Prelude

Konii was dead and had been for decades.

What remained of it was now an empty land of scorched hills, barren, dead grass fluttering in stale, tepid air. Years ago, the Kaskaren declared it an exclusion zone and sealed it from the world. Barriers sealed off the former nation from anyone daring to uncover what happened.

Lyell pressed his feet into the packed soil. No alarms sounded, no planes scrambled. Even those who laid waste to Konii had abandoned her. Not much was different across the threshold, but no one lived here. He started walking. In the distance, rolling hills rose into mounds, then low mountains. His walk became a hike. The sun loomed relentlessly, yet Lyell continued. It was quiet. Empty.

After a few hours under the heavy sun, Lyell spotted something familiar on an adjacent peak: a massive, twisted, mangled metal shape. He approached slowly, recognizing the ruined remains of a wind-powered instrument that once sang proudly in the mountain breeze. Its chimes were silent and rusted now. He turned away with a sigh, descending toward a clearing below.

He came down off the ridge with the sun still looming. The land eased as he descended, sharp rock giving way to dirt and sparse grass. A village lay before him, its houses scattered and intact. From a distance it looked empty and harmless— houses low against the hillside, faint house chimes dangling in the breeze.

When he came closer, he saw what the distance had hidden. A door resting on the ground, its frame torn up. Dark streaks on walls. He saw a cooking pot on its side next to floorboards warped and stained from soup that had long since evaporated. Lyell did not linger over these things.

At the far edge of the village stood the temple. Its stucco walls had cracked and chipped with wind and time, and the gold above them had lost its shine, but the shape of it was unchanged. It bore many ornate symbols and jewels whose meanings had long faded, and the structure stood tall against the emptiness around it. He was a boy when he first entered this sanctuary, thin and afraid, with no one to tolerate his family or his upbringing. Yet, as it was those many years ago, the door was open.

The air inside was cool. His steps echoed loudly in the main hall, and he quickly fell into shadow. But he was no longer a boy. He lifted his hands and lit the area with a flash of energy, as he had learned with harsh instruction.

He moved carefully, recalling passages and stairways not walked since his youth. He passed plain hallways with endless rooms. He passed through the training hall where he had sharpened his abilities. At the far end of a winding corridor, much lower in the temple, he faced a door. He remembered the elders’ stern admonitions never to go near this wing. Even the lock was formidable. It was a work of art in and of itself. Most of it, of course, rusted and grimy now. He settled his hand on the enclosure and sensed it. It took no effort to summon energy anymore; it was simply there. The pulse moved through the lock like water, shrieking and tearing as it went. The door burst inward and struck the stone behind it.

Darkness. And the squealing echo of what he had just done.

It took a moment for Lyell to remember to light the area again. He stepped over the hissing iron and went into the vast library. A thick must filled his nostrils. Before him were wide shelves of scrolls, books, and artifacts piled haphazardly by fleeing caretakers decades before. His fingers traced ancient spines, searching. Row after row, ladder after ladder. Occasionally, a sporadic creak that reverberated throughout the room. Nothing but forbidden knowledge filled these shelves.

He moved through the library with the patience the elders had tried to teach him. He had only learned too late to be grateful for it. There was a logic to abandonment. People in a hurry still move by habit, and habit meant the most valuable things would have been gathered last, dropped nearest the exit by hands that ran out of time. He worked backwards from the doorway, scanning the innermost shelves.

A book. He almost missed it: wrapped in brown paper, a wax seal pressed with a familiar glyph. The seal wasn’t holding the paper anymore, which had unfolded to reveal what had caught Lyell’s eye. The mark of the first founders, once known everywhere before the Union’s cartographers had renamed the mountains and erased the towns. It was a dense thing, well bound. The kind of craftsmanship designed to last generations.

It was a survey of early energy practices, compiled far before his time. He skimmed through the archaic text, which referred to things simply. What they called it then was just Vinali. A thread. The word that described the indescribable as close as they could. Much of what was written had been drilled into him in this very building: centering, sensing, the drawn-out discipline of learning to feel before you act. Some of it he didn’t recognize. Towards the middle of the book the ink began to fade. He leaned closer.

That was when he heard it. Or maybe he didn’t. Was that a footstep, or just an echo? He dared not move. He could hear more now, slow and methodical. They were coming from above, from the stairs, which led to only one place. He set the book back down on the pile of paper and trash he’d found it. He withdrew into darkness and waited.

The shape appeared in the doorway: a young man, dark outer coat with a high collar, cut plain and practical. A badge on the chest which Lyell could barely make out, yet indistinguishable. Five leaves pressed into a shield.

The agent stepped over the threshold with a light he had been angling low, the behavior of someone who had been trying not to be seen. He had not expected to find the still-warm metal lying in rubble. He stood frozen for a moment. Then something resolute moved behind his eyes.

“Come out!”

The man lifted his free hand and a dim shadow enclosed it. Outside, far above the stone of this place, wind moved across Konii, over dead grass and old village chimes and the long slopes of a nation everyone had forgotten. It disgusted Lyell. His chest started to burn.

Apparently, so was the air around him. The man started, noticed the hazy blue glow a little too late. Lyell had only learned, over a long time and by rigorous instruction, that fighting its presence was more exhausting than accepting it. What it cost him to use it was nothing. What it had cost him to earn that ease was everything.

He released a single, focused point of pressure, which, unlike the tearing flood he had sent through the lock, was precise and quiet. The way one must do such things, if one must. Knees buckled. Flashlight clattering on flagstone. He folded to the ground slowly, with a kind of dignity, and was still.

Lyell picked up the book and tucked it under his arm. Then he stepped over the man and moved back through the doorway. He didn’t need light this time. He came back out through the temple’s open door into air that was cooling now, the dead hills of Konii resting under amber sky. He looked at the book in his hands, then at the sky, then at the hills rolling away into the silence.

He started walking.