Chapter 2
ARIENNE
When the direction of the winds changed, dust blew into Arienne’s face.
She raised her hood and lowered her gaze.
The ground at her feet was a burnt red, with only a few hints of long-dried grass.
There wasn’t much vegetation at all in this wasteland—she could walk for miles without looking up from her feet and never bump into a tree or bush.
It was hard to imagine such a place could exist. The abandoned paths of the Rook Mountains had been harsh, with only a few lumbering bears about, but compared to the devastation of Mersia, the bare rocks and shrubs of the Rook Mountains were practically verdant. Here, there was only dust.
Her lone companion in these barren lands was an old donkey, and he looked pitiful in the dusty winds with his burdens of dried goods and water on his back.
He had no name when she bought him, so she called him Aron—it was the name of an explorer in a book she loved, a story about searching for treasure in a vast desert.
“Aron, let’s rest a bit.”
The winds were exhausting. She kept her back to the gusts as she sat down—not a rock or fallen tree in sight for her to rest upon.
She pulled the donkey to her side and brought out some dried mutton from a saddlebag.
It had been three days since she entered these wastelands, and the meat and hard bread tasted of dust. Large grains of sand knocked against her hood, the sound echoing in her ears.
Arienne read that grass had once grown up to the waist in these parts, and large oroxen, twice the height of men, had roamed these fields, shepherded by herders on horseback.
The herders spent their winters and springs at home in a large, rich city, and in the summer herded the oroxen before returning to their homes in the fall.
The city had been called Danras, and the country had been called Mersia.
Danras, with its sister city-states of Iorca and Lansis, had labored under the tyranny of Eldred the Grim King, until the Empire came 170 years ago.
Danras had sided with the Empire against the Grim King, and once he was overthrown, Mersia became the eastern edge of the Empire.
It was a pivotal moment in the Empire’s expansion to the east, where the strategic location of the new province proved to be invaluable in the Cassian Wars.
But of course, Mersia’s life as an Imperial province hadn’t lasted long.
One hundred years ago, seventy years after the annexation, the vast steppe teeming with life and riches became these deathly wastes in a single morning, struck by a weapon that would come to be known as the Star of Mersia.
It was punishment for declaring independence, or so the common knowledge went.
Arienne slipped the rest of her dried meat into her sleeve and closed her eyes.
She imagined a ship sailing on the water.
The white sails billowed upon tall masts, and the ship raced across the waves as the spray crashed around it.
The sky was clear, and the sun had begun its descent from its high point into the west. The ocean reflected the sunset colors, the water as yellow-red as the earth of Mersia.
Arienne pictured herself dressed like a pirate from an illustration in one of her adventure books, holding up a retractable telescope.
A crewman comes up to her.
“Captain Arienne, have you set a course for Danras?”
What shall she name the crewman? Cly, maybe. No, Bly. That sounds better for a pirate. Arienne scans her map, but not too closely—detailed images will only make her vision more inaccurate.
“Bly, tell the crew to turn thirty degrees to starboard. And maintain this speed.”
“Aye, Captain.” Bly turns his head and shouts, “Oy, you sea dogs! Thirty degrees starboard, she says!”
A chorus of “Aye!” is heard.
Through her telescope, an island slowly comes into view. But this is no island—it is the ruins of a city. It is Danras, or at least the Danras Arienne imagines in her mind.
The ship in her mind turns. Arienne concentrates on the sensation of her body turning with it, the movement of the ship underneath her as it heads to its destination. Out loud, she recites a short chant. Power blooms in her mouth.
Arienne opened her eyes, and the ruins in her imagination rose from the eastern horizon like a mirage before fading away.
She stood up and turned to the direction of the mirage.
A brief dizzy spell made her lean on Aron’s neck.
Ever since she stepped into the land of Mersia, the flow of her Power had become erratic.
Arienne had paid attention to every rumor about Mersia that had come her way.
While they were uniformly ominous, the most disconcerting one of all was that sorcery was of no use here.
Without her magic, she would just be a teenage girl with no special talents.
The prospect scared her—but then she thought of Loran, the King of Arland.
Hadn’t Loran been an unremarkable widow of thirty-eight before she jumped into the volcano to save her country?
The wind changed direction again, and blew sand in her face again.
But Loran’s request echoed in her mind. Arienne’s initial plans after the war had been to find a way to hide Arland’s gifted children from the Empire, to teach them what she knew of sorcery and create a real school for sorcerers, unlike the death trap that awaited them in the Imperial Capital.
But Arland had just barely managed to obtain a fragile autonomy; to not follow in Mersia’s doomed footsteps, Loran knew, the Arlanders needed to learn all they could about the Star. So, Arienne had journeyed a long way, determined to fulfill that mission.
Loran would have understood if Arienne had turned down this mission, but it wasn’t only because of her king that Arienne was here now.
She needed to come to this place, this land once ruled by the Grim King Eldred, to understand her own sorcery better.
And while the country was said to be an utter wasteland, Arienne could not shake the feeling that there was something here that Mersia had left behind for her.
She pulled the donkey’s reins toward the new direction she had found, but Aron refused to budge.
The horse seller had said there would be no better companion to make it to the other side of the mountains with than this donkey.
That he was obstinate, but a less stolid fellow would never even make it to Mersia, let alone have the gumption to set foot in it.
Arienne was starting to regret that obstinance.
She pulled again on the reins, but Aron did not give.
“Let’s go, Aron! Do you want me to leave you behind?” she threatened, convinced he could understand her. “Would you be happy with that? The sun is setting soon!”
Aron had all the food and water, so she could never actually leave him behind. But the threat worked, as he finally began plodding where she led. A broken-off shrub rolled past them in the wind. The dust now hit her left side instead of her face, which felt like a small mercy.
There was truly little here but dust. For three days, the gray skies overhead remained without a trace of sun. During the starless nights, the cold cut to the bone.
But it was said there was something more frightening in the night here than just the cold.
Arienne gathered her robes about her with her right hand and with her left stroked the glass orb she wore around her neck.
She had bought it before crossing the mountains, sold to her as a talisman for warding off ghosts, created by the rhymesmiths of the Mersian city of Iorca before the Empire’s coming.
She didn’t know how much longer it would take to find the city of Danras.
Until then, she could only hope that this tiny orb riddled with cracks would protect her from the terrors of the night.
Without pausing in her steps, she opened the door to the room in her mind.
She had collapsed her previous room when fighting Eldred two years ago, so she had built this new one to resemble the room that briefly gave her shelter during her escape from the Imperial Capital.
She could barely remember the face of the man who had helped her, but every time she came into this room, she wondered what he could be doing now.
Only two years had passed, but it felt like so long ago.
It was bright outside the window from the pale streetlights of the Imperial Capital.
She sat on the edge of a large bed in the middle of the room.
Right next to the bed was a crib under the window and inside lay little Tychon.
Arienne reached out and gently tapped his small, plump hands, and Tychon stirred a little in his sleep.
She remembered how she had defeated Tychon’s father, Lysandros, at Finvera Pass. The memory used to make her shudder, but now she only felt gratitude that she managed to win and escape with her life—and Tychon.
He was a baby with pink cheeks and sparkling dark eyes, but outside of her mind, he was nothing more than the carefully preserved corpse of a baby inside a small coffin of lead.
Now that she had hidden him inside this room, she would never take him out.
Never again should he be anything else than this happy child in this peaceful room.
The direction of the winds changed again. These spontaneous shifts did nothing but confuse and annoy her. Sighing, she lifted her head. An eastern patch of the gray sky was turning darker, fading into black. Night was falling on Mersia.