This Blade of Ours (This Monster of Mine #2)

Prologue Her

“Beware you would-be, God-Summoners! Take heed, all you who would call the Elsar to our plane!

For when the infinite touches the finite, the latter does not emerge unscathed.

A scar forms at the point of the meeting.

And from it, what blood will spill? Who else will part the seams of our world as a sword does flesh and enter?

Aim not for the lofty. Restrict yourselves to prayer and relinquish the selfishness of seeking out a personal boon. Let us worship as a hand does by the hearth. Plunge not into the fire!”

—excerpt from The Teachings of Inquisitor Caminus of Ur Dinyé

The collapse of a country was a quiet affair.

Few historians would agree. They preferred to point to crushing defeats in battle, assassinations, or civil unrest to explain the peaks and troughs of political chaos.

Yet, those were merely the symptoms of a rotting land’s disintegration.

Its cause would have snuck in earlier, quiet enough that no academic would entirely pin it down and capable enough to reach gnarled fingers through history to throttle the present.

Countries died in silence. As Ur Dinyé would today. Its current iteration, at least.

Her lips lifted in a smile. Squinting against the wind hurling orange sand across the Xārōmand Desert, she urged her mare toward one of the imposing mountains ahead.

Thousands of miles long, the Kaycakh Range’s jagged terra-cotta peaks formed a land border separating Ur Dinyé’s inhospitable Xārōmand from the neighboring land of Errigal—with whom they’d been at war centuries prior.

But these rocky giants had seen more than history. They had once held the future.

A millennium ago, in the heart of one of these mountains had existed a temple of such renown that only Ur Dinyé’s monarchs had been permitted to know its location.

Within its cavernous halls, devotees of Lord Time had meditated upon the past and present and been blessed with brief glimpses into potential futures.

The Seers’ prophecies had steered Ur Dinyé from devastation for centuries, until they’d been massacred by a king who had taken umbrage at what would become the Head Seer’s final prophecy.

Oh, the powerful and their fear. She cast a bitter look in the direction of Ur Dinyé’s capital of Edessa, thousands of miles to the south. She wouldn’t be freezing her ass off in the fucking Xārōmand if it weren’t for them.

Temperatures dipped lower under the slow wash of night. Above, Praefa and Silun surveyed her nightly routine of the past three months. Time and time again, she halted before the sheer face of a mountain and listened. The desert graced her with a wail of wind and spit sand across her cheeks.

Another night without hope. It had ceased to cut.

For ninety nights, she’d ridden through half the Kaycakh Range in search of the Lost Temple’s entrance.

The records she’d dug up from the Scourgemaster’s time had spoken to the temple’s rediscovery some five and a half centuries back but had neglected to mention the location after the unexplained deaths of those scholars and treasure-seekers who’d ventured within.

No matter. It was the nature of history to be lost and found again.

She steered her mare toward another peak.

Her mare balked, whinnying in fear as they neared the base.

Sand gave way to barren soil littered with chunks of limestone.

No sooner had her lips shaped a frown than she felt it, soft as gossamer.

A hum of otherness like the scrape of jaws over skin. Magic. Hunger.

Hatred.

The reins slipped from her trembling hands, elation heating her blood.

It’s here. Dismounting, she tethered her recalcitrant mare to one of the boulders fencing the mountain like teeth.

Nothing in the rock face ahead indicated the presence of a door, yet the desert’s fearful thrum under her feet spoke otherwise.

A warning. A proclamation of recognition.

“We know your blood,” the wind seemed to hiss. “It has spilled here before.”

“Go.” Sand curled around her ankles when she continued up the incline. “You are not wanted.”

Cursed land. Soiled with the innocent blood of thousands of Seers and sundered by even uglier secrets the Lost Temple had witnessed. The laws of the mortal world applied loosely here.

Her smile broadened. At last.

The mountain’s base vied with the Aequitas for breadth, rough slopes worn by Time’s chisel.

At one corner, a pile of rubble listed precariously to the left, shielding what must once have been an entrance.

A cave-in or a barricade? she wondered. The elongated finger bones extending in silent plea from a gap in the rock could speak to either.

She steeled her spine against a shudder. It doesn’t matter.

She placed her shaky palms against the cool, stone face and felt an answering ripple within.

