“Run. Don’t look back.”

Scarlet, in opposition to her mother’s plea, froze. Her breath came out in visible puffs, swirling in front of her before dissipating into the night. The mist her mother had conjured to conceal them had likewise dispersed into the forest around them.

Hiding was no longer an option.

Her mother’s gaze was locked onto the figure across the snow covered glade. A man, silhouetted in the light of the moon. Not just a man. A god. Scarlet could feel his aura pressing in on her, even over the distance.

“Scarlet. Run.”

“But—”

“Go.”

Scarlet stood paralyzed for one last moment. I can’t leave her to die. But neither could Scarlet help. She turned and fled further into the woods, away from her mother.

Her chest started to burn with the exertion of plowing through the snow and pushing aside branches, with her fear and frustration acidicly eating at her core.

She should have taught me to fight. I’m useless.

A scream resounded through the forest. Scarlet stopped short, taking a glance back toward where she had left her mother behind. She was too far away now, she could only see trees and darkness.

A sob grew in her throat, but she stifled it. There was no time to cry. She had to keep her silence and escape, or—

Or she could try to save her mother. But how? Scarlet crouched and pulled her dagger free from her bootsheathe. It wasn’t magic, but better to have a weapon than not. Staying low to the ground, Scarlet crept back toward the glade.

She didn’t have a plan. She was probably about to get herself killed—and if, miraculously, they survived, her mother would probably kill her for coming back instead of running to safety. It didn’t matter. Scarlet couldn’t live with herself if she gave in to cowardice.

The trees began to open up into the clearing. Scarlet circled around, doing her best to stay covered by branches and brush, until she caught sight of the god. He wore a cloak patterned with mottled colors, which would have given him camouflage deeper within the forest, though not against the stark white of the snow. At his feet was Scarlet’s mother, on her knees and holding her balance with one hand planted in the snow. Her other hand was pressed against her chest, above her heart. From her distance, Scarlet thought she saw blood dripping onto the snow.

As Scarlet moved to place herself behind the god and as close as possible while maintaining her cover, she found that she couldn’t look at him directly. Every time she tried, her gaze was shunted to the side. A unique trick of his magic, no doubt.

She was close enough to hear him speak now. “No, Kiera, I won’t kill you. At least, not yet. But you will live in a world of pain until that moment comes: the moment I have everything I need from you.”

Scarlet’s grip on the dagger tightened. Could she throw the blade into his back? She’d practiced such a thing, but he was still too far for her to be confident she’d hit her mark—especially without being able to look right at him. But perhaps all she needed was a distraction, to give her mother a moment to retaliate.

“Torture me or kill me now, it makes no difference. I’ll give you nothing.”

The glowing pulse of magic appeared in the man’s hand, pure energy coalescing into a deadly bolt. “Perhaps I’ll save myself some time then.”

As he raised his hand to throw the energy bolt at Kiera’s face, a primal yell unwittingly escaped Scarlet’s throat. She flung her dagger at the god and charged forward after it. The blade missed its mark, whipping by his left side. The god’s bolt likewise failed to hit, but clearly on purpose. It struck the ground next to Kiera’s hand, forming a crater about a foot both in diameter and depth. After releasing the energy, the god spun toward Scarlet, and she found herself frozen mid-stride.

“Scarlet!” Her mother’s cry awakened Scarlet’s guilt. She was a fool, she should have ran. Now they would both die. Scarlet had risked her life for nothing.

With a flick of the god’s hand, Scarlet was shoved away and fell backward into the snow. She rolled onto her hands and knees, preparing to get up, but then—pain blossomed from her back. The energy held in the magic bolt that hit her resounded through her body, forcing her to convulse and writhe in the biting cold of the snow. In contrast, her blood felt as if it was boiling; an agony beyond anything she could have imagined.

And then, unconsciousness.

---

Scarlet awoke with a jolt. Every bit of her body ached fiercely, radiating from a point on her back. The pain was overwhelming, but it only took the space of a breath for adrenaline to take over. She kicked the blankets off and haphazardly rolled from the bed to the floor, the landing sending excruciating shockwaves through her.

The floor was cold. Stone. That wasn’t right. The cabin’s floor was wooden. She wasn’t home, wasn’t safe. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she took account of her surroundings. The room was musty, small, and sparsely furnished. She had her back to a raised bed with a straw-filled mattress. There was a wardrobe hewn from dark wood, a matching bookshelf with bare shelves, and a dusty full-length mirror next to a vanity. A door was to her right, and to her left was the window, covered by thick red drapery.

So, she’d been captured, not killed. A strange choice, considering unlike her mother, she knew nothing useful. The second oddity was the room. While dreary, it seemed too nice for a prison. Then, the third peculiarity was that her injuries were bandaged. Underneath the night gown she had been dressed in, she felt dressings covering the wound on her back. Her right hand was also wrapped in linen. She didn’t recall sustaining hurting her hand, but both her palm and the back of her hand pulsed with a dull pain.

