IT WAS LATER THAN they had hoped for by the time that arrangements were made, chains secured and a kind of marching order determined. The Golden Purrmaine traitors had by now recovered full voice, but the quelling presence of thousands of aptly-named Quellsteel Pixies put a dampener on their mischief, at least for the moment. Doubtless there were already twenty counterplots fermenting in those overtaxed golden brains.

  A least they no longer all looked like Yaarah. Suggids!

  Allory emerged among Deepwoods trees shadowed by a deepening twilight and flew aloft. Not a night as deep as those before, for the thinning shroud of Shyraiama Dragons was all too clear. Prince Hansanori had occupied himself by taking briefings from the Fae of Ahm-Ulira and, as he returned, his silver jawline had a decidedly grim set to it.

  “We are sore beset on all sides,” was all he would say, before offering her his arm. “Your – ah, can you?”

  Allory chuckled slightly and assumed her Scintillant shape, such as it was, in order to link arms with him. Harzune had begun to train her in such unfamiliar courtesies before becoming suitably distracted by Zzuriel.

  “Reformed Allory,” said he, gently patting her not-quite-substantial, sparkly limb. Had he known of that murder … she shut the thought away ruthlessly. “So, we must make all haste to Ahm-Shira, a journey of some three days were one able to afford such leisure – aye, the leisure of better times, one may say.” She noticed a sad tautness about the corners of his eyes. “I must speak with my father. We must … act.”

  She drew breath.

  “How? How, you rightly ask?” said he, reading her question perfectly.

  “Aye.”

  “I know not. Only, that I must act for all our people.”

  “What news?”

  He sighed. “The Deepwoods are vast but, even now, information filters into these wooded halls in ways it has not for decades past, perhaps due to the Wraith’s unseen influence, yet the King remains unmoved. Nation wars against nation upon our very borders and the outskirts are already reported to be overrun by refugees in numbers uncountable by any measure of census or managing. And it seems that much has been withheld from Elf and Fae – very much indeed.”

  Allory shook her head slightly, not least at his phrasing. It seemed that Princes spoke differently to ordinary Fae and it took her a moment to unpick the meaning.

  “Simply,as I mentioned, that the Wraith’s grip upon the realms has been far subtler yet more complete than ever we imagined. Our intelligence service has only belatedly woken to the truth and they are scrambling wing over antennae to work out what is going on – a working that, according to the Golden Purrmaine Felidragons’ first words on the matter, will prove to be of nil consequence. All Spheris is in chaos. War has marched across faraway realms for generations without number – yet I should not disturb you with such heavy tidings.”

  “I am … aware,” she said.

  “Then it is true?”

  “All you have said, is true,” she echoed, touching her throat at the despair locked tight within. “All this and more. I wish I had better news, my Prince.”

  His eyebrow arched. “Alas, have I returned to ‘my Prince?’ What lamentable formality!”

  “Eep.”

  “Now, there’s a sound that bids me kiss it.”

  “Eep!” Allory giggled, all her sparkles blushing at once despite the great heaviness that lay upon her soul and memories. “I … must confess to a certain unfamiliarity with the mores of courtship, my … uh, suggids! My … harpist.”

  “Ooh!” A smile curved his lips. “That is most acceptable.”

  “Then I, too, am pleased.”

  They flew on in silence for a moment; a silence that struck her as portentous, both aware perhaps of the likely ephemeralness of what they had just shared – words and feelings painted most poignantly upon a backdrop of calamity. Teasing to lightly frame what neither of them dare to express. Allory looked on as the Quellsteel Pixies formed up in a great column of sooty dark wings and solemn mien, especially those who escorted the captive Felidragons.

  “We will travel with them and they will carry us to the capital city, day and night,” he said, again reading her thoughts with uncanny accuracy. “Here are our companions.”

  “Sparkles, frrr-prrr.”

  “Furball.”

  She was quite, quite certain that the dapper Prince produced an un-princely eyeroll at their manner of greeting, but her swift glance landed upon the very face of innocence. Suspicious innocence. She promptly abandoned him for her favourite perch upon Yaarah’s neck, just behind his tufted ears.

  The location to which she had been abducted appeared to be on the outskirts of Ahm-Ulira, as she recalled it, and to her further surprise, her anticipation of flying past one of the active volcanic vents took a matter of several minutes of quiet flying to fulfil. They flew beneath the great, soaring treetops burnished in the gathering dust into brass-olive giants of vaulting dimensions but thinning leaves, the eyes of her memory informed her. A closer examination revealed an unexpected brittleness to the foliage. Dryness. Glancing about further, she realised that the whole forest was what the Humans called a tinderbox, ready to ignite.

