"Master, please… open your eyes."The whisper came from very close, and then the world behind it blew apart.Heat struck the left side of his face like an opened oven. Something detonated a few strides away—he felt it through his back before he heard it—and when his eyes came open the grass beside his hand was already black and curling, and bright stones were falling out of the sky and bouncing, still glowing, where they landed.He breathed in.It went all the way down. That was the first thing, before the fire and the stones and the voice: the breath went all the way to the bottom of him and did not catch on anything, and came out again, and a second one followed it without being asked. His eyes stung. He had no idea why that was the part that did it.This isn't my dorm.The thought arrived fully formed, and he reached behind it for the room it meant—the door, the desk, the color of the walls—and found nothing there to take hold of. Only the game. The last corridor of the Temple of As

The coliseum had been a ruin for longer than Feya had been a town—somebody's war, somebody's empire, both long forgotten—but on tournament morning it was loud enough to wake the dead it had been built for. Banners hung off every arch: crossed swords, a coiled serpent-dragon, runes Ethan couldn't read. The crowd shoved in through the gates and up the stone bleachers, and vendors worked the press with trays hung around their necks, shouting over one another—skewers of meat still spitting from the grill, cups of something blue and fizzing that the sellers swore was mana.Ethan tightened a strap on the Godslayer armor that didn't need tightening. On his left hand the ring's amethyst stone pulsed, slow, then quicker, keeping time with him. He put the hand behind his back.Celestia had braided her hair that morning, one long silver rope down her spine, and stood beside him with her arms folded. Even here, even in this, people stepped around her without deciding to."You know," she said, eyei

The forest took four days and the Amber Sands took five more, and by the end of the sands Ethan had learned what his armor was like at noon with no shade for a day in any direction, and had stopped complaining about it, because complaining used water. On the evening of the ninth day they came up over a last long dune crusted with sand fused into glass, and stopped.Dasi lay below them in a bowl of red rock, and it was lit up like a switchboard.Towers of blackstone and brass. Lights of every color climbing their sides. Lines of blue-white brilliance running between the rooftops that he took for washing lines until one pulsed, and a spark ran down it like a bead on a string. The sky over the city was orange going to violet, and the smoke from a hundred chimneys stood up into it and leaned all one way. After Feya, it looked like somewhere from another century."She really lives down there?" Celestia said, in the voice of someone determined not to be impressed. Her eyes were wide."That's

Eileen talked the whole time she worked.Ethan had not expected that. He'd pictured some silent, sweating ritual; what he got was three days of lecture delivered to him, to the clockwork owl, to the furnace, to nobody, without a pause, while her hands never stopped. He sat on a stool at the edge of the heat because she'd told him to stay where she could shout at him, and she shouted.Binding agents. Why two materials that each did nothing at all on their own could do a great deal together, and why you never found out which pairs until you'd tried the wrong ones. The difference between a reagent and a catalyst—"One of them goes into the thing and one of them makes the thing happen and walks away clean, and if you mistake one for the other, you end up with an apprentice's eyebrows on the ceiling." How star metal wanted to be somewhere else all the time, and how the only way to keep it still was to give it a job.He understood perhaps a third of it. But he found, uneasily, that he recogni

The wind was howling across the cave mouth when they came out of it, and the first of the growls came up the rock to meet them—low and guttural, so deep Ethan felt it in the stone under his boots before he heard it.Celestia's claws were already out."They're not only hunting," she said. "They're talking to each other."He had the Void-Cleaving Blade in his hand without having reached for it; the pouch had simply put it there. He was still not used to that. "Six, you said.""Six.""That's not a pack," he said. "That's a family."They went up. The bluff above the cave broke into ledges and chimneys, and they climbed it in the half-dark with the wind pulling at them, until they were crouched on a lip of rock over the valley with the whole floor of it spread out below. A thin moon was going down into the mist on the far side. By its light, and the first grey of the day, they could see them.Four grown chimeras moved along the valley floor in a loose line, lion-headed and heavy-shouldered,