“From the moment I met Illian Trent, I knew that the MASO he had experienced was nothing like the one I had. Despite my personal experiences, the agency I knew had been tamed by bureaucracy and the dwindling influence of magic. If the MASO was once a dragon, what I had known was only the tail – the rest of the beast was dead.”

~ Bek Trent, M.A.S.O

Voices came, muffled and indistinct, through the heavy door of the bedroom. Within, a thick darkness had descended, held at bay by the luminous glow of the magical trenches in the walls. Bek could not control them as well as Illian, but they were bright enough to bring out the colors in the small, hide-bound book in his hand. Silver had remained with Illian and the wolf, and both dragons had expressed their preferences by curling themselves possessively across the rough sheets of his bed. As a result, he was left momentarily to his thoughts.

Lifting the book, Bek let his fingers trace the cover as he inched a nail beneath its heavy clasp, slipping it back and flexing the binding to reveal the title page. That page, in crisply inked words of bold, printed script, declared the book to be perhaps the last comprehensive edition of a 1597 reference manual. The Encyclopedia of Mythical Beasts, LM.

He had translated the title from its original Altian, carefully printing it in pencil just under the real title. Just as French had become and remained the language of scholarship in Europe for hundreds of years, Altian had been the language of choice for magical literature until a series of ordinances were passed in 1525, ordering the destruction of anything in Europe containing the ancient language due to its close association with witchcraft – a fact not recorded in any history book, and certainly not widely known or acknowledged. Even then, it had not been called Altian, but witchscript – a language uniquely unrelated to Alti or any land in particular. A few works had hurriedly been translated into either Latin or French, but too few and too late. The damage had been done. Elsewhere, works had been lost or destroyed by warfare, great libraries burned to the ground and books slashed to ribbons in an almost concerted effort to destroy everything Alti had left behind.

And yet this book had been written nearly a century later. Smuggled to American shores by some industrious young magic-user, it had revealed still more peculiarities to the few remaining people capable of reading it. Notable among them was its blithe observation that hundreds of magical species were extinct – species that had never in the history of the known world been observed as extant. Its pages bound an account of mythical beasts so thorough that some had chalked it up to creative fiction, naming even creatures from the previously unexplored reaches of the Americas.

In Bek’s experience, it had proven remarkably accurate.

But he had not jumped through hoops to get his hands on the book just to read up on the beasts. There was something else between its pages, some secret that had dictated it be written in Altian. If it was the Altian language’s association with witchcraft that had eventually caused the language to fall out of favor, it was also that association that helped it live on as the language of cults and darker circles, a cipher-requiring script used by those with secrets to keep and a lack of creativity. In the modern world, scholars familiar with variants on the Altian language did not tie it to Alti at all, but to the blood arts. They believed it had originated with a people near Egypt, and spread through the underworld. Books were written in garbled forms of Altian even in the modern era. This book could be the result of such a movement. Where better to hide a secret than beneath layers of mingled truth and lies, with an account so accurate it seemed false, in a language so steeped in myths and chaos it seemed a joke?

Or it could be genuine. He had no way of knowing. Bek wondered more and more every day if all of it could have been intentional; the Altian language could have been defamed to hide the island’s existence from those who would seek it out.

He stroked his fingers over the abbreviation at the end of the title, half-anticipating that the perfect ink would smudge. LM. Scores of people had interpreted the initials as a reference to whatever obscure author had compiled the volume. He saw it differently.

Lajernal Mir.

After Divide.

It was a rarely used date marker with no reference year, one that had caused a stir of confusion when an idiot somewhere in the world translated the Latin post partitus as After Divide and abbreviated it A.D. – there was zero relation between this A.D. and the more widely accepted one. At any rate, the notation suggested an earlier version of the book in which many of the same species might not have been extinct.

Bek sat back slowly, tearing his eyes away from the sparse page. Silver had been able to read the book all along. How many times, in the long hours that they schemed together within the nightwings’ caverns to defeat the Zara, had she looked over his shoulder and known precisely what he read? How many times had the words resolved themselves more clearly in her mind than they had in his? Could she have possibly noticed the inscrutable hints laced throughout the pages, certain words that, when spoken aloud, would dramatically change the contents of the book?

“Een ners ke jihaer, Alti yanvestriatliat ke vertratju. Gonat,” he read slowly, watching as the words seemed to rise like effervescent smoke from the page, vanishing into the light from the trenches in the wooden walls. “It is as if this beast says, ‘Alti was not a legend. It still exists.’”

The ink ran across the page, coalescing and then spreading, stretching ebony fingers across the paper. In a moment it was again receding, from mountains and forests and lakes, roads, cities, and a single capital, all marked in a hand so exquisitely refined it might as well have been printed on a modern press. No one could mistake it for anything other than a map, and he knew it was a map of Alti. As Illian had said, someone had been there. Someone had seen it. The last remnant of the lost nation, the Castle of Divides, existed within their world, and he was sure, now, that the book in his hand held the answer to how such a thing could be possible.