PROLOGUE

Four hundred and eighty-five years after the Fall of Saylassa.

She leaked.

Power flowed through the Mornae priestess’s perfect form, as it should, but at the edges, it sputtered away, lost forever. Like a cracked jar holding a precious ointment, her strength oozed out, a hair’s breadth at a time, not enough for concern. Not yet. It was an unexpected imperfection, one Dranic’s people had not recorded for ten millennia.

Dranic and the other three valmasin stood under the ritual chamber’s dome. They were clad in plain, black wool robes, their legs and feet lined and booted against the crater’s chill; four flaxen-haired foreigners with alabaster skin and pale mint eyes. A mass of vines erupted through the stone pavers and climbed the walls; their dark green leaves, small and flat, grew out into a canopy above them. Pale flickering lights shone from a gemmed dome meant to look like constellations. Otherwise, the chamber was sparse, unadorned.

The priestess’s dress, merely strips of gauzy silver cloth, clung to her lithe body. Her white hair, resplendent with goddess-light, was gathered up from a long gray neck and bare shoulders. She was tall and graceful, like all Mornae. Long gray fingers wrapped in kithaun rings crowned by blue sapphires and deep purple amethysts gripped a baby wrapped in a soft blanket. Her fine, delicate features invited him to look, to adore.

In his long years of studying them, Dranic knew her beauty to be the standard rather than a deviation. Their beauty was intoxicating, a power unto itself.

Dranic studied her with the eyes of a valmasin, a Xulian seer gifted with the power to unravel living things into their constituent parts. Her beauty could draw the inexperienced eye in so many ways. It was only an outward sign of her role and the most superficial. He turned his attention to her vigor, power, and intelligence bubbling up from her essence and flowering endlessly, throbbing with each twitch of muscle, each thought, each breath. It formed a loop between herself, the black rock, and the universe.

The Mornae called it goddess. The Dark. This woman was its priestess.

And yet, with each circuit, the power returned to her weakened. Enough for someone like him to notice. A Mornae priestess generated power, produced more than what she took in, but not this one. He tore his gaze away from her. It was a hazard of his work, to become enthralled, stupefied by the phenomena he was studying.

Seven-foot-tall knights stood at the four entrances to the ritual chamber. They bore kithaun spears, wore sashes across their bare chests with Hosin’s symbol prominently displayed. Dranic had to be careful lest they misinterpret the twitch of his brow, the lick of his drying lips, or an overlong stare.

Especially now that Saylassa was destroyed, and the crater’s walls assaulted. He gazed up to the canopy to regain his concentration and invited the priestess to approach the ritual basin.

A fuzz of silver-white hair peeked from under the blanket. She walked up the five steps to the chamber’s center and placed the bundle in a basin scooped out of a protrusion of pure kith. She unwrapped it—a boy—and his dark gray limbs kicked and paddled the air. He did not cry out. Mornae children must be silent like their goddess. His eyes were deep gray and would turn molten silver as he aged. If they took care with his education. She left him there, flailing, and stepped away to an alcove to kneel before a mosaic of her goddess. She raised her hands, palms up like a bowl to gather favor from the great, silent one.

More house knights pressed into the chamber.

Dranic glanced at his colleagues. They were concerned. They’d never performed the ritual surrounded by anyone other than the mother and her consort. Everything had changed, even for the valmasin.

The boy’s little hand grasped at something. Dranic could not see what. The Dark was not something he knew. Instead, he projected his own power into the baby’s skin, flesh, and bone, down the corridors of his tiny heart and lungs—and deeper still, to the marrow, to the essence. This was the valmasin’s domain. The other three seers did the same, each exploring the child, unearthing his potential. The valmasin had no need of house names, glyphs, or history. They knew the true history of these people, reaching back into antiquity, from their first arrival in Vailassa. They knew them from the inside, from their deepest essence. No one needed to tell them this baby was the product of these two Mornae; they knew it within their minds, united to the vast knowledge of their people.

The child swatted at unseen foes, but Dranic knew the little limbs were victorious as the muscles twitched, the blood rushed with zaeress, goddess-power. He must be able to survive its generation.

