The Mornae of Vaidolin, high and low alike, eagerly await the first court and the bloody fights to come.
All but the high matron of Ilor’Hosmyr, third high house, for her house has a grave problem of its own.
Regret is a rot. Do not let it take root.
MATRON VAIDEA IN WISDOM OF THE MATRONS, COMPILED BY JEVAN LOR’VAKAYNE, SON OF SAVRA
MAPS
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PRELUDE
When the exiles followed Savra across the Arms of the World into Vailassa, they didn’t know what awaited them. Savra had lured them away with a promise of individuated power, and once away, they soon experienced a terrifying reality.
In the beginning, they met tribes of people who’d been there before the Alcar made their first engine. These people had power, though it wasn’t the power the Alcar concerned themselves with, thinking it mundane and trivial. Certainly not the power that bound stars.
Savra had no such disdain. She predicted the need to use these other powers as step-stones to the Dark. And so, the exiles adopted previously unexplored forms of power, and through it discovered a ladder toward a more elusive one.
They developed deep connections with the native Vailassans. Those powers became part of their bloodline. When the Mornae finally found their footing, they’d become integrated with the various powers of the region, including the Dark.
Along with altered fruits and trees and beasts, the Mornae changed their features to match their newfound power and differentiate themselves from the golden Alcar. For they were now of the night, the moons, and, some would say, the Void.
Integration with the natives served the fledgling Mornae well, but a minor collaborator named Eruna Halnicor gained the most. She was of District Haln, in the southeast sector of Saylassa. She’d crossed districts with three hundred collaborators to learn from Savra. When the celestial council exiled Savra, Eruna and her people went with her.
When the Mornae conquered the crater, Eruna accepted the onerous task of taming the east valley, the least favorable of the four. It seemed an impossible task, but Eruna, later renamed to Runa to shed the Alcar functional designation, joined her people with the local inhabitants and learned from them how to cultivate that impossible terrain and transform it into the garden it is today.
What they found in the east valley defied understanding. Beneath an inch of dirt, they found an endless depth of worm-eaten kith, a chaotic honeycomb, coated in rich minerals and icy sludge. Water descended from the peaks and glaciers and pooled in the combs.
They discovered natural heat just below the frost.
Over time, everything grown there became like the blackness it was born from: fruits turned deep purple, bark and wood became black and hard as rock, leaves matured and passed through their death cycle in colors unknown to other parts of the world.
Together, they formed a perfect synergy of gifts. Gifts, they would say, even greater than the powers that built the stone monuments and towers within the crater, or the enchanted steel the Mornae are famed for. There is nothing more powerful than a living thing.
It was from the natives that Runa developed an affinity for the Fox constellation, Hosin, as the natives called him. She named her house after him and the goddess’s phase during his peak in the night sky: Hosmyr.
FROM MEMORIES BY JEVAN LOR’VAKAYNE, SON OF SAVRA.
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.
