training, but no blow from a metal sword could hold a candle to the sheer pulsating magic of the Shadowgate, and practicing with a mentor was a fair wind compared to someone actively trying to kill her. Especially when that someone was nearly twice her size and had reportedly been trained in the ways of the Shadowforged from the moment that he’d learned how to walk.
It was all Talasyn could do to dodge and to parry as Alaric drove her across the ice floes, his injured subordinate forgotten. Each dark barrier dissipated as they passed through it, as if he were banishing them—but to what end? Perhaps he took some sadistic joy in drawing this out, in playing with her as a cat would play with a mouse. She would never know and she wasn’t about to try to ask him.
Kesath’s crown prince was relentless; he moved like a thunderstorm, powerful and everywhere all at once. Shadow careened into light in a conflagration of aether sparks—once, twice, a million times. The flimsier patches in the sheets of ice cracked under the soles of her snow boots, spatters of lake water splashing at her woolen breeches, painfully cold wherever they landed. His blade easily dwarfed both of hers, and on more than one occasion she tried to shape her desperate will into a shield, tried to achieve what had eluded her ever since she began aethermancing, but she still couldn’t. More than once, she left herself wide open as she failed to conjure a shield, his scythe breaking through the flimsy weapon that she hastily cobbled together at the last minute, and she received sharp and shadow-spun cuts to her arms for all her trouble.
And then there came a moment when Talasyn teetered on the very edge of the ice floe and Alaric swung the war scythe from the side and there was no time for her to turn, to block, and she didn’t know how to make a shield—
She brought her hands together. The two daggers turned into a morningstar flail and she swept the shaft in his direction. The golden chain wound around the scythe’s blade and caught, and she hauled him toward her with all her might.
He shifted his weight and dug his boots into the ice, foiling her attempt to outbalance him. They stood mere inches from each other, both of them one ill-advised movement away from falling into the lake, their weapons tangled together at their sides. Alaric’s hood had slipped off at some point, revealing a tousled halo of wavy black hair. The eyes that Talasyn could see above the fanged snarl of his half-mask were sharp and unnervingly intent. He was tall enough that she had to lift her chin to meet his gaze.
She was breathing heavily from the exertion and he seemed a bit winded as well, his broad chest rising and falling in unsteady beats. But when he spoke, it was in smooth, low tones, so deep that it seemed as though the night grew darker around them.
“I was not aware that Sardovia had a new Lightweaver at their disposal.”
Talasyn’s jaw clenched.
Nineteen years ago, in what was now known as the Cataclysm, two neighboring states in the Sardovian Allfold had gone to war with each other—Sunstead, which had been home to every Lightweaver on the Continent, and the Shadow-ruled kingdom of Kesath. After Lightweavers slew Ozalus Ossinast, his son Gaheris ascended to the throne and led Kesath to victory, forcibly annexing Sunstead; in the same breath, Kesath tore away from the Sardovian Allfold and began styling itself the Night Empire. Gaheris had taken on the mantle of Night Emperor, and he and his Shadowforged Legion had killed all the Lightweavers and destroyed their shrines, leaving no trace of them on the Continent. Except . . .