“Get everyone back,” Dracian ordered as he activated a glowrod and tossed it into the center of the chamber. The light was dim but sufficient, and with luck they had stockpiled enough of the devices to last for a few days. “We need to collapse the shaft so they can’t just open it from the other side.”
Once the refugees and the surviving soldiers had retreated a few hundred feet father in, the Highlord glanced over to the rusted levers along the far wall. In theory, they would release several openings in the ceiling and trigger a planned collapse…but Ethan doubted that anyone had actually used the trap in decades, perhaps even longer.
“We don’t need the trap,” Selvhara said as if reading his mind. “Just hold me up and make sure everyone else stands clear.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Dracian replied, frowning. “You’re wounded and you—”
“I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “Besides, this is the only way to make sure they stay out and you know it.”
The knight studied her carefully, and the concern in his eyes was obvious. No, it went beyond mere concern—it was love, plain and simple, and Ethan struggled not to be sick. But as much as he wanted to blame Dracian for taking her away from him, deep down he knew it was his own fault. All of this was his own fault, when it came right down to it, and one of these days he knew he would have to let it go. But not just yet.
“As you wish,” Dracian said after a moment. “Everyone else: get back as far as you can. We can’t be sure exactly how the stones will fall.”
Taking in a deep, steadying breath, Selvhara thrust her hand towards the metal support columns holding the piles of rubble above the door. A bolt of lightning abruptly arced from her fingers and melted the beams, and a few seconds later the entire shaft collapsed, dumping what seemed like half a mountain’s worth of rock in front of the doorway. Normally, the dust would have choked them even this far in, but she quickly conjured a powerful gust of wind to contain the blast as best she could.
“Now it’s time to rest,” Jason whispered into her ear as he lifted her up into his arms. “Come on, this way.”
The two of them slowly walked back down to meet with the others, and Iouna shook his head in disbelief at the impressive wall now sealing them off from the outside world.
“It’s hard to believe…” the young man trailed off, his head shaking. “Praise Sol you arrived when you did.”
The Highlord didn’t respond. His expression remained as stoic as ever, but Ethan knew exactly what the man was thinking. He had just sent several of his knights and their precious dragons to die so that a handful of comparatively worthless refugees and soldiers could live. It was not a choice Ethan would have made in Dracian’s place; it was not a choice Ethan would have ever made at all.
But it was the choice that had saved his son. And for now, perhaps, that was enough.
“We’ll hold,” Ethan said, wishing for a moment he actually believed it. “We’ll turn them back here and change the war.”
For a long moment, the knight remained silent. He just stared at the rocks, his dark eyes lost in thought. But eventually he turned around to face the others, and his jaw visibly clenched behind his cheeks.
“Yes,” Dracian said. “We will.”
Chapter One
“Perhaps the Immortals have been here forever, watching silently as gods do, judging our worthiness to carry out their will. If that is true then I question their divine intellect, for what being could look upon our species and deem us worthy of their magic? We deserve their pity, not their power.”
—Asalian Daar, 526 AG, the night before his execution for heresy
2015 AG, thirteen years later…
It was a cool autumn day in the forests of southeastern Galvia, with a light breeze that rustled up the fallen leaves and made a man thankful he had worn a jacket. It was a good thing, Jason Moore thought to himself, because otherwise he and the other two men shoveling away at the dense pile of rock-encrusted dirt would be even more drenched in sweat and grime than they already were. They had been at it for almost two hours now, digging out a hole wide and deep enough to bury a wagon, and they still hadn’t hit anything.
“I hope you realize that if we don’t find something here,” Gor said into the long silence, “I am going to kill you.”
Jason grunted and glanced over his shoulder. The massive man standing behind him was one of the chagari, a hulking bipedal race politely referred to as “demon cats” by most humans. Covered in thick orange-red fur, Gor slouched at six and a half feet tall. His broad shoulders and hunched spinal structure always gave Jason the impression he was about to pounce on something. If not for the wickedly-sharp retractable claws on his hands and feet, the two large, curving horns atop his head, or the pair of sinister yellow feline eyes set deep in his face, Gor probably could have passed for a cuddly, oversized children’s toy.