It was not enough to be Mornae, however. The mother was of an excellent line, as was the sire. The boy must meet or, preferably, exceed them. Dranic looked up from the boy slowly and the valmasin met each other’s gazes. The knights shifted, metal scraped rock, a reminder of the agreement.

It no longer mattered if the boy manifested less or more. They could not reveal the defect so deeply buried in his essence. By the agreement, they’d pitted themselves against the truth, the thing they lived for. It was their clan’s purpose. Yet they had their instructions, and they had agreed. The realization struck him then: they should have left with the others. By this agreement, they had become puppets.

The leaves behind Yothan twitched and shivered, sending Dranic a message requesting direction. They knew the agreement, but now waited for Dranic to make the final decision.

Gather it, Dranic murmured telepathically through the leaves to Yothan and the others. The knowledge was what mattered, not the rituals. Learn him. Memorize him. The matron, too. Carefully though. If the Mornae didn’t care about their progress, they would. The defect was large. They had known it before as a feeble thing, nothing to alarm, beaten down by more powerful forces, but now it had metastasized into something more. Something no one present should ignore.

The knights hemmed them in to ensure they ignored it.

“Well?” the priestess’s consort asked.

He had been watching from a hall. A proud example of the Mornae. He bore black blades at his thighs; a film of black silk wrapped his chest but not enough to inhibit his communion with the goddess. The languid way he leaned against the wall masked the threat of a knight of Isilayne, who, in an instant, could slay them all.

Dranic glanced at each valmasin. One by one, they nodded to him. They needn’t speak. They spoke a hidden language which traversed the vines, the air filled with spores and pollen, miniscule living realities. From their murmurings, Dranic knew they had all seen the defect’s growth. But they had also made an agreement, and their lives depended on its outcome.

In the past, the valmasin would have spoken freely, sharing the details with the mother and father. It could take hours, even days, but the parents would wait patiently, attentive to every word. The life of the child depended on it, and the future of their house as well. The valmasin were impartial, caring only for the purity of their findings. Sometimes they would disagree and even debate. It was all part of the process. It was not for them to decide, but to give all their knowledge to the matron so she could judge. A hundred years ago he would have asked her openly. All information served the greater goal of encompassing the full knowledge of the child’s essence.

But today, this house wanted Dranic to speak only a single judgment, a single word. The chamber stilled. For the first time, he decided in favor of his own safety and that of his kind.

“Voravin,” he said.

Excellent. Pure. Mornae.

That was all they demanded now. No description of each quality. No projection of what the boy may excel at. That age had passed. Only one thing mattered now.

Sufficiency.

The knight captain relaxed and nodded at Dranic.

The matron raised her hands higher, to the great goddess. The consort grinned, a white slash against ash skin. The mother, also a matron, approached and the valmasin stood apart as she wrapped the boy. She moved exquisitely and gracefully, her blue, crystalline eyes like a twilight sky. Dranic knew every curve of her, every filament of muscle and skin, every fit and strength of each bone, in her essence. It never ceased to fill him with awe to see how perfectly these people manifested their union with the Dark.

And yet… the leak.

“Voravin,” he repeated awkwardly.

The words he wanted to say sat at the edge of his mind, his tongue needing to spit them out. He clamped his jaw tight. His companions stared at him wide-eyed.

“Voravin,” he muttered uncontrollably.

Knives left their sheathes.

The matron looked about, flustered, brow knitted, pressing her child to her chest. She stared at Dranic, perturbed by the repetition. His companions bowed their heads. She was a high priestess, summoner of blue fire, supreme amongst the Mornae. She fixed her gaze on him, and knowledge passed between them.

She knew! Had she felt it? The emptying of her vast reservoir of power? What could she do now? Taint or not, weakness or not, her boy would have to be enough.

She whirled about, silk fluttering, and left the chamber with her entourage.

Once alone, Dranic’s companions gathered close.

“We should have left with the others,” Yothan whispered.

“There is nothing for us here,” Feroh said.

“The knowledge will endure,” Haran said.

“From now on, everything we say is a death sentence,” Yothan said.

“Someday they may need us again,” Dranic said. “We are Harahn. Our purpose is bound to them.”

“Curse him,” Yothan said. “All our work is wasted.”

“But the knowledge, brothers,” Dranic said. “The knowledge will endure even if our flesh does not.”

They all nodded.