“Dad,

I’ve heard that you won’t be returning north for some time. Zil-Antonin told me that things are not going well in the south and you’re needed there. I know I’m not getting the entire story. There are strange things happening up here, and I’m being kept in the dark. Zil-Antonin is keeping me in the dark. So is the militia. Even Kamila and Aleks…

I don’t know what’s happening there, but please be safe. I have enclosed something you gave me long ago. I don’t know what they have planned for you, but I hope this helps you remember why I always came back, all those years when I was studying for the Reapers. Please… just be safe.”

-From the letters of Hilda Zelenko

244 YT, Late Spring: Kivv

The new teardrop pendant, forged in an artisan’s shop somewhere in the far north, hung from Hilda’s wrist where the old charm her father gave her had once been. With her opposite hand she rubbed the pendant between two fingers, slowly opening her eyes and drawing in a breath of the cool spring air. In the distance, the lake stood abandoned. The cracked, ancient stones of the wall were slightly warm beneath her, counteracting the chill in her knuckles and fingers as she leaned against the wall’s ramparts and watched the wind rustle the leaves on trees among the hills.

It had been many minutes since she or Lucian had spoken. The light whistling of the wind around them calmed Hilda’s mind, pushing away the old voices, drowning the doubt and the fear, settling her senses and her breath. After a long time, Lucian spoke. The familiar weight of his hand, the warmth of it, rubbed against her shoulder.

“Hilda, is everything alright? You’ve barely said a word since we came up here.”

She shrugged, shoulders crackling a little, joints stiff from the cold. “I’m doing fine,” she said. A part of her even believed it. “Never better, actually. I’m making progress with my magic, my precognition is improving… I feel like I’m ready. You know? Ready to really be a part of the world.”

“But…” Lucian didn’t look her straight in the eye, yet she felt him watching from the corner of his eyes. She sensed warmth and concern from him, but it was shrouded by a nervousness, the anticipation of pain.

Hilda stared at the distant mountains, and finally she said, “I’m scared.”

“Yeah.” Lucian nodded. He did not say that he felt the same. He did not have to.

“I’m so scared. All the time.” Hilda’s fingers curled unconsciously, scratching her fingernails against the old stone. She tore free a little bit of dust, the dust of masonry hundreds upon hundreds of years old, masonry that stood from before the end of the old world.

Silently, Lucian wrapped an arm around her shoulder, and the two sat there, watching the distant lake and the mountains beyond. Where Lucian’s hand brushed over her shoulder Hilda felt the slight burning of the fresh tattoo of power she’d recently acquired: the Viper. Below that on her arm, the Owl burned lightly, slowly, opening her eyes a little wider and clearing her ears and slowing the world around her, even if only for a moment.

“When does it go away?” she asked.

“It doesn’t,” Lucian said. Hilda knew it already, and he knew that she knew. It was just the thing he knew he had to say at this moment. That it was true didn’t make it any less rote.

Hilda whispered: “It makes me so angry.” With the Owl burning, the lake came into sharper focus, each point of light slowly filtering from her eyes into her brain so that she could see the patterns that the early-evening glow made on the water. Those patterns rose and fell with the breeze, shifting and twisting themselves to match the air around them, like the trees that swayed and bent to appease the implacable wind. “There’s no reason we have to be this way,” Hilda said. “We didn’t do anything to deserve this, and yet…”

“Of course there’s no reason.” When Hilda glanced over at Lucian, she saw him staring at the trees beyond the lake, and she followed his gaze. Distantly, she thought she could see something moving among the trees – the tiny figure of an animal trapped on the surface by circumstance, even though the spring had not yet fully banished the frost and night was coming with its fresh waves of cold. “No one deserves anything they get in this world,” Lucian said. “It’s just the way things are. We can’t change the way of the world any more than the lake can rise up against the sky. But they can’t change it either, as much as they might wish to. Some things truly are set in stone.”

“I don’t accept that!”

“That’s good.” Lucian smiled. “I wish I could say the same.”

“Don’t lie to yourself.” Hilda shifted and stood, placing a hand atop the rampart. “Your mission is going to change the world, isn’t it? You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think we could make a difference in the world. You’d be staying as safe as you could inside the walls, waiting for the right time to run away again and disappear into the wilderness, when the war comes for us.”

“Maybe I still will do that. Maybe you will.” Lucian’s voice was wry, a little self-mocking, but somehow, still serious at the core of it. “Suppose that we do run away. we could make it, us and a few others, I’m sure. The Invictans would never catch us. We could go north – to the archipelagos – places that the empire won’t ever bother to touch. We could bring all the people of Kivv with us, if we wanted to, even the people from the south. That camp by the southern wall is going to fill up soon, you know. There’s a limit to how many people we can move into permanent homes, in a walled city. How far can we really expand? But if we run – well, what’s the point of holding to this –“

He didn’t get the chance to finish, because Hilda cut him off with a snarl. “I think we both know there’s no way either of us will make that choice,” she said. “You want to stay. I know that you want to stay. And I…”

“No one knows what they want, Hilda.” Lucian shook his head. “We know what we think we want, at any given moment, and that’s good enough most of the time. But sometimes what we think we want, and what we truly want, have nothing to do with one another. Can you tell me what I truly want? Or what you do?”

