Prologue

She was falling.

The pain hardly registered now, only the wind screaming past bloodstained hair.

Her eyes closed. She embraced death.

The impact blew whatever breath she held out of her lungs. Her back twisted, the shock making her flinch forwards. Then she sank.

The murky depths clawed at her face and she found herself with a second wind, a sudden burst of energy where moments before there was none. She fought, tried to swim, tried to move the one arm that felt sluggish, her legs which were weak.

“Help!” she called out. Her voice sounded wrong, too desperate, too young, too broken.

It didn’t matter. The liquid slipped over her prone form and stuck to her. She was the fly caught in the spider’s web.

Her last gasp ended with black sludge crawling into her mouth and down her throat.

Then the darkness rose around her and the last thing that Taylor Hebert, Skitter, Weaver, Khepri saw, was a sea of untainted stars, a jagged, broken moon, and two figures, one light and one dark, looking down at her.

***

Salem lifted her head from the tome sitting before her and looked off to the west. Through the stained glass of her library’s windows, she could make out the moon hanging above, slowly tumbling towards the distant horizon as the night started to wane.

She stood, slowly and carefully, as she did all things, and looked across the room. Only a few seers were there to keep her company and most of those were sorting through the towering rows of books, keeping them dust free and clean in the dry air of the Spire.

“Come,” she said, her voice so low as to be a whisper. From the darkness came two creatures, both as dark as the shadows in which they lived. When she started to walk they followed, slithering from one shadow to another in her wake.

She climbed down one of the spiral staircases of her home, each step slow and measured, her dress pooling by her ankles. When she reached the very bottom she paused. There was something in her domain, something in the air that felt... wrong.

“Find it,” she ordered and two shadows slid past her and into the room. She followed after them, still taking her time, still moving at the same slow and measured pace of someone that had all the time in the world to do as she wanted.

The chamber was colossal, a cavern lit by a thousand grimmlamps that floated by the ceiling and mingled with the stalactites that hung like the teeth of a dead beast. The purple light they cast did little to push away the shadows.

A pool, unmoving and of a substance that allowed no light to escape, took up the bottom of the room’s interior. A few Grimm moved out of the pool with the languorous motions of something coming awake for the first time. These she ignored.

Her shades were milling, spinning through the air above something that should not be.

Salem quickened her pace.

“Remove it,” she said, dark eyes fixed upon the formless thing heaped on the edge of the shoreline.

Her grimm moved to obey, pulling the thing back and out of the pool of darkness. They left it a few feet from the edge, then moved back to where the dark could swallow them once more.

Salem came to a stop above the thing. She knelt, robes bunching around her as she folded herself over and looked with something approaching open curiosity at the thing which had invaded her domain. A hand, white as snow and lined with blackened veins, grabbed the edge of the thing and turned it over.

“How very interesting.”