Remember, the Prophet told her, the moment you can no longer hear me, you must return to Avitas, just as you did before.
Eliana would have bristled, had she not been so afraid. You have said this already.
And I will say it again. Your plan is a fascinating one, but it is not without risk.
Risk. Such a small word for what she was about to do. It had taken the seven saints all their power to create the Gate. Later, her mother had opened it with only her bare hands.
And now, here was Eliana Ferracora, her hands damp with sweat and wrapped in gold chains.
Tell me again what it is, she said. The Deep.
The Prophet hesitated. I worry repetition will only add to your fear.
Please. Talking through this will settle me.
Very well. The Deep is, essentially, an abyss. A void between worlds, as Zahra told you, months ago. No sight or sound. No physicality. Nothing but raw, unfettered empirium. At least, for angels, this has been true. Occasionally one of them might sense a flash of color, a whisper of sound. Visions that pass as if mere thoughts before the empty blackness returns. But it seems your power allows you a different experience. For you, the Deep is a place of continuous, corporeal illusion.
It’s also full of countless enormous monsters, let’s not forget, Eliana said dryly.
The Prophet sent a flutter of amusement. Yes. The cruciata that have entered the Deep from their world—which the angels named Hosterah—can indeed survive there. They are strange, ancient beasts that even the angels do not entirely understand. But little else can survive the Deep. The angels could not and lost their bodies.
Eliana placed her palms in the dirt. The earth beneath her was a familiar anchor. Panic beat a fierce drum in her heart. Images of her body tearing itself to pieces flashed through her mind.
You won’t lose your body as the angels did, the Prophet reminded her, though their voice vibrated quietly with tension. They could not pass through the Deep unharmed, but it seems that you can. Your mother could have too, I think, if she’d had the chance to try.
As if that were a comfort. Eliana set her jaw, rolled her shoulders. I will see things I cannot trust, but I have to trust them.
I think you will see, as you did that first day, faint images of what I believe are worlds beyond our own, as if you are walking through memory. But I think it isn’t memory—it is happening now, or has happened, or will happen. Many worlds, all connected by the Deep, in which time has no meaning.
Eliana focused on her steady breathing. You think.
It is a theory, the Prophet admitted. Many scholars throughout history—both human and angel—have posited the very concept I describe. Think about it. You were able to stand in those hills, even though they were mere illusions, echoes through the Deep. So, whatever you see today, be it roads or mountains or forests, trust it. Use it. Believe the illusion. Let your power provide you with reality.
Or else fall into the endless abyss? Eliana asked wryly. Be consumed by the Deep?
I am confident you will manage to avoid that.
And Eliana felt that confidence, sent to her by the Prophet on a steady current.
She wished she shared the feeling.
Instead, a sick fear gnawed at her stomach. She could not shake from her mind the violet sky tinged gray with the shadows of beasts. Though she had survived her first journey to the Deep, there was no certainty she would survive the second. But if she waited any longer, she would be cowed by the sight of this thing she had made.
Eliana held her breath, let go of the tree roots, and stepped swiftly through the fissure, expecting the same vista of soft hills and empty fields to greet her.
Instead, she saw a city crowded with narrow black spires that stretched toward a dark sky scattered with stars.
She froze where she stood, in the middle of a broad thoroughfare choked with people—merchants carting their wares, jugglers tossing glowing orbs, children leading animals by knotted ropes. Some of the animals she recognized; others, fleshy and mottled, she did not. If she looked too directly at any one thing, it slipped from her gaze, turned gray and cloudy, then flew out of sight. There was a faintness to it all, a slight discoloration, as if she were looking not at something real but rather at the relics of a dream.
They don’t see me, she said, slowly making her way through the crowded street. Dark shapes quivered at the corners of her eyes, giving her the unsettling sense that something vast was closing in upon her. She learned quickly to keep her eyes focused straight ahead, or else the world would start spinning. She could not think about what truly surrounded her: nothingness, endless and dark. The fall of her feet on the illusory road beneath her—that, she lied to herself, was real and true.
You understand, now, how they did it. The Prophet’s voice was grave. The Deep touches all things. The joints between worlds here are thin and pliable, the empirium capable of being molded by those with the power to do so. Like your saints of old, who used their elemental talents to doom an entire race.
Zahra told me it was a peace treaty, Eliana thought evenly, matching her words to her measured pace forward. The angels would enter another world, one that was uninhabited, and make it their own. The humans would remain in Avitas, and the Angelic Wars would end.
Zahra told the truth, the Prophet replied. It was a terrible deceit.
The saints did not enter the Deep, though, or else they would have died. Isn’t that right?
They worked their magic from Avitas, yes. A pause. More or less.
How was this accomplished?
Silence from the Prophet.
Eliana fought a swell of impatience. How do you know all of this?
I am a keeper of many stories, was the cryptic reply.
Holding her many questions on her tongue, Eliana watched a boy run past. White braids fell to his waist, and freckles dotted his pale skin. She looked for too long at him; his shape blurred and faded, then flattened, as a shadow would fall across the ground, and was gone. The cobblestones were slick with rain, and Eliana thought she saw drops falling, but when she looked harder to confirm it, pain spiked behind her eyes.
