"Stop touching things you do not understand, Kael," he muttered to himself. He pulled his finger back from the scroll and stared at the last line on the page. It was past midnight in Vault Seven, the deepest level of the Royal Archives. Four floors of solid stone sat above his head. The oil lamps on either side of his work table were the only light in the room, and the only sounds were the wick burning and his own breathing. He had been down here since the sixth bell, copying a scroll the Head Archivist had flagged as too fragile for the junior staff. Nobody else came to Vault Seven. Nobody else had reason to. He had copied three hundred and twelve characters tonight without trouble. Then this. A single rune sitting alone at the very bottom of the parchment, below the final line of text, with no label beside it and no border marking it off from the rest of the page. The ink was darker than everything else on the scroll, almost wet-looking, even though the document was centuries ol

Garrick Stormblade had spent six months running down a rumor.He had started in the outer provinces, tracking merchant stories about a god-mark appearing in the capital bloodlines.He had bribed two temple archivists, beaten the location out of a Void cultist in a river town, and spent the last three weeks living in the alleys behind the Archive district waiting for the right night. He had expected something dramatic. A battle, maybe. A chase through the palace.He had not expected to find the vessel standing alone in King's Road staring at the sky with a glowing hand.Garrick had the young man by the arm and was already pulling him into the alley between the tanner's shop and the grain store before Kael could process what was happening.He pressed them both flat against the wall as a group of palace soldiers ran past at full speed."Let go of me," Kael said. He tried to pull his arm back. He was not strong enough."Stop moving," Garrick said."I do not know you. Get your hand off me.

Garrick had protected a king before.King Aldren had been forty years old and suspicious of everyone who came within arm's reach of him, and Garrick had kept him alive through two assassination attempts and a deliberate poisoning over six years. That work had been clean. Identify the threat.Remove it, keep the principal breathing. Aldren had been complicated but he had been human in the ordinary sense of the word, and his enemies had been human in the ordinary sense too.Kael Voss was a different problem from any Garrick had worked before.They stopped in the northern forest when the horses needed water. Garrick found a stream and tied both animals at the bank and let them drink.Kael sat on a flat rock nearby with his right hand resting open on his knee and the rune glowing quietly in the dark between the trees. He had not tried to hide it since they cleared the city gates."Close your hand," Garrick said.Kael closed his fist. "Does it show through?""Less." Garrick sat on a fallen

The ruins of Caer Veyl rose from a black lake like broken teeth.Kael stood at the waterline and looked at what was left above the surface. Stone towers with their tops sheared off. Archways that led into open water. Walls that stopped halfway up and ended in rough jagged edges. Everything below was a gray-green shadow in the depths, the rest of the city taken whole when the last Rift War split the ground and let the lake in over a single night, according to the texts Kael had read in the Archives years ago. He had read the account three times because it was detailed and strange. He had not expected to be standing at the shore looking at it in person."The relic is down there," Garrick said."How far exactly," Kael said."The reliquary hall sat directly below the main temple. Based on the current waterline I estimate forty feet at the center. Maybe forty-five."Kael looked at the water. It was completely still and dark and reflected the sky without distortion. "You want me to swim for

In his dream, Kael stood on a throne made of bones.Not sitting. Standing, with both feet planted on the seat and his hands at his sides, looking out across a flat dead landscape that went in every direction without end. The sky was the color of old ash. The ground below the throne was cracked and dry and nothing grew anywhere on it. There were no people. No buildings. No sound of any kind. Just the dead land and the throne and the gray sky pressing down on all of it."You built this," a voice said from behind him.Kael turned. The Shadow Within stood at the back of the throne. It looked exactly like him. Same face, same height, same build. But the eyes were pure black from edge to edge and it stood with a stillness that no living person had."I did not build anything," Kael said."Not yet," it said. "This is what comes after you claim all three relics. This is the world that is left."Kael looked at the dead landscape. "You are showing me a lie.""I am showing you a projection," it s