Instead, he was the stuff of nightmares.
“I just thought you should know,” the chagari added after a moment, taking another large scoop with his shovel.
Next to him, Tam Eldrin scoffed. “This is only the third dig-site. Jason’s almost always right by about the seventh.”
“Just give it another ten minutes or until Sel shows up,” Jason soothed, realizing he was still damp despite the breeze. They had all tossed their jackets and traveling cloaks to the side after half an hour, and at this point the hole was deep enough he couldn’t even see their belongings over the ledge above anymore.
“Speaking of Sel,” Tam said, gesturing upwards. The distant clomping of hooves gradually grew closer before stopping entirely, and eventually they heard the soft thump of someone hopping down from a saddle.
“Good of you to finally show up,” Gor grumbled loudly enough for the newcomer to hear. “Now why don’t you start digging and make yourself useful for a change?”
A slender woman leaned over the edge, her left eyebrow cocked in amusement at the three laboring men below. “You want an old woman to pick up a shovel and strain her aching back?”
“You really have to ask?” Tam muttered. “This is Gor we’re talking about here.”
“I won’t apologize for expecting everyone to contribute,” the chagari replied tartly. “Unless our glorious leader agrees to cut her share of the treasure as recompense.”
Jason sighed and shook his head. “For one, Sel never takes a share anyway. For two, you had better be nice to her if you don’t want to bleed out the next time we run into a Crell patrol.”
Gor continued to grouse under his breath, mostly for show, and Jason grinned as he glanced back up to the woman sitting on the ledge above them.
Selvhara Narhesti hadn’t changed much over the years, though that was hardly surprising considering how slowly her people aged compared to humans. From a distance, she could have passed as an attractive, middle-aged human woman, but up close her pale skin and pupil-less violet eyes betrayed her elysian heritage.
Ostensibly, her people—the “faeyn,” in their native tongue—were the result of the mixing of Immortal and human blood during the Godswar thousands of years ago. Like their darker-skinned cousins, the vaeyn, the elysians were natives of the distant western continent of Calhara across the sea. Sel was the only one of her kind Jason had ever seen, and over the past decade she had been the closest thing he had to a mother.
“Did you see anything out there during your trip?” he asked after a moment.
“Every landmark you mentioned,” she confirmed. “If your notes are right, this has to be the place.”
“You know what they say about assumptions,” Tam murmured. “Especially Jason’s assumptions.”
“They make us a lot of money?” Jason countered.
“Well, yeah, but…” the other man stammered. “Uh…never mind.”
Smiling wryly, Jason speared his shovel into a fresh mound of dirt. He had known Tam for over a decade now, and in a lot of ways the other man hadn’t changed a bit since they had first met. Tall and lank
y with an unkempt shock of blond hair and a cherubic face that couldn’t grow a real beard no matter how it tried, Tam was part scamp, part loner, and all awkward. He dressed like a vagrant, and his wide assortment of dopey grins made it impossible to take him seriously.
The two of them had originally met following the end of the war and the subsequent dissolution of Galvia into the newest colony of the Crell Imperium. Both of their lives had been devastated by the fighting, if for drastically different reasons. Jason had lost his entire family. Tam, for his part, had never really had one.
Life as an orphan was never easy for any child, but life as an Unbound orphan in a war-torn country was something else entirely. Ever since his innate channeling powers had first manifested around puberty, Tam had been a pariah constantly on the run from the authorities. He had eventually traveled to Lyebel, one of Galvia’s largest cities and home to the only legitimate academy for Unbound on the entire continent—or it had been, anyway, before the Crell had burned it to the ground.
After the war, the two of them had lived as glorified vagabonds for several years before finally fleeing into the relative safety of Solaria. Tam had still been forced to conceal the nature of his powers wherever they went, and he had never been able to find a proper teacher. As a result, he preferred to ignore his magic whenever possible…often to his companion’s chagrin.