She and her mother had faced Riordan. The god himself, not just his soldiers, like in the past. Now, in his grasp, it appeared he wanted her alive. Scarlet wasn’t about to let him have her.

Carefully, she stood. The movement caused her vision to blotch and fade into grey for a few long moments. She stumbled to the window, and pulled back the curtains. She was in a tall tower, though she couldn’t make out much of the landscape below in the darkness. Just some bare trees, and a river not far off, moonlight glinting off the flowing water.

Strangely enough, two moons graced the sky. One was a crescent, which gave off a faint yellow glow. The other was full, its shine a shade of violet. The sky was oddly colored as well. Even in the darkness, Scarlet could see that it was a purple hue rather than blue.

It wasn’t what she had expected. She’d thought to see the capital, Kingsmount, sprawling out before her, houses and roads and farms off in the distance, not this barren landscape. And the sky, the dual moons—this was the Crossworld.

Her mother had never taken her to the plane where the gods originally resided, the plane that sat between the Worlds of life and death. But here she was now—and without a single clue how to get home.

She had to find her mother. It was the only way she could escape. For many reasons, she dared not consider that her mother may already be dead. If Scarlet was alive, she had to be as well.

Every movement cost Scarlet dearly, a single step causing what felt like a full year’s ration of pain, but she scoured the room. She pulled open the wardrobe. There were a couple of dresses hanging in it. They smelled musty; Scarlet doubted anyone had worn them anytime recently. She was about to close the wardrobe, when she spotted her boots in the back corner. She pulled them out and tugged them on; footwear would be helpful if she had to make a run for it. If she could even run. To her surprise, her dagger was stashed in the drawer of the bedside table. She grabbed it and made her way to the door. It opened with ease.

Riordan truly thought so little of her that he’d left her a weapon and an unlocked door. She supposed her performance in the forest didn’t call for any more respect than that. He thinks I’m too weak to escape. He’s wrong.

She crept into the hallway, which had the same grey stone walls as the room. The air felt moist, and blue luminescence emanated from light motes in metal sconces placed at regular intervals. It was a magic Scarlet was familiar with. Creating orbs of light was one of the few pieces of magic her mother allowed her to learn.

Perhaps after this, she would relent and finally teach Scarlet how to fight, properly—not with the dagger but with the flames that roared within Scarlet’s veins. She could feel them now, pulsing in rhythm with her pain, fighting to escape from her fingertips. But just as she had no idea how to break free from her current entrapment, she didn’t know how to release her fire as anything larger than a candle’s flame.

Her frustration and grit powered her exploration through the halls. Soon, she was lost in a maze of stone and doors. The layout of the castle confounded her. Some halls stretched from one end of the castle to the other, and some were only a few feet long before splitting off into two or three directions.

She imagined that a castle would be lavishly decorated, but this one didn’t live up to that expectation. There were no ornamentations, nor anything to distinguish one hall or doorway from the next. She tugged at each door she passed, finding most of them locked. The unlocked ones led to barren, dusty rooms.

Everywhere she went, she felt exposed. There was nothing to hide behind, and only her dagger to defend herself with if she came across a guard—or Riordan himself. If only she had her mother’s powers of illusion and concealment. Instead, all she could do was wander the strangely barren castle and hope for the best, with sparks at her fingertips that she hoped she could coax to full flames if she needed to.

Eventually, she came across a room that wasn’t abandoned. A library, full of shelves upon shelves of tomes. Scarlet practically salivated at the sight of the vast rows of books. She’d never seen a collection of knowledge like such. They wouldn’t hold the information she sought currently, yet it was still a struggle to keep from pulling a tome off a shelf.

“Knowledge is power,” her mother once told her during an argument. She said it like it was a bad thing.

“Powerful is exactly what I want to be,” Scarlet retorted.

Her mother only shook her head.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Power doesn’t make you safe. Trust me.”

As Scarlet stood injured and alone in the Crossworld, those words rang less true than ever. Though she’d spent her whole life running from danger, she didn’t have the skills to confront it head on. I hate it. I hate being defenseless. If only I’d had the ability to truly make a stand in the first place…

What would she do if she couldn’t find her mother? She could be kept somewhere else, maybe in the World, or she could be… dead. Scarlet’s head spun at the thought. But she finally had to acknowledge the possibility. As much as her mother frustrated her, she was also Scarlet’s idol. She was strong, brave, and she’d risked her life more than once to protect Scarlet. And she could be dead.

Wherever her mother was or was not, Scarlet was alone. And her mother had been wrong. Scarlet needed power to keep herself safe, and she needed it now.

