Ten
There is no sleep, not really, but eventually the world turns inside out and I’m gone.
There is a vision. It feels like the splitting of my skull. It starts as a pinprick of white splitting the dark. The white becomes glass. Then the glass splinters into shards that slice the perfect black sky to ribbons.
I fall, not down, but somehow through—into the jaws of the void. Every fragment slices me, cold and burning, each one cutting off a piece of my identity. I can’t tell if I’m being devoured or remade.
Somewhere above or below I hear the echo of a voice. No, not a voice. It’s like music but it hurts. Like someone plucking at my nerves.
“What is this...?” the familiar voice of the Mother Shard sings out, in harmony with the music.
I try to answer but I no longer feel whole. Every part of me drifts separately through the dark. Sometimes they form into the fractured silhouette of a young boy.
“What have you done? Why can’t I see? Where have you gone?”
A wind rips through the pieces, shattering the boy.
There is a hunger in the air, clawing at my skin, tearing me to shreds.
It begins as the hunger of a predator, then twists into something worse: the hunger of a mother who cannot remember her child’s face.
The hunger turns towards me. And somewhere deep inside myself, I understand why.
“What are you? What are you?”
I am nothing, I want to answer, but in this place my thoughts are not private. My mind feels picked clean, like dry bones on the road. My words are picked apart before they even form.
“You are not nothing. You are...” The Mother Shard’s voice breaks, before remaking itself. “You are holy fire. Not a bridge. Not a true child. Mistake.”
A face appears in the shards, or rather, the suggestion of one. A complex layering of distorted reflections that look like the face of a woman, cracked down the centre and stitched together with threads of radiant blue. The mouth moves.
Son.
The mouth continues to move, but the sound is suddenly everywhere.
“You are not mine.” The Mother Shard screams. “You are fire in the sea, but the fire does not die. Wrong. All wrong.”
I want to run, but my body is staked to the void with shards of glass. Every time I shift, they tunnel deeper, anchoring me.
“I am starving. Hungry. You offer me nothing. Empty shell. Pointless flame.”
The glass dissolves, releasing me as it forms into a circular mirror.
The fragments rearrange. I can see the faces of Offerings from the past. I see them burn and freeze and drown and scream.
They rise from the ground, broken, their Mana drawn from them like unspooling threads, swallowed by a great crystal mouth.
I see the Mother Shard, not as a goddess but as a cleaving wound, pulling on the strings of the world.
“You burn bright. Not food. Not food. Why do you torment me?”
I scream, but the sound never leaves me.
Without warning, the world flips and I am standing on a mirrored plain. In every direction I see jagged shards of white crystal. On the horizon looms a single obsidian tower, impossibly tall, stripping the light from the darkening sky.
I walk towards it.
Crystal shards impale my feet with every step, leaving a trail of blood in my wake, but it glows golden instead of red.
I cannot stop myself from moving.
At the foot of the tower, the crystal shards soften. They pulse in time with my heartbeat. It races faster and as it does, I am lifted, then slammed into the ground. Repeatedly.
“You are blinding. Mistake.” The voice is a roar of women and children and howling beasts. “Why have you come? Why do you forsake me?”
“I don’t know what you want from me.” I profess, but each word is a spray of dark blood from my mouth.
“Liar. Your blood lies.” The voice is pure and calm now. “They want you. You will burn.”
The mass of the tower becomes a soft membrane, pulling me in, devouring me. It squeezes me, wrapping me in layers of cold crystal until I feel my bones begin to splinter.
Golden light leaks from my skin, warm, and then hot. Hot enough to turn the crystal layers to steam. The tower shakes and I see cracks everywhere, rising up its length. The sky peels open like the lid of an eye, and I see light once again.
“It is not enough,” she says. “My Veins bleed out. My bridges fall. My world suffocates.”
The voice skips and stutters.
“Veins. Broken. Fall. Bleed. Not enough.”
My chest is so tight I cannot breathe. The golden light continues to pour from my skin, blinding and uncontainable. The tower shreds apart, fragments spiralling into the sky. A shadow emerges from the light—something ancient and black—its edges burn with dark purple flames.
“Who are you? You do not belong here,” shrieks the Mother Shard, her voice scraped raw with panic.
I try to shrink, to make myself disappear, but the light and the shadow will not let me. It sees me.
Then the world explodes.
