KAELITHAR

I only feel alive when I am asleep.

The waking world is sand and fools and the white, scorching eye of the sun. But the dream is mine. A fractured void of obsidian and drifting violet mist, where the ground is made of broken glass and the sky has no stars at all.

Except one.

You.

I find you at the edge of a precipice of silver glass, the way I always do. Your back is to me. Your burial silks move around you in a wind I cannot feel, pale as moonlight, soft as the inside of a shell. And you are shining. Not like the sun. The sun burns and blinds and lies. You glow like a star seen from the bottom of a well: distant, steady, and so beautiful it hurts to look at.

Three hundred years I have been coming here.

Three hundred years, and you have never once turned around.

"Starlight."

My voice comes out ruined. A rasp of shadow and old blood. I step toward you, and the darkness clings to my boots like tar, dragging, slowing me down. It always does. The dream does not want me to reach you.

I don't care what the dream wants.

"Turn to me."

You don't.

Instead, your voice moves through me. Not through the air. Through my bones. Through the hollow place in my chest where something human used to live.

The sky breathes beneath the stone, my King. The roots of the mountain strangle the sun.

"Riddles." My lip curls. "Always riddles."

I reach for you. My gauntleted hand is shaking. I hate that it shakes. I have torn the hearts out of carapace-beasts with these hands. I have crushed the throats of kings. And I cannot keep them steady when they reach for you.

The tether pulls taut between us.

It burns. A single golden thread running from the center of my chest to the center of yours, hot as a brand, the only warm thing that has touched me in three centuries. It is the reason I did not die in the Wastes. It is the reason I am no longer entirely a man.

"Stop speaking in ciphers," I beg. And I am begging. I would never let another living soul hear me sound like this. "Tell me where you are. Just tell me where. And I will slaughter every god that stands between us."

You tilt your head. Just slightly. For one breathless moment, I think you are finally going to look at me.

The forgotten sleep where the first crown fell, you whisper. Find the silence.

Then you begin to dissolve.

Light, coming apart at the edges. Unraveling like silk thread.

"No."

I lunge.

My fingers close on nothing. On mist. On the empty, freezing air where you were standing a heartbeat ago.

"No! You do not get to leave me! Stay! Stay with me—"

The mist swallows you whole.

And the dream shatters like glass.

I wake with a violent gasp.

The tether snaps back into my chest like a whip, and for a moment, I cannot breathe. The pain of it is physical. As if someone has pried my ribs apart with a rusted crowbar and torn out whatever was beating behind them.

Hollow.

I am always so hollow when I wake.

The room is freezing. Frost has spread across the ceiling in black, feathered patterns, creeping down the walls, crackling over the stone. My own magic, bleeding out of me. Reacting to my rage.

In the corner, something enormous stirs.

Morkai rises from the shadows to his full height, horse-sized and shifting, a mass of living smoke with two burning red embers for eyes. He made no sound as he slept. He makes none now. He only fixes his gaze on me and peels back his lips, revealing teeth of cold white mist.

A soundless snarl.

He can feel it, too. Through the bond. The violence coiling in me like a struck snake.

"I am awake," I tell the darkness.

My voice has nothing left in it. No warmth. Nothing that could be mistaken for mercy.

I swing my legs over the edge of the bed. The stone floor frosts white beneath my bare feet.

"And the world will bleed for it."

I flick my wrist, and the shadows answer.

My armor rises out of the dark. Black starmetal fused with the bones of the beasts I slew in exile. The plates snap onto my body one after another, with a sound like ribs breaking. Pauldrons. Vambraces. A breastplate scored with three hundred years of scars.

Last of all, I lift the crown.

It is made of solidified shadow, jagged and shifting, and it bleeds. When I set it on my head, the darkness runs down my forehead in slow black rivulets, like blood from a wound that never closes.

I look down at Morkai.

"No more searching," I tell him. "Today, we start breaking things."

Hours later, the throne room of Zylvargard is a tomb.

That is how I prefer it.

Carved into the sun-sheltered face of Mount Krukos, the hall is black stone from floor to vaulted ceiling. The only light comes in through a single great window of stained glass, filtered into bruised violet and deep red. Outside, the white sun scorches the Bleached Wastes to glass. In here, it cannot reach me.