“Can’t one of you just wave your hands and blast all of this dirt out of the way?” Gor grumbled after another few shovelfuls. “It would save a lot of time.”
“The Aether is not a toy,” Selvhara admonished, “and the Goddess does not approve of her followers draining her energy needlessly.”
“How convenient for her,” Gor muttered. His yellow eyes flicked over at Tam. “So what’s your excuse, then?”
Tam shrugged. “I don’t think shooting fireballs at a pile of dirt will help very much. And what if there’s something valuable just a few inches down? Do you really want me to torch a bunch of ancient scrolls by accident?”
“Good point. Maybe they’ll have some spells you can learn to make yourself useful for once.”
Jason sighed and shook his head. A few years ago, he would have tried to play diplomat and keep everyone happy, but now he realized that endless bickering was just the inevitable consequence of traveling with a chagari. Or maybe Gor just had an exceptionally charming personality. Either way, the extra muscle was usually worth it, especially when they needed to scare off the competition.
The group continued digging for another ten minutes before Jason’s shovel finally struck something. It took another fifteen to figure exactly what that something was.
“Staircase,” Tam said, banging his shovel against a solid chunk of dirt. “This definitely looks like some kind of tomb entrance.”
“It’s a Hassian royal crypt,” Jason corrected, smiling at the telltale ridges in the stone railings. “Over two thousand years old.”
“And possibly filled in,” Gor pointed out. “What are the odds the entire place hasn’t collapsed by now?”
“There’s nothing here suggesting a cave-in of that size,” Selvhara told him, her eyes closed and her fingers pressed deep into the dirt. “I believe only the entryway is covered; I can sense a stone door on the other side.”
Tam whistled softly. “You really need to teach me how you do that.”
“Trade secret,” she whispered, withdrawing her faintly-glowing hand. “Now move—I should be able to soften up all of this dirt without disturbing the structure itself.”
The three men crawled up and out of their ditch to give her some space. As a druid of Anvira, Selvhara had mastered a wide array of channeling techniques. Jason had seen her heal wounds with a touch, conjure raging tempests of wind and rain out of previously calm skies, and even shoot lightning from her fingertips. Unlike Tam, however, she couldn’t channel Aether on her own. Without the magical bond linking her to her goddess, Selvhara was just another flesh-and-blood person like anyone else.
Most regular folk struggled to appreciate the difference between the Bound and the Unbound; after all, the subtleties of magic, just like any other esoteric field of knowledge, were difficult to appreciate from the outside looking in. Ultimately both possessed the ability to channel the Aether, the so-called “blood of the gods” left behind following the death of the Immortals in the last age, and that already elevated them above everyone else. For thousands of years, however, almost every nation around the world had agreed on at least one thing: the Unbound were dangerous, but the Bound were not.
“Here we go,” Selvhara whispered. “You might want to hold onto something.”
For a moment, nothing happened, and Jason started to wonder if the dirt was packed in more tightly than she had realized. But then suddenly the ground beneath him began to tremble, and he dropped to a knee to steady himself as the center of the ruins transformed into a sinkhole. The rocks and larger hunks of clay were sucked downwards as if they had been devoured by quicksand, and soon the entire ditch looked like it had been transmuted into a ravenous vortex of mud.
“The idea was to remove the dirt, not transform it into a pool of muck,” Gor commented. “Did we forget to mention that earlier?”
“Just shut up and let her work, would you?” Tam grunted back. After a moment, he leaned in closer to Jason’s ear. “She does know what she’s doing, right?”
Jason smiled. “What do you think?”
After another few moments, Selvhara thrust her hands up over her head, and her violet eyes blazed as if they had been replaced by a pair of glowstones. The afternoon breeze quickly intensified into a stiff gale, and the pool of slosh was violently sucked up into the air. With another flick of her wrist, Selvhara directed her concentrated hurricane to move thousands of pounds of dirt, clay, and rock from the ruins back to a pile on the surface.
