Chapter 11
Dagan
The Rooted Marches, Nightfall
We arrive at the last village—Stone’s Edge.
It smells of smoke. The remnants of crops gone bad. Burned before the taint could spread.
It is old smoke, settled into stone and thatch and bone.
Not the sharp tang of something newly burned, but the heavier scent of lives already turned to ash.
I hate that smell.
“It was worse a few cycles ago,” Varen, the village headman, says as we walk. His shoulders are bowed under a weight I can’t lift with any power I possess.
“We’ve rebuilt what we could. The rest…” He gestures toward the charred remains of a house where only three walls still stand.
A child sits in the doorway, tracing lines in the dirt with a stick.
“We… we leave it as reminder.”
Alina walks at my side.
She has not spoken much since we arrived, but her eyes never stop moving.
Over the cracked foundations.
The tarps strung between broken walls.
The makeshift shelters dug into the cliffs when the SoulTakers’ fire rained from the sky.
She watches. She counts. She measures.
There is something profoundly grounding about it.
“This used to be the main square,” Varen says, stopping at an open patch of earth where the outlines of old stalls are still visible. “We hold the names here now.”
The names are stones.
Hundreds of them.
Each one carved with a sigil or a few careful lines of script.
Some have flowers laid before them.
Some have toys.
One has a single boot.
Alina’s breath catches.
“These are all—” She swallows, voice thin. “All from one raid?”
“Two,” Varen answers quietly. “The first took our Dreamwright. The second took half our workers.”
My hands curl into fists.
Alina looks at the stones for a long time, then at the cliffs where new shelters have been dug.
The wind tugs at her hair, dark strands slipping free around her face.
I have been keeping my distance.
Walking a half-step ahead.
Not touching.
Not looking at her too long in case I forget why I must not want the thing I very clearly want.
It is not working.
“Where is your Dreamwright now?” she asks.
Varen hesitates, glancing at me for permission.
“Tell her,” I say. My voice comes out rougher than intended. “She is my viyella. She will know what to do with the truth.”
He nods and leads us toward a low stone building near the back of the settlement.
The air inside is cooler, tinged with the metallic scent of ore and old ink.
A woman sits cross-legged on a woven mat, hands hovering over a shallow basin of Ember dust.
She’s younger than I expected, with streaks of color burned into her hair—silver and pale blue.
Her eyes are ringed with shadow.
“Lord Dagan,” she murmurs, voice hoarse. “You honor us.”
“You still weave?” I ask.
She laughs once. It is not a pleasant sound.
“I try. The forges send less ore to the outer villages now. The fires all burn lower. The SoulTakers choke the routes between sanctums. But yes. I still weave. Less dream. More nightmare.”
Alina steps forward. “You’re a Dreamwright?”
“Yes, milady.”
“What exactly does that mean?” she presses. “I’ve heard the term, but—”
“You are from another world,” the Dreamwright says, looking her over with clear, assessing eyes. “I can smell it on you. Different dust. Different storms.”
“New Jersey,” Alina says wryly. “It’s a real place, I promise.”
The Dreamwright smiles faintly.
“I’m Alina.”
“They call me Masielle. See, we spin the raw ore of the very heart of Nightfall into threads. Into scenes. Into possibility. We send them through the Forge Songs to your world and all others. Dreams of falling, flying, losing teeth, kissing strangers, passing tests, facing fears. Visions of what might be, might never be, might should be. They become stories. Art. Inventions. The courage to leave. The strength to stay.”
Alina’s eyes narrow, fascinated. “You’re telling me Nightfall is literally responsible for imagination.”
“For hope,” Masielle, the Dreamwright says simply. “We are one of many sources. Not the only. But a root system beneath the multiverse. When we fray, so do the things built above us.”
“And the SoulTakers?” Alina asks softly.
“They are unmaking,” I answer before the Dreamwright can. “They feed on terror, despair, the collapse of what should have been. They want the Vein bled dry, and the Forges silenced. No more dreams. Only void.”
Silence stretches.
She has heard some of this before. But hearing and seeing are different things.
Alina’s hands clench at her sides.
I watch her profile—sharp nose, stubborn chin, mouth pressed thin as if something in her is cracking.
The way the villagers’ grief hit my chest like a hammer, I see the cold realization strike hers.
This is not some distant war in a foreign sky.
This is her world now, too.
Her people, waking in the middle of the night sweat-soaked and sobbing.
Her artists, staring at blank canvases.
Her engineers, losing the spark that made them build anything at all.
It clicks into place behind her dark, luminous eyes.
