Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ten years ago.
Nakir had imagined death many times.
He had suspected it would be painful, agonizing, slow, and final.
He knew the price of drawing too much from the Weave, and he’d been ready to pay it in the hopes of sparing his parents.
So when he opened his eyes again and discovered he was alive, looking up at his mentor’s stoic expression, reality slammed against him with crushing weight.
He could still taste the ash in his mouth.
With great effort, the Aeshlien sat up. Dawn light filtered gold across the desert villa, palm fronds rustling in the salt breeze. A scene so serene it felt like a cruelty.
They were as far from Lenorea as they could get—and yet they’d still been found. Sand gritted under Nakir’s hands as he turned, blinking the crust out of his eyes as he tried to remember what had happened.
That same sun also rose on the twenty shells of corpses strewn about the courtyard.
They were all that remained of the assassins sent in the middle of the night to dispatch the last of the exiled Hasan family.
They all bore the mark of Nakir’s dark power.
Each of their bodies was nothing more than a rotted husk.
But they weren’t the only bodies.
His parents, Lazaros Galanis and Evanthia Hasan, lay twenty paces from them. His mother’s auburn hair had fallen from its signature half updo, her usually glowing beige skin pale even in the warm light of the rising sun. His own amber eyes reflected back at him, lifeless and cold.
He had never seen his father’s black hair so messy, the ends caked in blood.
Lazaros’s final act had been to reach for his wife where she lay feet away—their fingers brushed even as they lay motionless.
Not even death could part them. Their throats were opened, and they’d been left to bleed out into the sand.
But not before they’d watched Nakir burn out and die.
“No.” Nakir tried to sit up further, but his body rebelled, and he nearly passed out, back into the dirt. Steady hands caught him and held him upright.
“I came as soon as I could,” his mentor told him. This man, who had taught him everything he knew about magic, had guided Nakir in many other ways as well. His dark blue eyes were ice-cold as usual, stern face tightly drawn.
Nakir turned back to his parents, the pit in his stomach growing.
They were dead. A cry tore through him as he reached toward them, but his body was too depleted to allow him to even crawl to them.
“What happened, Nakir?”
How could he even explain? He stared into the morning sky, devastation written across his face. “They came in the middle of the night... Zenobia’s assassins,” he rasped, words almost detached from the man speaking them.
“How many?”
“Too many.”
“What happened to you, Nakir?”
Roman Kentigern was not a sentimental man.
The powerful Necromancer had almost no family and even fewer friends, but as Chosen of Nex and Headmaster of the Crystalline Academy, he was highly revered and respected across the Four Kingdoms. Nakir’s mentor was ageless, with dark brown hair past his ears, spectral blue eyes, and a cold stare that could freeze the sun.
He was not a large man by any means, but his presence was larger than life.
“I tried to take them down,” Nakir explained, shaking his head as he tried to remember past the flurry of images in his head. “I was already spent from our travels, and...”
“And?”
The Aeshlien was shattered. He wasn’t supposed to be alive. It was supposed to have been enough for his parents to escape.
“And they were powerful. They had several Channelers. They were... too powerful.” Nakir stared at the hands he’d used to tear the life from so many. “And I ran out. I ran out of magic.”
“No, Nakir. You did not run out of magic.”
Was that anger in his mentor’s voice? Nakir remembered the promise of revenge at the bottom of his well of magic, a whisper in the dark that there was so much more to take if he only gave in.
Nakir’s voice broke as he realized the truth. “I burned out.”
“Yes. You burned out. You took what wasn’t yours, and the Weave exacted its price.”
He gaped at his mentor, eyes wide. “How am I...?” The words were whispered, as if he were afraid to break some spell that would reverse the ritual only ever performed by the most capable Healers.
Nakir knew some Necromancers could snatch the dead from the afterlife, but there was always a cost. Any mage—Healer or Necromancer—who did so risked their own magic, forever.
Roman’s stare was exacting. “I resurrected you.”
“But—”
“There’s a problem, Nakir.”
His heart raced. “Have you lost your magic?”
Roman shook his head. Still, Nakir breathed a sigh of relief. If the most powerful Necromancer in the world had sacrificed his own magic just to raise him from the dead, he would never forgive himself.
Roman reached into his pocket and withdrew a familiar blue stone.