The air is so cold that my courtiers' breath hangs in front of their faces. No one speaks. No one moves. The only sound is the faint, low hum of my magic in the walls.

I sit upon the Obsidian Throne, rigid and still, and let my presence settle over the room like a hand pressing down on every throat.

High Diviner Ysmera lies prostrate at the foot of the dais, her forehead against the frozen floor. Her robes of woven starlight pool around her. She is trembling so violently that her staff rattles against the stone like teeth.

There is blood running from her nose. Bright and fresh. The price of scrying too deep into the Mirror-Lake of Xar.

I do not offer her a handkerchief.

"You have five seconds," I say softly. "Or I will feed your tongue to Morkai."

At my feet, the shadow-wolf lifts his great head. His jaws part. He doesn't growl.

The silence is worse.

"My King…" Ysmera chokes. She doesn't dare lift her head. "The Mirror-Lake. The silt cleared. For the first time in three centuries, it cleared. I saw… I saw the seal."

The temperature in the room plummets. Frost races across the floor toward her outstretched hands.

"Where?"

"Beneath the roots of Mount Krukos." She is weeping now. "The oldest texts call it the Tomb of the First King. But the magic around it, Sire, it is not a ward. It is a prison. It repels all sight. All sound. It is…"

She swallows.

"It is breathless."

The sky breathes beneath the stone.

The roots of the mountain strangle the sun.

The forgotten sleep where the first crown fell.

The riddle clicks into place, and something inside me goes very, very still.

Mount Krukos.

The mountain this city is carved into. The mountain this throne sits upon.

For three hundred years, I have burned libraries, shattered nations, and dug up ten thousand graves in the Crypts of the Faceless looking for you.

And all this time, you have been sleeping beneath my feet.

I rise.

The shadows in the room rise with me, crawling up the walls, swallowing the violet light from the window.

"Zarek."

Commander Zarek steps out of the dark near the pillars, his iron armor scraping, the dragonbone greatsword heavy across his back. He is the only man in this court who looks at me without shaking. That is why he is still alive.

"Sire."

"The Tomb of the First King," I say. "It lies beneath Mount Krukos. I want the Shadowguard in the deep tunnels by nightfall. Every miner. Every slave. Every pick, every drill, every barrel of blasting powder in the kingdom. If the mountain refuses to yield, you will shatter it."

Zarek's jaw tightens.

"Sire, the capital is carved into that mountain. If we breach the roots, the structural integrity of the entire city—"

"I do not care if the city falls into the abyss!"

My voice cracks through the throne room like thunder. The shadows erupt. Black spikes tear up out of the floor in a ring around the dais, and somewhere behind me, a noblewoman screams.

"I do not care if you pave every road from here to the Wastes with corpses! I do not care if Zylvargard slides off the mountain and the whole court goes with it!" I am breathing hard. The scars across my skin are blazing violet. "Open that tomb."

Silence.

Zarek bows his head. "Yes, my King."

Slowly, the spikes sink back into the stone.

I turn away from all of them and walk to the great stained-glass window. Far below, the city clings to the mountain in the shade. Somewhere beneath it all, deep in the breathless dark, a single star is waiting.

I press my gauntleted hand flat against the glass.

I imagine your throat beneath my fingers. Your pulse. Real. Warm. Found.

Mine.

"Find the silence," I whisper.

And for the first time in three hundred years, I smile.

"I am coming, my Star. And I am bringing the dark with me."

That night, I drink the Nightshade wine and I sleep.

The void opens around me, obsidian and violet mist, and there you are, at the edge of the silver glass. The same as always.

But tonight, the tether is tighter. Hotter. It pulls at the center of my chest like a fist closing.

You are closer.

I can feel it.

"I know where you are," I breathe.

The mist stills.

I take one step toward you, then another, and for the first time in three centuries, the dark does not drag at my boots.

"I know where you are, Starlight," I say again, quieter. My voice breaks. "So turn around."

I stop just behind you, close enough to touch.

"Look at me."