T ime did not flow the same way in Ilyzath. Seconds stretched to months and the months compressed to seconds. I wasn’t sure if this was a

dream, or one of Ilyzath’s tricks.

The shift happened all at once, as if something intrinsic to the world tore painfully apart, like flesh parted by a too-dull blade.

The next thing I knew, I was being dragged down, down, down, falling through the floor and through the earth and into something that felt deeper, rawer than all of it.

I felt the cold spray of sea salt on my face. The overwhelming sensation that I was being watched.

I felt a presence that I knew—a stranger that I knew, soul-deep— envelop me, the familiarity of it jarring, like something I had forgotten I was looking for had drawn close enough to touch.

They called my name.

I reached out for them, and then I was somewhere else entirely.

And then I felt another presence, someone encased in stone, someone looking down over a beautiful city in the mountains. That, too, lasted only for seconds.

The heat, the pain, tore me up. I felt burning, like flames were eating me alive.

I felt everything shattering.

An intangible understanding snapped into place: something is wrong. Something is breaking.

This is dangerous.

The flames consumed me.

I WAS on my feet before I even realized I had moved. Blood pounded in my ears, driven by sheer panic.

There were so many things I didn’t understand. But when I opened my eyes, two certainties stood clear in my mind, the sharpest things I had felt in months.

One. Something cataclysmic had just happened. I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain what it was, or even how I knew it. I felt it in a sense deeper than sight or sound, like an earthquake shaking the basest parts of me, leaving irreparable damage.

Two. Someone was looking for me. Someone important. I felt a connection to them like a rope knotted around my throat, pulling closer.

My hands met the wall before the act was a conscious decision.

Let me out.

A frantic attempt to use my magic resulted only blisters bubbling under my fingertips—my magic redirected by the Stratagrams inked over me. I barely felt the burns.

I NEED TO GET OUT.

Ilyzath’s voice never sounded like words, exactly. Just a collection of sounds. Now, it enveloped me in creaks and groans. The carvings on the wall shuddered.

You feel this change, too. How strange. And yet, perhaps it is unsurprising, that a fly can sense the tremors of an incoming storm.

I pressed my palms to the wall, my breath heaving and heart pounding. The carvings shuddered just as frantically. I had never seen them do that before.

“What is that?” I rasped out. “What just happened?”

The groans of stone sounded like laughter or sobs. It was the beginning of an end, brought upon by mortal hubris. Hands reaching into forces that should not be wielded, and thinning boundaries that should not be torn.

“I don’t understand.”

No. Of course you do not.

The thread of connection to that strange, familiar soul was beginning to fade, like the blurry afterimage of a dream, and that thought devastated me.

I attempted another burst of magic and was again rewarded only with more burns over my hands. I didn’t stop.

You cannot break these walls. Surely you are not so foolish to think you can. You belong here. Ilyzath’s shadows caressed my face. Why do you so wish to leave, my ashen son?

“Because…” I didn’t know how to describe it, the intensity of the sudden need. It was like I had been alerted to a lost piece of myself, somewhere far beyond this place.

The walls creaked in something akin to a chuckle, hearing my unspoken response. Ilyzath, after all, heard everything.

I, too, have lost pieces of myself. But like my loss, yours, too, is inevitable.

Another failed attempt at shattering those walls. Another burst of pain. “Nothing is inevitable,” I muttered.

The connection was almost gone.

I could have sworn Ilyzath laughed.

For an age of your people, I am here. Suns rise and set, and I am here. Empires fall, and I am here. Long before the sunrise or the stars or the shape of the Aran seas coastline. Long before these walls and long after mortals destroy this world. I will feel it fall around my feet, and I will watch. That is inevitability.

I scoffed. Fuck that.

I kept trying anyway. “That’s what we do,” I muttered, mostly to myself, panting with the exertion of my next blow. “Fight the inevitable. Even when it makes us fucking idiots.”

A strange pause in the air, as if all Ilyzath’s whispers ceased at once. It was so dark now that with every attempt at my magic, a red glow sparked over my face.

Hmmm.

I went still. A strange realization rocked through me.

All this time, I had been here, locked up in Ilyzath’s box of horrors. I’d listened to its whispers, cowered at its visions. But never once had it occurred to me to wonder what it was—wonder if it was alive enough to want.

Not until now.

