The Ghost City
TALIA
The figment differs from the ghost in one essential way: it still carries part of a soul. A ghost is an echo. A figment is a prisoner.
“But why?” Talia asked, twirling the peony between her fingers. It looked so real. “Who made the illusion? And where is the power coming from?”
Lore was smiling like he knew a secret. “Don’t worry about it.” His hand settled on Holloway’s shoulder. “The gods preserve what they choose.”
Lore usually encouraged her curiosity when it came to magic. Shutting her down now was odd.
“We’ll go to the citadel,” Lore continued. “If answers survived the fall, we’ll find them in the library.”
The library. Talia couldn’t wait to see it.
She tried to take in everything as they moved deeper into the city, scanning columns, the seams of doors, the bases of lampposts. No signs of decay.
Riven was quiet. She wished she could take away his heartache, but the best she could do was let her knuckles brush his every few steps. Then they turned a corner, and the road looped back on itself—the same fountain, the same fruit stalls, the same overturned cart. Not just similar, identical.
“We’ve been here already,” Dawn said, kicking an apple that had rolled into the street.
Lore walked up beside her. “The true gods test our faith.”
Talia didn’t believe in Lore’s gods, but if they did exist, they had a cruel sense of humor. Dawn bent down to swipe a bit of stone from the path and scratched an arrow into the wall pointing the direction they were walking.
Ten minutes later they stepped into a square with a fountain in the middle and a big white arrow on the wall. The back of her neck prickled, and she looked over her shoulder.
A child stood beneath a red-striped awning. She looked translucent. Her dress fluttered in the still air.
“Hello?” Talia asked.
The child pressed her palms into the air. Beneath her fingers, cracks spread in the illusion like breaking glass. She lifted one hand and pointed through the widening fissure, down a narrow side street.
A wash of emotion struck Talia then, grief, old and heavy, threaded with a warning. What kind of being could crack open an illusion with her fingers and hum with human feelings? Was she seeing a figment?
“Tally!” Holloway called. “What are you doing?”
When she turned back, the child was gone, but the grief lingered in the air. “Let’s try this way,” she said, guiding them to the side street.
Dawn made a face, but they followed her, and the fountain finally fell behind them.
A sharp pain grew in Talia’s side as they climbed a narrow street so steep the pavers were almost stairs. She pressed her hands into her waist. The city spread out below them, a sparkling maze of twisted alleys and wider avenues.
Halfway up the slope, a door stood open, and the figment was waiting. Talia could make her out more clearly now, a girl of eight or nine, dark hair, eyes wide set and too old for her face. The girl turned and stepped inside, and Talia moved to follow.
Riven started to follow her inside, but she held up a hand. She didn’t want him to see the girl—or, worse, say she didn’t exist. She was overcome with the strongest urge to go in alone.
“Wait for me?” Talia asked with a pleading smile. “I’ll only be a minute.”
Riven scowled, but he called to the others to stop and took a position outside the door.
The air was stale and dry, and Talia’s nose burned with an almost-sneeze. She moved deeper, drawn into a hallway with a door at the end.
It was a child’s bedroom. She took in a small bed in the corner, the blankets folded neatly.
Then her vision stuttered. Claw marks scored deep into the bed frame, feathers scattered everywhere.
The room flickered between states—whole, ruined, whole again—until her eyes hurt. It settled on destruction.
Something violent had happened here, but there was no sign of blood. No bones or bodies. As if whatever had attacked hadn’t found anything to kill. The girl stood in the corner. Emotion rolled off her in waves: grief, fury, fear.
Talia followed her gaze to a charcoal sketch pinned to the wall. Stick figures, some tall, some short. The smaller ones wore circles at their necks. Beneath them, a single word in Starscript: elein.
She knew the word. In the oldest lexicons, elein referred to pets or companion animals, ranging from lapdogs to oxen.
But these figures stood on two legs. She looked again at the crude necklaces.
Or—collars. She couldn’t recall an example of people being called elein, but it was possible the word had been sanitized in translation.
“They enslaved them,” she whispered to herself.
The scene distorted and rippled again. The child strained against it, her outline breaking apart. Talia reached out, but the air snapped and everything stilled. The bed stood neatly made. The gashes in the wall were gone.
There was nothing else to see, and Talia squinted against the daylight as she stepped back into the street. From outside, the house looked like every narrow townhouse in the row.
They kept climbing the narrow street, pausing every few blocks to let Talia catch her breath. Eventually the street widened into a boulevard lined with statues, pairs of people and animals. Each of the animals wore a marble collar.
Talia’s stomach dropped. Collars. Like the picture in the room.
“The elein,” she said slowly. “What was their relationship to the fae?”
Lore walked a step ahead. “Dawn, why don’t you tell her?”