She turned away, her head aching. Not knowing what was real and what was not left her stomach in queasy knots.
None of it is real, the Prophet replied, and yet all of it is real. I believe what you are seeing is another world, very distant from this one and yet so near that if you put out your hand here in Elysium, you would be touching it and not know it. Many worlds, the Prophet repeated, their voice soft with fascination, all connected by the Deep.
A movement above her, faint at the edge of her vision, urged Eliana to look up, but she refused, afraid of what she would see. She remembered Remy convulsing at her feet, Corien watching coldly from above.
Did it hurt? she thought, knowing the answer. When you lost your body?
Another beat of silence. Seldom did they speak of the Prophet’s identity. Eliana often feared that delving too deeply into such questions would ruin everything between them.
But Eliana had known the truth from the first time they had spoken: the Prophet was an angel, whether they chose to talk about it or not.
Once again, the movement above flickered. Eliana looked up. Overhead was a night sky with stars more numerous than those she knew in Avitas. Ripples passed through the stars as if they were froth on black water, and in that water swam creatures unseen. Eliana squinted and saw faint dark shapes.
Her blood turned cold. The cruciata?
Yes, the Prophet replied.
Do they see me?
It is possible.
Driven by a wild, throat-clenching instinct, Eliana reached an iron gate and hurried past it into a small park, where the trees were heavy with rain. She ducked behind one and clung to its trunk, hidden beneath the sopping leaves.
But then, through her fea
r, she remembered: None of this was real. She could hide beneath a tree, inside a house, deep in a cave, and none of it would matter, for in reality it would still be only her, Eliana, huddling behind nothing, seen by whatever lurked in the Deep. She couldn’t hide—she was alone and vulnerable in an endless abyss, and this tree was not a tree, and the ground she stood on was not ground at all. She existed in nothingness, and nothingness surrounded her.
Abruptly, her fingers passed through the tree, and she stumbled through it and fell. A stubborn part of her brain expected to hit the ground, but instead she kept falling, past the ground that wasn’t truly there and into a spinning maelstrom of darkness.
Lights flashed, as if she had passed into a storm. She tried to shut her eyes against them—they were too bright, they were hurting her—but she couldn’t. They were everywhere, scorchingly brilliant, as if all the stars she had seen were now erupting in sprays of color. The hot white of lightning and a roiling plum, the punched black-blue of a fresh bruise. She tried to scream, but the air stole her voice. No, not air. Nothing. The empirium, the Prophet had said, raw and unfettered.
Distant shrieks and howling roars crashed against each other, building to an awful, discordant cacophony that slammed over and over against her ears, as if she were falling from a high cliff through chaotic mountain winds.
She gasped and choked, struggling to breathe. Heat swept across her skin in painful waves, and with a burst of terror, she wondered if this was the beginning of the end. She would lose her body just as the angels did, her skin peeled away by the Deep.
Eliana, listen to my voice.
She fumbled for the Prophet’s faint, distorted words as if they were handholds she could use to climb free of the darkness. What’s happening? I don’t understand!
Listen to me and concentrate on what I’m saying. Remember the city you saw, the road you walked upon? You must recreate the illusion, use it to steady yourself and find your footing once more. Your little river, Eliana—remember it. How it anchors you to your own power. How it protects you from anything that would hurt you.
Eliana struggled to think of the city and its black spires, the boy with the white braids, the juggler’s glowing orbs. The images rushed at her, tumbled and frantic, and she grabbed for them, imagining her castings and the power they carried as anchors that could pin the world back into place. And with each image she caught and held came a relief from the roaring noise battering her ears. The brilliant lights dimmed; the spinning blackness slowed and steadied. She began to feel the edges of herself return—the hem of her nightgown kissing her legs, her hair brushing her shoulders, the cool embrace of her castings.
There you are. The Prophet’s voice was steady, no longer so distant. Take a step.
Eliana obeyed and placed her foot on the wet cobblestones of the spire-city’s rain-slicked road. For a moment, she did nothing but stand on her own shaky legs and breathe. She clung to the feeling of her own physicality, hoping it would ground her.
Trust the illusion, she told herself. She held onto the song of her power, thrumming in every vein, and in her mind she drew a picture of the world she had seen. Rebuild it.
The boy with the white braids sprinted past her. Dizzy, she turned to watch him as he plunged into the crowded street and crashed into the arms of a man who knelt before a shop front, waiting to embrace him. The man’s white hair was bound in many knots. He was, Eliana thought, the boy’s father.
Her eyes filled with tears as she watched them. How long it had been since she had been held by someone who loved her.
Come home now, the Prophet ordered. I should never have allowed this.
Eliana turned away from the narrow green light in the distance that marked her way home. I can’t. Not yet. I haven’t done what I came to do.
Eliana, you nearly lost yourself to the Deep just then. This is new to me too. If that happens again, or something worse, I may not be able to help you.
Eliana flexed her fingers. The chains of her castings shifted gently around her hands. But if I go back now, I could die there just as well, so I might as well stay here and finish.