Someone I knew once had taught me that there was nothing more useful than understanding the hidden needs and wants of others. And now, in some

strange element of the air, I felt it in Ilyzath. Want. Desire. Grief, and fear. “You want something. I can help you.”

A shudder of laughter. Does a mountain need the help of an insect?

“A mountain can’t move. An insect can.” I pressed my palms to the stone. “You want something. I can feel it. You need to stand here. But I can go, if you let me.”

There was a long pause, and I prepared myself to resume my desperate clawing at the walls, because surely that made a hell of a lot more sense than trying to negotiate with a fucking prison.

But then the words whispered, I will make a bargain with you, Maxantarius Farlione.

I stopped. This had to be another hallucination. Another trick.

I will allow you to fight inevitability. I will give you your chance to repair the damage that is being wrought upon the underlayers of this world. You will fail, but I will allow you to try. The carvings collected around my palms, like ants circling a carcass. But I ask for two conditions. You must bring a piece of me with you, and you must return when I call.

My brow knitted. “Repair the damage? I don’t understand. What does that mean?”

But there were no more words, no sounds. Only a silent, unspoken demand: Yes or no?

Maybe I should have been more discerning. Maybe I should have thought harder. But I wasn’t thinking about the risks. I was thinking only about the pain that screamed in a world far beneath this one, an indescribable call that I felt like I had to answer, and a thread that pulled me towards someone else that needed me very much.

“Fine,” I said. “You have a deal.”

Pain ripped through my hand, worse than the fresh burns. I hissed a curse and leapt away from the wall. When I looked down, a black-and-blue mark adorned my left palm. The overlapping symbols resembled the ones marked into Ilyzath’s walls, arranged in a diamond shape, and it seemed to shimmer slightly, as if shards of silver were buried within the ink.

“What is—?”

I looked up, and a doorway now stood before me.

You may leave, Ilyzath said. No one will stop you.

I THOUGHT it was a trick even after I reached the doors. But Ilyzath spoke the truth. There wasn’t another soul in the white halls. Not prisoners, not guards, and not even a whisper from Ilyzath itself. I didn’t think I even knew how to leave my room. I tracked the turns every time I was taken from my cell, but I knew they changed every time. Yet, minutes later I found myself at a large set of silver double doors. They opened as I approached, revealing the sea, dim beneath the waning light of dusk.

I can’t fucking believe this is happening, I thought, as I stepped beyond them to freedom. A wall of cold, moist air enveloped me.

I drew in a sharp breath.

In the distance, I could see the shape of the Aran skyline, silhouetted by the sunset. Plumes of smoke pumped into the air, thick enough to see even from this distance. The Fey must have launched another attack—a bad one, by the looks of it.

It was so shocking that it took a moment for the truth to set in: that I was here, outside of Ilyzath’s walls, without a shred of iron on me. Free.

No—not yet. Not quite. I needed to get off this island. I reached for my magic, only to be barred by the tangled mess of Stratagrams. I couldn’t use a Stratagram of my own to leave, not with my magic locked away.

I needed a boat.

I needed —

“Max? How did you… Why…” I turned and froze.

I was so accustomed to Ilyzath’s visions that it took me a moment to determine whether the person who stood before me was real.

Brayan stared me down, his sword clenched tightly in his hands. His hair whipped wildly in the wind, just like the cloak over his shoulders, streaks of red and black cutting through the broken sky. He was now dressed in an Aran military uniform.

Of course, he had joined them. Just like Nura had said. He looked at me as if he couldn’t quite believe I was real either.

I had no weapons, no magic. Even when I did, I could hardly ever win a fight against my brother. Without it, I stood no chance at all.

“I won’t go back,” I said.

He moved closer, and I tensed.

“Brayan, I swear to the Ascended, if—”

“Shut up.” He cut me off, raising a finger to point. At the edge of Ilyzath’s entrance, where it dropped into the churning sea, a small boat waited. “Let’s go.”

I didn’t know how to respond. The thought of the Brayan I knew turning against the uniform he now wore seemed impossible.

He stepped closer, irritation clear in his voice. “What are you waiting for? Move, before the Syrizen find you.”

Arguing was pointless, even if the world no longer made sense. In a daze, I followed Brayan to the boat. We pushed off from Ilyzath. I watched it shrink, from a towering wall of white to a pillar, to a distant shape swallowed by the red-tinged mist.

“They’ll come for us,” I whispered to myself as we drifted away. But they didn’t.

No one did.