It sounded like a jab. Talia was missing the punchline, but it clearly got under Dawn’s skin.
“Asshole.” Dawn stared at the ground as she spoke. “The fae didn’t have magic of their own, Talia. They drew power from their pets.”
“Through the collars?” Talia asked.
Dawn grunted. “Those were more about restraint, but sure.”
“Did they—” Talia hesitated. “Did they ever put people in those collars?”
Lore clicked his tongue, spinning on his heel and walking backward. “Very interesting question! Rumor has it that the elein were people, in a manner of speaking. They could shapeshift.”
“Not in a manner of speaking,” Dawn snapped. “They were people, shifted or not.” Anger sizzled through the bond. Talia noted that Dawn spoke in past tense.
“What happened to them?” Talia asked, running her hand over a marble lion. She might have been imagining it, but his eyes looked sad.
The sun was sinking lower in the sky, and shadows pooled beneath the statues. Dawn had walked ahead of the group, her silhouette framed by the citadel ahead.
“The night that Valrotala fell, the elein went wild,” Riven volunteered. “We don’t know why, but they destroyed the city. Slaughtered the fae. They even killed each other, Dawn’s family…”
He trailed off. Riven and Dawn had been away when the city fell, and if the elein had ravaged the city, what they’d come home to—the scene must have been horrific.
“Where are the elein now?” Talia asked. She didn’t want to press, but she was too curious. It seemed improbable that so many deadly creatures could just— “Oh.”
“Yes,” Riven said quietly. “You know them as fluxborn. Those monsters are feral. There’s nothing left of the people they were.”
Talia had more questions, but she held them in as they caught up with Dawn at the entrance to the citadel.
The doors were massive and shut tight, but they made their way through a service entrance into a wide, empty hall.
The air was colder inside, and their footsteps rang sharp on the polished marble.
At the far end of the room, a portrait took up most of the wall.
Talia walked down to look at it. Five figures—a king, a queen, three girls.
Her gaze snagged on the woman in the center.
She was beautiful in an otherworldly way, the kind of beauty that felt sharp around the edges.
Beneath her image, a plaque read Elanwei lar Valtaren, Voice of the Voiceless.
Riven made a low broken sound in his throat.
She squeezed his hand. “You knew her.”
He didn’t answer, maybe he couldn’t. He squeezed so tight, it crushed her fingers. She thought back to the faerie story she’d studied, the one Dawn had told around a campfire once. Was this the same Elanwei? Was that even possible?
Lore walked up and gazed at the portrait. “Voice of the Voiceless.” A slow smile tugged at his mouth. “How appropriate.”
Talia only had to tip a little to bump against his shoulder. He was at ease, relaxed, his emotional signature laced with amusement. There was something sticky to his emotions, too, but she couldn’t quite place it.
He nodded at her, like he knew she was reading him and he didn’t mind. Then he hooked Holloway’s elbow through his and steered him toward a doorway at the end of the hall. Talia had started to follow him when the child flickered in at her side. The girl’s gaze moved between the portrait and Talia.
“What happened to you?” Talia asked the girl before she could stop herself.
No answer, just emotions: fear layered with urgency. But Talia felt her feet shuffling toward Lore before she’d decided to. Then suddenly the scent of roasted meat rolled through the hall, then fresh bread, then spiced wine. Her exhaustion doubled, vision blurring at the edges.
Lore’s voice carried from the doorway. “The banquet is ready. We’ll eat before we descend.”
Talia tried to hold on to the child’s warning, but her thoughts slipped.
Her hunger surged, and her eyelids went heavy.
She was moving through the arched doorway after Lore, into a hall lined with tables heaping with food.
Platters of fruit glistened. Bread steamed, fresh from the oven. Cups brimmed with wine.
“We shouldn’t—” Talia started. Her thoughts kept sticking, like slow-dripping honey.
Holloway reached for a fig. “This looks delicious.”
“No—” She tried to step back, but her legs wouldn’t listen.
Panic spiked as her body moved on its own. Riven’s hand tightened on hers, but the sensation felt muffled and distant, like they were touching through water.
The air shimmered.
She blinked.
When she opened her eyes, she was seated at the table.
A cup pressed into her palm. Wine on her tongue—tart, sweet, wrong.
She hadn’t poured it. Hadn’t lifted the cup.
Couldn’t remember moving at all. Her mind tried to trace back what had happened, the sequence from standing at the door to sitting here, but the memories weren’t there. Not fuzzy, just gone.
Holloway was smiling, juice running down his chin. “See? Delicious.”
The child’s terror pulsed at the edge of her awareness, but she couldn’t remember why it mattered. And underneath that, a deep hum kept time with her heartbeat, steady and patient, waiting somewhere below the floor.