The Prophet fell silent, their quiet anger a cloud on the horizon of Eliana’s mind, but she ignored that and closed her eyes. She concentrated on the slight weight of the gold discs resting in her palms, slowly urging her power to rise until a gentle force tugged at her chest. That same instinct had brought her to the courtyard garden, where the air was thin.
Now, this pull at her chest, at her shoulders and fingers, urged her to move forward. Slowly, she opened her eyes and found the black city painted in incandescent shades of empirium gold. Brightest where she focused her gaze, dimmer at her vision’s periphery.
The empirium is luminous here, she thought to the Prophet. Brighter than anything I have seen in Avitas.
As it should be. The Deep is the empirium unburdened by physicality. The Prophet’s voice softened. I think this is why you, daughter of Rielle, can walk there without pain. The empirium is the footprint of God. It is the thing that made the worlds. And you carry more of it inside you than any being that has ever lived.
Except for my mother.
A fluttering pulse, as if the Prophet felt a slight pain. Yes, little one. Except for your mother.
As Eliana walked through the winding city streets, following the empirium’s call, the buildings grew taller and closer around her. She kept her mind sharp, used it to create a path that was real even if the road underfoot was not. Even if this was an illusion, a mere echo of a world that lived far beyond her reach, she would believe in it. The path led her up a narrow staircase of stone, into a house with its doors thrown open to the night.
Hurry, Eliana, the Prophet said at last. Hours had passed in a blink. He will come soon. We can try another day, if we must. Do not allow stubbornness or pride to—
Here, Eliana thought. Inside the house, in the corner of a sitting room that existed in a distant world that was not her own, she had found what she sought.
Oh, the Prophet said, their thoughts soft with amazement, for they could see through Eliana’s eyes the place she had found: a thinness in the fabric of the Deep, a pliancy of the empirium itself, just as she had discovered in Avitas. Only here, in the Deep, it manifested as a slight watery sheen in the air. It was made of a thousand colors, as if it were a prism catching sunlight.
Eliana waited another moment, letting her eyes unfocus and turning her thoughts inward, so the empirium could guide her golden sight through the gleam to what lay beyond. She smiled to see it, then called up her power, brought her hands to blazing, and pushed aside the air shimmering before her until a small seam hissed open, spitting white-hot blue light against her fingers.
Past the seam and below her, as if she looked down upon it from a low cloud, stood a city, sprawling and white. Spiraling towers capped with wings reached for a brightening dawn sky. There was the wide chasm circling the city, the bridges spanning it.
And there was Corien’s palace, its burnished domes and elaborate parapets resplendent in the creamy light of sunrise.
Eliana sank to the ground and sat back hard on her heels. She braced her hands against her thighs, afraid to breathe too hard, though her head spun from her exertions. The world around her shimmered precariously. She blinked hard and, through a glittering haze, stared at the hole she had made. How weak it seemed, how small and pale. Fingers of light branched out from its perimeter, but so slowly and faintly that Eliana feared the tear might soon repair itself.
That’s enough for today, the Prophet said. Hurry home, little one, I beg you.
Eliana stood, swaying slightly. I must make it wider. Wedge it open farther. It’s too small now. The cruciata will never get through. Once I leave, it might mend.
There’s no time for that now. We will come back and try again and again until it is done. Or we will craft another plan entirely.
&nbs
p; Staring at the faint shapes of Elysium, Eliana felt frantic. I cannot wait any longer!
If you try to push your power too hard all at once, you might lose yourself to the Deep, or you could draw the cruciata to you before you’re ready—before I’m ready—or you may alert Corien to our work, and he will come for you, and for me, and all will be lost. The Prophet’s voice was stern. You must ruthlessly measure out the use of your power, or you will leave yourself vulnerable when you most need the strength. We must work slowly, and all the while continue our exercises and rebuild your stamina. We decided this when you first presented your plan to me.
Eliana knew this was right, and yet she turned from the seam with tears of frustration in her eyes. Is he coming?
Soon, I think. And you must be entirely yourself before he sees you.
Her heart heavy in her chest, Eliana exited the house and hurried back the way she had come—through the city’s center to its outer streets. She saw the narrow door leading back to Avitas, distant greenery framed in angry bruised light.
It is real, she told herself, moving as quickly as she dared toward her exit. It is real, it is solid. She made herself slow, forcing herself to feel each footfall against the road. Then she was at the seam and slipping through, its light buzzing against her skin. On the ground beyond, safe in her charred thicket, she turned and drew the seam closed with shaking fingers. Soon, only a faint imprint remained, a trick of the light one could easily dismiss. She watched it fade, the image of that one paltry hole in the Deep lingering in her mind. It sickened her to think of how much work was left to do and what she would endure in the meantime.
There you are, the Prophet said, their voice a soft tremor of relief. Thank God. Eliana, I think this was too much, too bold. You should not go back again. There are other ways to fight him. The hole you carved may widen by itself in time. The cruciata will sniff it out.
“But how long will that take?” Eliana whispered. She was too tired to return the mind-speak; she reveled quietly in the ragged sound of her own voice. “I cannot wait for that to happen. I must do it on my own before fighting him takes what is left of me.”
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