Three years had passed.
In the kingdom of Evergrove, in the city of Vrindalok, the morning was the kind that asked very little of the world. Birdsong somewhere in the high cherry trees. The slow, dry sound of a city that had been awake since the fourth hour and was still pretending it had not.
A royal cart stood at the inner gate of Evergrove Royal Academy.
Carved dark wood. Blue silk drawn across its narrow windows. Two horses in matching blue trappings, perfectly still.
Around the cart, eight figures waited.
Four soldiers stood at the four corners. Broad-shouldered, heavy Armor the colour of overcast sky, the silver Bluemoon crest set above each heart. They stood the way men stood when their work was to make sure nothing reached the thing behind them.
Four hunters waited beside their horses. Long coats. A sword and a hand-axe each. The dust of a long road on their boots.
The leader stood a half-pace ahead of the others.
His name was Veer Vyom.
He had been thinking, all morning, about exactly one thing. Sir Viraj is not here. The princess will see only me today. This is the chance to make a place for myself in her eyes.
He had not let it show on his face.
The inner gate opened.
He straightened.
She came down the stairs.
Long hair the colour of clear morning sky, falling loose to her waist. The light caught the curl of it the way deep water holds the colour of itself even in shadow. Her eyes were the same blue, only quieter — the blue of something that had been taught it did not need to ask for the room's attention.
She wore a travelling robe of soft pale blue, embroidered at the cuff and hem with the silver thread of the Bluemoon house. A small pendant rested at the base of her throat.
Seventeen years old. She came down without hurry. One careful step at a time.
The four soldiers and the four hunters bowed at the same beat.
"Your Highness."
Alina paused on the second-to-last stair.
The smile that came to her mouth was small and quiet — the smile of a person who was kind by nature and had not yet learned that some people did not deserve it.
"Oh — Sir Vyom."
She tilted her head, faintly.
"Isn't Sir Viraj coming this time?"
"He is occupied at the kingdom, Your Highness. We were sent in his place."
She nodded.
"Then I am trusting you for this journey, Sir Vyom."
His head stayed bowed for a half-second longer than the bow required.
"Your Highness honors me."
She came down the last stair. Walked the few paces to the cart. The driver opened the door for her and she stepped up into the silk-lined dark of it without looking at any of them again. She was not unkind. She was simply already somewhere else in her head — somewhere closer to home than this courtyard.
The four soldiers took their corners. The four hunters mounted.
The cart moved.
And the eastern road of Vrindalok led, as the eastern roads of every kingdom in the World of Living led, toward the Endless Night.
—
An hour later, the trees closed over the road.
The Naught Layer was the same as it had always been. Ordinary. Patient. Trees that had not yet learned to be afraid of anything. The cart rolled along packed dirt at a comfortable pace.
Inside the cart, Alina watched the trees.
She was thinking about her mother. The half-formed picture of her sitting at the eastern window of the Bluemoon palace, a cup of tea cooling on her knee, watching the road for a cart that was still half a day away. Alina had not been home in two years.
A horse drew up alongside the window.
"Your Highness."
She blinked. Her eyes returned from the trees.
"Oh — Sir Vyom."
"How are your studies progressing?"
"They are going well, thank you."
A second rider drew up on the other side. A young woman, sharp-cheeked, dark-haired.
"Your Highness. They say you have begun the Voidthread."
Alina turned her head.
"Yes — only the foundations."
The young woman caught herself. Bowed in the saddle. "Forgive me, Your Highness. I have not introduced myself. Eshani Noya."
"There is nothing to forgive, Lady Noya."
Vyom's voice came back warm.
"Voidthread is one of the strongest paths in the world, Your Highness."
"It is a good technique. But not so strong as people say, Sir Vyom."
"Your Highness is being modest. Voidthread is far better than the Sevenfold."
A small pause inside the cart.
"I have heard of the Sevenfold path. There is no one at the Academy who walks it. When I evolved, Sir Viraj told me not to choose it."