Now for the price of entry. Withdrawing a dagger, she pricked each fingertip, barely noticing the pain.

So great was her excitement that she barely winced.

Five crimson streams rolled down her hand to dribble onto parched soil.

Red faded to terra-cotta. The earth drank deep.

The wind halted.

Quiet. It was so very quiet now.

A hammering began in her chest, exultation and fear warping in a dangerous weave.

She drew on the rock with bleeding fingers.

A straight line, then a curved one, then several more.

Zuvrai, the Urdish rune for “Time.” Mortal concept and immortal god.

A rune so dangerously taxing that to draw it was to risk all the time that the user had left.

The same rune Seers would have drawn to enter the Lost Temple millennia ago.

Her chest squeezed with every pass of her fingers over the rock face, breaths dwindling and labored.

Zuvrai was a Tenth-Tier rune, demanding a torrential, inherently unsustainable flow of power from its user. She was no Seer. She didn’t have long.

Faster.

Magic was a peculiar thing. An inner well of power shaped by ancestry and tied to blood, accessible only by drawing the right patterns in one’s life force.

Runes were the language of the gods, the Elsarian priests said, and their first gift to humans to allow them a taste of the divine.

It was also their first test, a sieve to separate the greedy and power-drunk from those good and faithful who would pass the gates into the Bright Realms where the High Elsar resided.

When all was said and done, where would she be placed? Monster or martyr?

A choked laugh tore from her. Had she access to her own epitaph, she would have written it now before history did it for her: Judge me or justify me, you know I was necessary.

Red flooded her vision as she drew the final set of zuvrai’s lines, arteries bursting in her eyes like swollen streams. Blood laced her tongue when she swallowed. Her fingers drew the last stroke and paused midair. Gods help me.

The rune flashed gold. Soul-deep agony arced through her with the ferocity of a lightning bolt as zuvrai came to life, unspooling her time.

Unspooling her. Invisible hands clawed at her lungs, wringing, twisting.

Her screams were quickly swallowed by the now-cacophonous desert, alive with a thousand jeers.

Every pulse of her heart was a clap of thunder.

Falling to her knees, she clutched her head and gasped for air.

The ghosts laughed. “You were warned.”

“No,” she croaked. Teeth clenched, she slowed her panicked breaths. “I won’t die here.”

Slapping a palm against the rock face, she dragged herself up, gaze fixed on the now-glowing rune drawn into the mountain. Scarlet wove into the gold lines, warning that she would soon be drained of power and life. Fifteen minutes? No. Ten.

“You know me,” she hissed to her listeners, heart thudding so hard that she feared it would stall any moment. “You know my kin and my kind. You will yield,” she snarled.

The ground shuddered. Yes. YES.

“Let. Me. In!” she screamed.

A chunk of the mountain’s craggy face crashed down with an earthquake’s force. She lost her footing and tumbled down the incline, cowering from the spray of rock and sand. Coughing, she raised her head when the rumbling ceased. By the Saints and Wretched.

The chunk had reduced the rubble blocking the entrance to dust. The Xārōmand quieted when she staggered back up to that pitch-black mouth.

A torch flared in an ancient sconce by it.

Then another, and another, leading her in.

She shuddered. Welcome or trap, it doesn’t matter.

She was going where even the dead couldn’t touch her.

Pain clawed through her chest, hooking in and ripping down. Blood gurgled in her throat. Eight minutes. She ignored the broken corpses piled around the entrance, red tears snaking past her jaw from her own bleeding eyes.

She ran into the temple.

Firelight hissed to life in her wake, drawing golden fingers down frescoed corridors of battles past, fates avoided, futures won, gods appeased, murdered Seers—Elsar save me. The bones! Hollow eye sockets regarded her flight with mockery, their jaws unhinged in laughter.

“Will you make it in time?” they asked. “Can you control what even we couldn’t?”

I will, she vowed. The Seers had glimpsed the land’s future but been sequestered from its workings. She knew the people of Ur Dinyé. I can control them.

Libraries. Lecture rooms. Worship halls. Marble columns and limestone walls. The gilt had been chipped off, gaping holes left where statues and prayer tablets must once have stood. How many treasure-seekers and scholars had the dead punished for it?

Three minutes. She had never known such pain even when—Faster. She rounded a corner, kicked down the banquet hall’s rotting doors, then froze.