The entire process only took a few minutes, and once she was finished they were suddenly standing in front of a pristine, ancient staircase descending down towards a massive stone door covered in markings—markings Jason would recognize even if he was blindfolded.
“Amazing how much more useful that would have been two hours ago,” Gor grumbled as he vaulted down from the ledge to the staircase with surprising grace. “Perhaps next time we should let you dig while we do the scouting.”
Selvhara didn’t reply. She closed her eyes and let out a deep breath, and Jason swept behind her and slid a supportive arm around her waist. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes, I just need a moment,” she told him, smiling tiredly. “That isn’t as easy as it looks.”
He smiled back and squeezed. No, the common folk definitely couldn’t appreciate the difference between a Bound and Unbound. Even he had trouble with it sometimes. Selvhara’s power would have been absolutely terrifying in the hands of a rogue druid, but then again that was the whole point. If at any time her order determined that she had misused their goddess’s power, they could sever her bond to Anvira in a heartbeat. The same was true of the Crell Imperators and the Solarian priests and even the vaunted Knights of the Last Dawn. They all had an invisible string that could be cut at any moment. Tam and others like him did not.
“This language is the same as the one you showed us earlier,” Gor commented as he studied the doorway below.
Once he was sure Selvhara was all right, Jason stepped down next to the chagari. “Did you become a linguist when we weren’t looking?”
“No, but one of your tomes had several illustrations. The inscription here is identical.”
“He may not be big on words, but picture-books are right up his alley,” Tam muttered under his breath.
“Either way, I’m impressed,” Jason said, ignoring the jibe. “This is a basic greeting—and warning—to visitors. It states that this is the tomb of Queen Malacross the Dreamwalker.”
“A greeting and a warning?” Tam asked. “What’s the warning part?”
“Nothing specific,” Jason replied, rummaging through his
pack to find the keys and journals he had prepared for the occasion. “I already told you, this tomb pre-dates the Godswar by almost five hundred years. The worst things that could possibly be in here are a few dart traps and maybe a collapsing floor.”
“If I recall correctly, a collapsing floor nearly killed you and that nobleman you were with two years ago,” Gor said.
“His name was Slaan, and he was just pretending to be a nobleman,” Jason corrected, running his finger along the outlines of the inscriptions before selecting the appropriate key. “But most of that trouble was his fault, anyway. He tends to lose his patience when the treasure is dangling right in front of him.”
Leaning forward, Jason extended his arm and slid the key into the lock—
And then suddenly a massive chagari paw slammed into his chest and hurled him backwards onto the steps. Even as he gasped for air, a serrated blade scythed down from the top of the door fame and embedded itself into the stone below. The metal was dull and rusty, but it clearly would have had enough force to sever his hand…
“Shit, what the hell was that?” Tam asked.
“A false keyhole, obviously,” Gor said, extending a paw to help Jason up. “Your books also had pictures of common Hassian-era door traps. I suggest looking at them next time.”
“Just making sure everyone is paying attention,” Jason muttered as he bounced back to his feet. “I like to keep everyone informed for a reason.”
“Indeed,” the chagari replied with a self-satisfied grunt. “Now how about you find the real slot and get us some treasure? I believe you owe me a ruby the size of your hand.”
***
Jason had never understood exactly why he had always been so obsessed with Hassian culture and history, but he assumed it was just a latent desire to connect with the legacy of his now defunct homeland. He had spent the better part of four years studying archaeology, history, and philosophy during his time in Solaria and then Solipei, and even now he still looked back fondly on those years. Before his father had ordered the ill-fated invasion of Crell, Jason had spent most of his youth chasing similar pursuits, and almost everyone in his family had encouraged it. His mother had been a playwright, and when her little boy discovered bits and pieces of forgotten cultural history, they always made their way into whatever drama she happened to be working on at the time.
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