“This isn’t just Nightfall’s problem,” she whispers.
“No,” I say quietly. “It never was.”
She turns to me then, really looks at me, and the weight in that gaze is enough to shake mountains.
She sees me.
And for one wild, destabilizing heartbeat, I understand Aurel, our fallen Prime.
I understand what drove him to take more and more upon himself, to bear the burden alone, to burn until there was nothing left.
Because when the thing you love is everything, how do you not try to set yourself between it and the void?
Aurel fell doing that.
I remember the way his body collapsed, light torn from it by Idris’ treachery.
The way the earth screamed under my feet as the Prime’s crown tumbled from his head.
I swore I would never let anyone close enough to make me feel that powerless again.
I was a fool.
I thought I would be the lone one of us who would actually trick the Fates into granting a zareth where I could remove my heart from the equation.
But it is already hers.
The power behind the Lord of Earth is already hers.
It sits in the way the land quiets when she walks.
The way the people straighten when she smiles at them.
The way my stone-locked heart keeps cracking open every time she laughs or frowns or mutters under her breath at a data point that doesn’t make sense.
I am halfway in love with her—yes, still trying to pretend I am only half.
It is like trying to argue with a landslide.
Pointless.
“What is it?” she asks, stopping only because I’ve stared too long.
“I believe,” I murmur before I can stop myself, “I must be in love with you, my viyella.”
Her head snaps toward me.
“What?” she breathes.
The Dreamwright makes a soft sound and very tactfully looks away.
I drag a hand over my face. “Forget I said—”
The ground cuts me off.
Not figuratively.
Literally.
The first shudder is small. A ripple through the stone like a muscle twitch.
Then another.
Then the floor under our feet bucks, hard enough that the basin of Ember dust tips and spills, glittering grains scattering like sparks.
Alina grabs the doorframe instinctively, eyes wide. “That’s not normal.”
“No,” I snarl, already moving. “It is not.”
We burst out of the Dreamwright’s chamber into chaos.
The air is thick with dust and shouted orders.
Children are crying.
A cart topples over in the square as a fresh fissure splits the ground beneath it.
The Central Node—my powers surge inside me.
“They’re hitting The Central Node! The SoulTakers are coming,” I growl.
“What is it?” Alina asks.
“It is the heart of the Rooted Marches’ ley lines, anchored beneath this very village,” I tell her, urging her along, not wasting a moment.
“Get everyone to the caves!” Varen shouts. “Move! Move!”
Another quake hits.
This one is not subtle.
The entire hillside groans.
I feel it deep in my bones—the sickening pull of a fracture trying to propagate, to tear through the bedrock and open a tear big enough to swallow the settlement whole.
For a moment, the world narrows to two things.
The cracking earth.
And the woman at my side.
“Oona,” I bark, catching her arm. “With me.”
She runs without argument.
We reach the center of the square as the largest fissure yet tears its way toward us, the ground splitting open with a deafening crack.
The buildings on either side lean precariously, walls crumbling as stone shifts beneath them.
“We’re going to lose them,” Alina gasps.
“Not if we hold,” I growl.
“Hold what, Dagan?” she snaps, wild-eyed. “This isn’t a door, it’s a rupture! You can’t just—”
“Yes,” I cut in. “I can. And you can help.”
She stares at me like I’ve lost my mind. “How?”
The zareth between us flares at her question, hot and insistent.
The earth wants her.
“Trust me,” I say.
Her throat works. The fissure widens—three feet, four—stone crumbling into the dark.
She nods once. “Okay.”
I take her hands in mine and drag them to the ground.
“Feel it,” I order. “Like at the Stepped Vale. Listen.”
Her palms hit the dirt.
Her eyes slam shut.
For a second, nothing happens.
Then I feel it.
Her.
She is sliding into the rhythm I’ve known since before I could speak.
Attuning to the stress lines, the points of tension, the way the rock wants to move.
“There’s a shear plane running under the north edge,” she says through gritted teeth. “If it fails, that whole section slides.”
“Can we anchor it?”
“Maybe. You need a buttress here.” She jerks her chin toward the uphill side. “And reinforcement there.”
The fissure jerks closer.
I let go of my restraint.
Power floods up from deep beneath the Marches, roaring through my legs, my spine, my arms.
If I take it all into myself, it will burn me out, leave me a hollow shell like the Prime fell.
So I don’t.
I push it through her.
My viyella.
The real boon in all this.
The bond flares, suddenly enormous.
Earth surges up through our joined hands, through Alina’s body and back into mine, a circuit that makes my vision go white at the edges.
The zareth sears between us, not painful, but right.