An idea occurred to her. It was dangerous, but if she was truly done running, taking risks was the new status quo.

As quickly as her injured body would let her go, she made her way down an aisle of books. At the back of the library, there were a number of reading nooks and writing desks. Scarlet pulled open the drawers of the closest desk, found them empty, then moved to the next. As luck would have it, this desk had a drawer full of inks and quills. Scarlet snatched a bottle of black ink and let herself crumple onto the adjacent chair.

She closed her eyes, and thought back to the words she had read so many times before. She had copied them numerous times from the book onto fresh paper, not with ink but with a small flame emerging from her fingertip, carefully calibrated to be hot enough to char the page but not to set it aflame. Flamescribing was the one type of magic her mother permitted her to use on a regular basis—encouraged, even. The blackmarket for reproductions of books containing illegal knowledge was small, but paid well and had become their main source of income.

For once, Scarlet needed to use ink. Not for transcribing, but for the magic that she had read about. There were emissary tattoos, applied in a magic ritual that connected emissaries like her mother to their patron god in a magical bond. But there were other bindings that could be done with ink and magic too.

Scarlet needed ink, magic, and… blood. She leaned down and pulled off a boot, and dragged her dagger’s blade against the skin a couple inches above her ankle. At the sharp bite of the metal, a gasp escaped her throat. A chill washed over her body. She definitely didn’t need another injury, but it was the only way. She cupped her hand below the cut and let the blood pool into it. With her other hand, she poured the ink into the collected blood and let them mingle.

Now the hardest part: magic. She focused on the last scraps of energy within herself, and urged it to soak into the mixture of ink and blood. The strange, dark concoction began to shimmer. Scarlet, even more drained than before, felt like she was about to pass out any second. But she had to do this.

What she needed to do now was make a decision. For the oathbond to work, for it to increase her connection with her own magic, she had to promise something. It would be a promise she couldn’t go back on, or the binding would eat away at her power instead of giving her more of it. It couldn’t be something too easy—it had to mean something.

Her mother had an oathbond, though she’d warned Scarlet against ever making one herself. Always the hypocrite. She wouldn’t even tell Scarlet what she had promised for her bond.

Scarlet could promise to save her mother at all costs. A difficult, perhaps impossible task, that she intended to do with all her heart. But if her mother was already gone… no, Scarlet had to choose something else, in case the worst had already come to pass.

Scarlet gazed into the black pool cupped in her hand. “I swear,” she whispered, pouring her determination into the liquid, “one day, I will burn this castle to the ground.”

The ink grew hot against her palm. She took her free finger, dipped it in the ink, and then used it to draw a line around her ankle. There was no time to do anything fancy—plus, a simple band was traditional, from what she had read. It would be the same as her mother’s, too. She willed the ink to soak into her skin, and it did, burning all the while. The pain was intense, but unlike her other pains, this one made her feel stronger instead of weaker. At the end of it, a inked line that was a fingertip’s width thick wrapped around her ankle, permanently embedded beneath her skin.

She took a deep breath. I did it. I think.

Then, she heard the tapping of footsteps on stone. She jumped out of the chair, the sudden movement making her vision splotch once again, and dove behind the desk, her knees hitting the ground hard. The footsteps were getting louder—

Then they stopped.

Scarlet forced her breath to slow, though she wanted to gasp for air. She blinked a few times, and her vision cleared. There was no sound but her own breathing.

Maybe the person had passed by in the hallway. They could be gone now. She could be safe.

Tap. Tap. Tap. The footsteps were louder this time. Scarlet was not alone in the library.

She didn’t trust herself to stand, so she crawled into an aisle of books; a more sheltered place than the open area with the desks. Her dagger was clenched in hand, her knuckle dragging across the floor trying to hold the blade from scraping against the stone. She was about to turn the corner around a shelf and—

“Scarlet?”

The voice came from behind. Scarlet turned back and flung her free hand out, hoping to release the raging fire she felt within. A tangle of flame and smoke emerged, bigger than anything she had summoned before, but they didn’t reach the woman that had found her. Scarlet coughed, choking on the smoke, and skittered back, trying to gain distance if nothing else. Her back slammed into the corner of a bookshelf, hitting her wound squarely. Her entire back, her whole existence, was agony. For moments or hours, pain was the only thing Scarlet was aware of.

Eventually she came to, opening her eyes to see another pair looking back at her. The woman was crouched down to meet her at eye level. At Scarlet’s returned consciousness, the woman stood back up to her full height.

Her eyes were green and sharp, contrasted against her bright, true red hair. At the end of her thick braid, a single black feather dangled. Her brown skin hinted at a Suraskriti or Omorui ancestry, though Scarlet had spent her life in the insular Saridian and couldn’t make an educated guess at which. Underneath a black cloak, the woman wore simple, neutral-colored clothing. A bright clear crystal hung from her neck, and she had two piercings—a mirrored pair of turquoise beads pierced high up on each nostril.