Eshani's mouth moved before her brain did.
"Because it is useless, Your Highness."
Vyom laughed — a short, easy laugh, the laugh of a man who thought he was sharing a joke with someone above him.
"Yes, Your Highness. The weakest of the seven. No use in a real fight. I think a Sevenfold disciple could not even clear the First Layer alone."
Inside the cart, Alina's hand stilled on her knee.
"Sir Vyom."
He glanced through the window.
"It is not good to mock a technique because the world calls it weak."
She did not raise her voice. She was still looking at the trees.
"Every path was made by a person who gave their life to it."
A long, careful silence.
Vyom's smile had gone tight.
"My — my apologies, Your Highness."
"It is alright."
The cart wheels turned. Alina's eyes did not leave the window.
After a moment, she added — because she was the kind of person who could not leave a man embarrassed without offering him a small piece of road to step back onto —
"Sir Vyom. When will we reach Bluemoon?"
"In half a day, Your Highness. Before nightfall."
"I want to see Mother and Father as soon as I can."
"Yes, Your Highness."
He drew his horse forward, back to the front of the column.
—
Two hours later, he had not stopped thinking about the way she had spoken to him.
It was not anger. It would have been easier if it had been. Anger, a hunter could apologize his way out of. That — the soft, careful disappointment of someone who had thought a little better of you a moment ago than she did now — was a thing that did not pass.
Eshani drew her horse alongside his.
"What is it, leader?"
"I think I upset the princess."
"Then why did you speak that way?"
"You spoke the same way."
"I am not the leader of this squad."
He let out a breath. Did not answer.
"Leader. The princess is kind. She does not hold things like that against people."
"Yes."
He kept riding. A long minute passed.
Then his voice came again, lower. The kind of voice a man used when he was talking to himself and pretending he was talking to someone else.
"If we reach Bluemoon faster than the planned route — much before nightfall — she will remember this road for a different reason. She will say, Sir Vyom brought me home before I expected."
Eshani did not answer.
The polite, half-attentive expression slowly slid off her face.
"Leader. What are you saying."
"Call the others forward. We are taking the Third Layer."
She did not move.
"Leader. With respect."
"Call them, Eshani."
She let out a slow breath. Fell back into the column.
—
A few minutes later, the four hunters were riding abreast at the front of the cart.
"Leader." Hardik, the eldest, broad-bearded. "We are not strong enough for the Third."
"It is also dangerous for the princess." Ranjan, thin and wiry, who had not spoken much since the morning. "More than for us."
"Leader. The Tadit Chakra is overhead today. Look at the sky."
They looked.
The sun was high — but the eastern horizon had begun to gather a thin, slow weight of black that did not move the way weather should. The Tadit Chakra. The lightning-cycle. Once a season, the sky over the inner Endless Night turned, the canopy went dark for a full afternoon, and the lightning began. The Third Layer beneath such a sky was not a place that even Outlanders walked through without a reason that could not be moved.
"Leader. Please."
Vyom did not look at any of them.
"The princess wants to be home. We can put her at the Bluemoon border before nightfall. The Second takes four hours. The Third takes two. Eshani — your hide-barrier is strong enough to keep the cart covered."
"Leader, my barrier is not built to hold under that long a strain — "
"You will hold it."
He turned his horse. Looked at her.
"I am the leader of this squad. Do you understand me, Eshani."
A long silence.
She knew the shape of an argument that had already been decided.
"I understand you, leader."
The column changed direction. The cart wheels turned onto the inner path.
—
Half an hour later, the forest was black.
Not the black of night. The particular dark of the Third Layer — the dark that lived under canopy too thick for sunlight to remember its way through. The road here was narrower. Older. The trees on either side had grown into one another at their crowns, branch over branch, until the sky had been quietly unmade above the path.
The lightning had begun.
Far above. The white flashes came every twenty heartbeats — long, slow, illuminating the trunks for one full second and then leaving the dark behind brighter than it had been.