I snap upright, lungs seizing, chest on fire. It is daylight—real daylight, familiar and merciless.
My hands are locked into primitive claws, digging into the hard rock beneath me. Sweat slicks my skin. It takes me a full minute to convince myself I’m awake, that I am really outside.
I am wearing the white uniform provided to me in the Embrace. My heart will not slow, and when I wipe my palms on my thighs, they still come away wet.
To my left, I see Marissa and Callen, strewn across the floor like scattered straw. I force myself to stand, but my legs are trembling and my head throbs with every step.
Somewhere in the distance, an Overseer is singing; its haunting wail reverberates through the air.
Just beyond, I catch sight of a Mana Echo—a girl engulfed in flames, her silent scream repeating endlessly as the fire consumes her. I have to look away.
Her fate is just one of many available to me.
As the realisation settles over me, cold and undeniable, my stomach twists.
We’ve been unceremoniously dumped in the Heartlands.
The Blood Rites have begun.
And I am not ready.
The Heartlands look nothing like they did when we passed through them three nights ago, and if the Overseers are to be believed, no time has passed at all.
But the sun is shining now. So something has changed.
The sun beats down on me; its heat is suffocating, like summer in the Light Dominion. I can only imagine how the other Offerings are coping with the warmth, especially the Shadowborn.
I should not be thinking of him at all.
I need to focus.
The shore is a graveyard of dark stone and jagged rock teeth.
Farther inland, enormous slabs of obsidian rise over one another in broken terraces that swallow the horizon whole.
The only colour comes from the sky, a mottled blue that makes the slippery terrain shine.
Scattered plants stick out of the cracks, stubborn flecks of green interrupting the grey.
Nothing here looks soft. Waves heave against the shore, spraying me with water that tastes of salt and something I am unfamiliar with. All around, steaming pillars of water burst from the ground in random spots, hissing and spitting.
I scan the horizon for friend and foe alike, but there is no one around, and the terrain is making it difficult to see. It’s just the three of us here, and neither Callen nor Marissa has stirred.
The emptiness of the shoreline leaves me untethered. The Overseer’s song continues to reverberate around us, but I cannot see its maker.
The Mother Shard is the only constant. She looms at the centre of the horizon, far in the distance in the middle of the island, a mass of crystal that seems to both eclipse everything and yet still anchor me.
But even she looks different. Near the top of her towering form is a perfect golden oval, like the iris of some sort of divine eye, and every time I look at it, it seems to move.
I kneel beside Marissa and rouse her from her sleep. She wakes in a panic, her breathing ragged, her skin scratched from the rough ground. The marks don’t vanish though. Nothing heals here.
I wake Callen as well, only to be met with a resigned grunt. He shakes my hand from his shoulder and drags himself to his feet.
“We need to find cover,” I say as a gust of salty wind slams into us. “It’s too exposed here; I think we need to head inland.”
Callen grunts again. “It doesn’t look like there’s anything but mountains of rocks.”
Marissa lets out a small sob. “I think Luceris is right; we have to move.”
Callen shrugs, letting out a dejected sigh as he starts walking.
We follow behind, picking our way through the rough terrain. I don’t know where we’re going, only that standing still feels worse.
We need cover from the sun.
And from everyone else.
As we push inland, the rocks become more slippery and treacherous than I expected. It's like walking on wet glass, with jagged rock faces threatening to slice open our fingers.
Callen walks ahead in silence, glancing back every few steps.
My fingers are split and bleeding from the jagged rocks, but I do my best to ignore the pain. It’s strange to have wounds after days of miraculous healing.
An enormous crash echoes in the distance. The ground beneath us shudders with the force of whatever caused it.
Marissa slips. She hits the ground hard, catching her arm on the sharp edge of an outcropping.
She squeals and clamps a hand over the wound, but blood is already leaking between her fingers.
“I can’t—” she starts, but her knees buckle, and she goes down once again. “Please. I need a minute.”
Callen doesn’t hesitate. He scoops her up and props her upright, as though casually righting a fallen doll on a shelf.
“Keep moving,” he says, his voice flat. “It was your idea to find cover.”
His gaze drifts to me, his mouth tightening into a thin line.
“You don’t have to be so mean,” Marissa says, adjusting her sleeves and pushing the hair from her face.
The ghostly form of an Overseer suddenly appears, phasing through the rock face. It glances in our direction but quickly looks away, seemingly uninterested in us.