The woman looked down at Scarlet. She wasn’t tall, but the immensity of her presence made her tower over Scarlet. This woman’s aura was as powerful as Riordan’s. Scarlet’s breath caught.

This isn’t Riordan’s castle. It’s Death’s.

The god examined Scarlet, toying with her crystal pendant as she did so. “You should not be up yet.”

Scarlet found herself without words. She had pushed her body as far as it would go, and now even her mind was failing her.

“Come. I will take you back to your room.”

The back of Scarlet’s hand burned underneath the wrappings. Agitated, she itched it through the bandage, but it gave her no relief.

“I can’t—” Stand. Fight. Give up.

“You must. Come.”

The burning sensation became unbearable, like a red-hot brand pressed against her hand. Though she thought she lacked the strength, Scarlet found herself standing. The pain in her hand receded as she acquiesced, though the rest of her body protested in kind.

She snatched her dagger from the floor and followed the woman out of the library. It didn’t feel like a choice. If it was, Scarlet would have collapsed by now.

“You know who I am, don’t you?” the woman asked as she led Scarlet through the halls.

“Death. You’re Death.”

“And our agreement,” Death said, “Do you remember that?”

“No.”

“Ah. Perhaps the memories will return with time.” The god made a sweeping gesture. “This is my castle, Deianira.”

“Deianira,” Scarlet repeated. The castle she had just bound herself to destroy. Her blood ran cold. She couldn’t think about that right now. “Does that mean something?”

Death stiffened. “It is just a name. The point is—get familiar with it. The castle. Kiera’s return has been delayed, and you will be staying here for the time being.”

“She’s okay? My mother survived?”

“She will be fine.” Scarlet’s relief was immense, but Death took no notice. “She has gone on a mission for me, and in the meantime, I will be training you as a mage. It is past time you learned to control your gift.”

“You’re going to train me?” Scarlet said, slowly. “You’re going to teach me magic?”

“Yes.”

Somehow, they had already arrived back at the room Scarlet had woken up in. It seemed impossible to have returned so quickly.

Death led her into the room, and Scarlet sat down on the edge of the bed. Her limbs were heavy and her pain threatened to overwhelm her consciousness yet again. She fought to stay awake, to get a bit more information.

“Is that the agreement you were talking about before? Did you and my mom decide I get to learn magic now?”

“No. I should not be surprised you don’t remember. You were quite far gone when we made it.”

Scarlet’s hand tingled again. Not painfully, but strange. A prompt? Gently, she unwrapped the bandages. On her palm, a diagonal slash ran from the base of her index finger down to her wrist, scabbed over. It emitted a dull pain. Curious, since she didn’t know where it came from, but otherwise ordinary.

She flipped her hand over. On the back was a symbol, tattooed in black ink. Two circles, one bigger than the other, partially overlapping.

“An emissary tattoo. When—how—”

“You agreed to become an emissary in exchange for your life. I needed the binding to keep you from crossing over. Kiera never would have allowed it otherwise.”

Scarlet couldn’t interpret the wry smile on Death’s lips. She tried to let this new reality set in. All her life, her mother had shielded her from her emissary duties. She knew next to nothing about the origins or purpose of the conflict between Death and Riordan. Now, Scarlet was an emissary too, bound to do Death’s bidding.

Knowledge and power—everything she’d wanted. Except, she had wanted it from her mother. Has she abandoned me? With Death, of all people? Strange as this situation was, her mother had to come back. Right? She had never left Scarlet for long before.

But this wasn’t before. This wasn’t even the World.

Scarlet took a shaky breath. “When will you start teaching me?”

“As soon as you are recovered.”

“And my mother—she’s coming back soon?”

Death waved her hand in a dismissive gesture, sharp nails glinting in the light. “Yes, yes, she will return. In the meantime, I will keep you busy. Sleep now. The more you rest, the sooner we begin your education.”

As Death exited, she closed her fist and the light orbs in the room dissipated. Scarlet was left alone in the darkness to ponder the fact that in the single hour she’d spent being both conscious and away from her mother, she’d already made a horrible mistake.

The oathbond. If she didn’t hold true to her intention to destroy the castle—Death’s, not Riordan’s—her magic would be weaker, not stronger.

But she couldn’t afford to be weak. And so… In my heart of hearts, I must believe that I will do it, one day. Even though Death is now my patron god.

She wanted nothing more than sleep, respite from the overwhelming aching of her wounds and the contradiction of getting everything she wanted in all the wrong ways. As she awaited the wave of unconsciousness that would soon come, she repeated a mantra in her head: One day, I will burn this castle to the ground, one day I will burn this castle to the ground, one day…