Eshani's hands were up. Her eyes were closed. The hide-barrier hung around the column in a thin curve of nothing — not a wall, not a shimmer, only a small absence the forest's eyes were trained to slide past. Her jaw was tight.
Vyom rode at the front.
"You see? It is not so different from the Second."
Ranjan, behind him: "We are crossing the Third, leader. People say this layer is the first step into the inside of the world."
"That is because Eshani's barrier is doing its work."
The cart rolled. The forest around them was quiet. Too quiet — the kind of quiet older hunters were trained to listen to. Vyom had never been the kind of hunter who listened to silence when he could fill it instead.
Then the smell came.
It came in one breath. The way a wall comes when the eyes have been somewhere else.
Thick. Rusty. Hot. The kind of smell that did not stop at the nose — it went down the back of the throat and into the lungs and made the lungs not want to be lungs anymore. The smell every hunter learned in their first year and never forgot. Old blood. A great deal of it.
Eshani gagged.
Her concentration broke.
The barrier shuddered.
"Get it back up — "
"I — I can't — the smell — "
Hardik, fast: "Eshani. Breathe through your mouth. Get it back up."
Her hands shook. The barrier flickered. Held. Flickered again.
The horses had stopped.
They had not been told to. They had stopped on their own — all four of them, in the same beat, hooves planted in the dirt, ears flat against their skulls. The lead horse let out a low sound that was not a snort and was not a whicker. It was the sound a horse made when it had decided that whatever was ahead of it was not, by any animal's measurement, worth the next step.
Inside the cart, Alina's hand went to the silk curtain at her window.
She did not pull it back.
She had been raised in a kingdom that bordered the Endless Night. She kept her hand on the silk and waited.
A flash of lightning came down through a high gap in the canopy.
For one full second — they saw.
The clearing ahead of them was not a clearing.
It was a grave.
Bodies of monsters were strewn across the ground in the postures of things that had been killed in motion. Twenty of them. Thirty. More — the lightning was not long enough to count. Some lay in halves. Some lay in pieces. One had been opened from throat to gut in a single clean cut, the kind of cut that did not happen by accident. The fur of the largest had matted dark to its hide. A second had been turned half-inside-out by something that had not been in a hurry.
The blood underneath all of them was wet.
Not a day old. Not even an hour.
The lightning passed. The dark came back.
For a long heartbeat, no one in the column moved.
Then Ranjan turned away from the cart. He went to one knee in the leaves. The sound of him being sick was small and flat in the heavy air.
Hardik's voice came out tight.
"Eshani. The barrier."
"I — "
"Eshani."
She tried.
Her hands were shaking too hard. The barrier rose halfway. Wavered. She forced it up. It held — for two heartbeats — and then it went out, and her knees hit the leaves before she understood that her body had stopped holding her up.
A second flash of lightning came.
Vyom's mouth opened.
Whatever he had been going to say did not arrive.
Because somewhere to the left of the path — somewhere in the dark beyond the grave — a sound came out of the forest that was not a sound any of them had heard before.
It was not a roar.
A roar would have been kinder.
It was a long, low, rolling note that did not come out of a throat the way an animal's noise came out of a throat. It came up from underneath the ground. It went into the trunks of the trees and came out of them again. The leaves above the path stirred without wind. The hairs on the back of every hunter's neck rose at the same beat.
The horses screamed.
All four at once.
The lead horse tried to bolt. The harness caught it short. It went up onto its hind legs and came down hard, foam already at the corners of its mouth.
Inside the cart, Alina's hand left the silk.
The cart door opened.
She came down the step.
She had her hands at her sides. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. Her blue eyes were very wide and very quiet — not the eyes of a girl who had panicked, but the eyes of a girl who had heard a sound that did not belong to a road and had come out, without thinking, to see what it was.
"What — what happened — "
She stopped.
Because none of them — not the four soldiers, not the four hunters, not the driver — were looking at her.
They were all looking at the same place.
Just past her shoulder.
Behind her.
To be continued…