  The Pixie column – more a dark river to her eye – skirted the deep volcanic fissure in the forest floor to avoid the worst of the stinking gases seeping up from its maw. Aye, and fragments orange lurked down below, occasionally spitting up toward them but falling well short of their low altitude. Intriguing. How did one design the geological substrate of a structure such as Spheris? A fully constructed world, she recognised for the first time. She had always known or believed that truth, she told herself, yet had not appreciated it in such a … physical sense. Ehlshinoi must have a mastery of physics second to none. She must know about forces that shaped whole planets. If Spheris met such a definition. Was it unusual? Or a way entities such as her beautiful Middlesun were forced to hide …

  Oh! Would you –

  Her thoughts scattered as a sunbeam from on high seemed to curve around a high-up bough and fall momentarily upon her forehead, with a sense like an ethereal kiss.

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  Allory giggled inwardly, sending love and scintillance back. Aye, I am thinking about you.

  Still, what she sensed was unexpected. Allory pondered her feelings while the Prince made an exclamation of startlement and Yaarah purred, “It happens.”

  A kiss of sunlight. How precious.

  To put into words what that gesture signified took her the whole time that they traversed the mile-long fissure. Ehlshinoi seemed ready, somehow. Almost … pregnant? Huh! Does she have babies? she puzzled. Yet that was not quite the sense of it either. Why when all creatures of the Wraith’s immense armies marched upon Ahm-Shira, would this strange sensation become paramount? Did the Wraith hunt her progeny? Had she missed this detail? Aye, that feeling was also one of finality, an ending of things; perhaps, her final relief from the existential burden of the ariayaenvul, and a new beginning with that dreadful entity defeated and life within Spheris now freed to thrive?

  She wished for it more than she had ever wished for anything in her life.

  Passing into sweeter airs and back beneath the thickets of the Deepwoods, they flew now past and over great camps of soldiers, Elves in the main, bivouacked and drawn up in regiments. The eye of General Allory Fae assessed their readiness. The hum and bustle of the ten thousand tasks that moved armies were here honed to a near-fever pitch. These men and women feared the future. Trembling hands applied whetstones to blades, checked leather armour, stroked the fletching of three-foot arrows prepared in bristling quivers, stacked in their thousands in this area. Keen eyes scanned logistics lists and deployment orders and intelligence reports. There was no bark of laughter or playful snigger to be heard. She saw children, some as young as ten years, being outfitted and made ready; eyes wide and dark, voices muted.

  Hansanori peeled off to speak to one of the leaders and soon caught up again.

  Several miles further, they reached regiments of Humans, some foot soldiers and some cavalry. “Men of Arburn, judging by the purple eagle pennant,” Yaarah identified them. “They have come far. Six hundred miles and ten, frrr-ssst.”

  “A frrr and a ssst for that?”

  “Allory Fae, you are a pollen-brained rascal.”

  “By my whiskers, what an insult – ah, there goes Hansanori again.”

  “Even in the dark, it is hard to miss that silver-chased flying chamberpot.”

  “Scholar Yaarah!” she hooted. “Such language is beneath you.”

  He stroked his whiskers and purred, “I’ve been polishing that joke for days.”

  So hard did she laugh, she combusted into a cloud of sapphire sparkles and could not reform herself for an hour afterward.

  One would almost think he cared.

  The Prince caught up later again, whisked along by a squad of Quellsteel Pixies. Allory found them impossible to count at this hour. One merged into the next. But Hansanori lit them up perfectly, his natural glow appearing to enliven a living armour of legs, antennae and wings. Who could have imagined legion Pixies living in the deepest places of Spheris? And ancient monsters such as Julfyria?

  Speak of which! “Hansanori, did you warn them about Julfyria and the Kera-du-Kerakarool?” she called over.

  His antennae bobbed. “I did. It is hard to say what warning might come if those battling monsters do emerge, and we know not where –”

  “Pray not right beneath the city,” she said.

  “Aye. We are very deep in the Deepwoods, here, but I fear the Wraith has long planned against this day. His armies march on land and command the air. We must imagine that the underground route is in no way exempt.”

  Memory snapped at her with the speed of a copper-banded jungle cobra.

  * * * *

  Jandazari lay upon a royal bier in the great hall of Ahm-Shira, the Majestias Argentium, according to legend the place where the heart-magic of the Suylas Deepwoods connected to Middlesun in her Centresky. His wings did not quiver with the pulse of his life’s sap. His chest neither rose nor fell.