A wyrdstone—a small but powerful rune-engraved gem that could be enchanted to detect mages.
A similar one had been used on Nakir when he was a small boy by the very man next to him.
The glowing stone had always represented new hope, a bright future, for the newly discovered mage.
Nakir’s magic, though dark and feared, had given his parents hope that one day they would have the power to reclaim what had been taken from them.
But as Roman held it to Nakir’s chest, it did not glow.
“It’ll come back,” Nakir protested, pushing the wyrdstone away, unable to accept its judgment. “I... I just need to rest.”
When he pushed himself onto his knees, he realized he and Roman were not alone.
Nakir could never forget the menacing Oracle Roman kept close by, his given name lost to time.
His silver-white hair was bound tightly behind his head, the usual barely contained scowl planted firmly on his face.
With pale skin and lilac eyes, he cut an intimidating figure.
He was larger than either of them, and not someone Nakir would ever willingly enter conflict with.
But it was the Bloodwright’s grave stare that struck true fear into his heart.
The Oracle’s tone was final. “No, it won’t. It’s gone.”
That was what it took to finally break him. The walls of the courtyard began to close in on Nakir, his breath coming too fast, his face heating to the point bile rose in his throat.
Roman put a grounding hand on his shoulder, a brief moment of affection, unusual even between the two of them.
“You burned out, Nakir. There is a chance I didn’t get here in time—that when I performed the resurrection ritual, your magic had already returned to the Weave.
We can speculate, but we may never know what truly happened. ”
His parents, his magic. Both gone. Stolen.
Maybe the people who’d taken his throne were right about him. Maybe he was cursed.
Deep within him brewed a seething, burning anger. A hatred he had never been able to summon before. A true, unslakable thirst for vengeance.
Roman was speaking again, but the words were like water falling over a cliff, rushing past his ears. “When I pulled you back, the Bloodwright delivered a prophecy. You need to hear this.”
Nakir turned to face the man. The Bloodwright still stood ten feet away, leaning against one of the pillars marking the entryway into the courtyard, arms crossed, his gaze fixed on Roman with that same deadly stillness Nakir had always found unsettling.
Not because of what the Bloodwright was—though that was reason enough—but because of what passed between him and Roman in moments like this one.
A silence too heavy to be empty. The Bloodwright served Roman, that much was certain, but whether by choice was a question Nakir had never dared ask aloud.
He suspected the answer lived somewhere in the long catalogue of things Roman Kentigern would carry with him into eternity—if Aevensor ever managed to claim him at all.
His deep voice rumbled across the sandy stones.
“The prophecy is this, Nakir Hasan: Your magic is gone, but you may one day regain something of far greater consequence. Only with the power of the Truth-Teller will you finally take back what is yours, the Kingdom of Lenorea, bought and paid for and promised to you by the blood of your ancestors.”
Nakir was so lost in the words he almost missed the glint in Roman’s eyes.
All his parents had ever dreamed of was for the Hasan family to be restored to the throne.
As they’d only had one child, that dream rested solely on his shoulders.
But how was he supposed to take back the throne without magic?
Without an army? Without allies? “Only with the power of the Truth-Teller will you finally take back what is yours.” Some ancient weapon? A powerful artifact?
Roman stood, brushing the sand from his black robes. “We must part ways, Nakir Hasan.” Without his magic, a part of their connection had been permanently severed. After everything they’d done together, Roman would have no use for him. He was no longer a mage.
Another layer of grief washed over him, but he pushed it down, far away, where it could never hurt him. “Yes. Of course.”
“We will see each other again someday.” Roman reached out a hand. Nakir’s muscles trembled as he shook it in farewell.
And then, for the first time, he was truly alone.
Age of Upheaval, Y 218. Hunter’s Moon, Day 21.
Alethea thanked every one of the gods when Nakir did not treat her with any awkwardness the next day.
Inside the tent, Emi, Dawes, Balthasar, and Kerrigan clustered around the desk in their own distinct orbits.
Emi had claimed one of the few seats, her golden skin warm in the morning light filtering through the canvas, the slight point of her ears visible beneath soft waves of brown hair that brushed her shoulders.
Whatever softness she usually carried was absent.
Her brown eyes were intent, serious, fixed on the map.