  Beside him lay another shrouded form …

  Wait. That’s not right?

  Yet the memory moved without her volition. Allory remembered ogling the king’s royal rump like a drivelling lackwit eyeing a gourd of tasty, spiced jungle honey while her dear friend lay dead before her insubstantial nose, and a bevy of Councillors and important functionaries looked on. Yet if the more muscular corpse was Jandazari’s, he who had given his life to protect her from the kinship-avengers, then who lay beside him? A Fae child, to judge by its size.

  Her brow creased in dreamlike puzzlement.

  She had to dance. She knew she had, for her life had moved onward from that point into the crucial business of preparing the very burden the carried now, yet the dream seemed not to move. It was frozen. Frozen, waiting … no, there was no touch here. No corruption. She sensed nothing untoward, yet something was clearly amiss. Observation reached her senses as if conveyed through invisible glass, slowed and skewed in ways for which she had no words. Horrific nightmares she knew full well. Fractured, chaotic, amsinthe-twisted shards of a life she had so many times wished had never been born of the cocoon, yet it had been. Shards of a wretched creature called Allory Fae.

  “Pathetic runt!” her dadfae’s voice hissed.

  Is this him? No, no, no … she shuddered violently. He is no longer here. He cannot be. It’s only a dream.

  She thought these dreams had stopped and, with them, the debilitating halo migraines. Yet this dream lingered, and malingered, for an eternity before suddenly, it changed.

  All the faces turned toward her. Even the shrouded bodies on the bier.

  “Allory.”

  They spoke as one, a chorus of sepulchral voices roughened with age and death.

  “N-n-no!”

  “Allory Fae.”

  “No, you can’t – you cannot –”

  “Allory accursed.”

  The chorus beat upon her ears like limbs thrashing out of some disturbed grave.

  “Runt.”

  “No!”

  “Runts must die.”

  “I should – I should have,” she sobbed. “I should have died, so many times.”

  “You lived only because he willed it. Because you deserved it. All the punishment. All the pain. You cannot escape who you are. Runt. Runt. RUNT!”

  As the last syllable crashed down, regardless of her denials and her antennae-pulling sobbing, the bigger corpse upon the bier suddenly sat up as if yanked by a rope. A hand rose and fell, conveying a wet snicking sound as if flesh parted before a sharpened blade.

  Allory screamed!

  No silver blood bloomed.

  “See,” Jandazari intoned, and fell back with a lifeless, dull thud.

  I will raise him. I must.

  Yet she could not dance. Nor sing. The dream seemed to have muted her very soul, stolen it away into someplace else, somewhere else. Instead, she saw herself move forward and her hand stretch out of its own accord toward the smaller corpse, and though she fought it with all her will, the silky white fabric whispered aside to reveal the lifeless eyes of Iyenory. Her neck had been opened so deep she saw the white of bone.

  Allory recoiled.

  “The path is broken,” they hissed.

  “No! No – she can’t be – it’s a lie! A lie! No…”

  * * * *

  “One of those dreams?”

  Yaarah’s paws held her against the unbearable softness of his neck ruff. His whiskers ticked her cheek and his fur smelled slightly of smoke mingled with the spicy dankness of Spheris’ deepest places. Panic clenched her throat. Was this real? Was he real – was this her real time, or another timeline she had lived? How many times had she lived, how many different lives and scenarios …

  For that was what she had seen. She realised it now as clearly and acutely as she felt the reassuring, terrifying weight of the ariayaenvul upon her neck. A ghastly soul’s fetter. Such weight it held now, doubled and redoubled even in these last days, that she imagined an ever-stretching, world-spanning balloon that dragged upon her being with all the mountainous weight of a Forestal Dragon Elder, and what would happen if it burst? She had not to think upon it to realise how the soul locket overflowed. It had never been meant to take this. The thousands. The millions. Aye, and what if it no longer had space to hold?

  Could that dream-memory have been real? It felt so authentic. So visceral. Was the narrative thread of her life triumph or tragedy? For the first time, she considered the very real possibility that all she knew and struggled for – in this time, this place, this life, this … whatever it was – might be a lie. Failure might be foredoomed.

  No. No, she refused to believe in such a pointless future.

  This was her time. She would fight to her very last breath for those she loved.

  Taking one such breath, then another, she puffed out her cheeks in a quiet sigh. “Thank you, Yaarah. Aye, it was a dream – one I must tell you about.”

  His reply was a low purr.

  “Let me tell you about Iyenory, a runt like me.”

  “No,” he said.

  “No what?”

  “No, just Iyenory. Her name is enough.”