“I know you’ll decide to stay, in the end.” Hilda bowed her head a little as she said it, then she looked up and met Lucian’s eyes. He took a step back, his hand falling from her arm, his eyes widening for a few vital seconds.

“And you?” Lucian asked. “You know we don’t always have choices in the end…” His mouth was a thin line, a line of disappointment that cut deep and made Hilda nearly take a step back. She remembered the ramparts, the edge of the wall, and felt in a flash the precognitive rush of air around her, the sudden crack of pain -

Hilda’s heart pounded in her chest as she stood still and upright. The Owl tattoo burning, she raised her hand and lowered her head, pressing her fingers into her forehead. And she closed her eyes and focused. The Reaper’s Gift fell upon her, sharpening her awareness. Lucian’s aura hung bright and cold near her, and she wanted to reach out to it – the light that drew her attention the moment she became aware of it. but instead she looked inward, reached inward, her mind folding upon itself till the mist closed in around her and she stood –

And she held the end of a great chain, but that chain was not cold. It was warm, too warm, yet it did not burn her hands, for her hands were one with the chain. It pulsed – a ringing sound traversing the chain’s length across all its links. The chain shook with each pulse, the beating of a distant heart that was, all the same, Hilda’s own.

Voices whispered around her – not the voice of Plato Arap, nor even that of Ofer Shvets. They were the voices of people she’d known – stretched out and echoing over the surreal space where she stood. Her feet flat against the glassy surface, the mists covering her ankles and stretching up around her and whirling in the not-air.

“I’m worthy!” Kamila shouted, an echo that caused Hilda to flinch and nearly drop the chain. But it would not leave her hands.

“Stay out of sight,” her mother said, so quiet Hilda almost couldn’t understand the words as anything more than a low hum, a comforting sound, indistinct.

“I am a Reaper, one who knows the cost of truth,” Antonin Voloshko recited. The words were indistinct yet Hilda knew them by heart, so even the vague impression of words resolved to clarity.

“You don’t have anything to prove” – Lucian’s voice, distant, almost the voice of an absent-minded wanderer again, the way he’d spoken by the lake all those weeks ago.

“I’ll make it – there’s a city – it’s so close –“

That was a voice Hilda did not recognize.

She followed the voice, for it was unfamiliar but close. She followed it along the chain until she came to a link where, when she held it, the voice was the strongest. “Shorten the path, find the way.” She felt at the link in the chain, only a few steps from where she’d begun.

Walk north.

Letting go of the chain, Hilda turned. Without hesitation, she stepped from the wall. The tattoo on her leg, the dragon, burned, hardening her against the impact. She landed and rolled easily, unharmed by the fall. Shocked by her own impulse, she turned and looked up at the wall, where Lucian leaned against the ramparts. “Are you alright?” he called down, and she nodded.

“There’s someone moving up there!” Hilda said, though she still did not know quite how she knew it. she glanced to the north, to the woods, and there was indeed a figure moving among the trees. Perhaps it was an animal, but… the Reaper’s Gift was around her and she felt confident that it was not an animal.

The sound of an impact next to her, and Lucian rose up to his feet from a roll, his hand instinctively resting on the hilt of a dagger. He quickly relaxed from the fighting stance and started to walk forward. “Who is it?” he said in a low hiss, something between a whisper and the clear, ringing voice of an actor on the stage.

From the forest ahead she heard a voice, echoing across the path and through the land between. From the trees came the voice: “You have to listen to me! I’ve seen the Influence spread, the Void – I’ve seen a great empire rise and fall and rise again, and I’ve seen it rend the corpse of the Old One and revel in the Void, in the Silence –“

“Where are you? I can’t see you.” Hilda stumbled across the field, past the lake. The water lapped at her feet, warm even through her thick boots. Lucian followed behind, breathing heavily, panting under his breath:

“Hilda, Hilda, who…” As they passed by the lake’s edge and started up a hill, he pushed aside the branches of the low-lying trees. “…who are you talking to?”

“There’s someone moving up there,” Hilda repeated. She climbed up the hill’s incline with speed that startled even herself, feeling the Bear and the Viper burning on her neck and her shoulder. Lucian struggled to keep up, pushing aside the stinging branches and the unfolding leaves of spring.

In the woods, they began to hear noises. Hilda heard them first – the occasional burst of sound from the rustling of many leaves, the rippling of the earth below. And she felt the charge in the air as well – the telltale sign of magic. Yet when she reached out, by instinct and by Word, muttering beneath her breath and inscribing miniscule signs in the air, she detected not the merest sign of any Aether-Touched. Instead, she felt…

“You’ve stepped onto a path that is not for you, and for what? Now you dare stand before the king and cast doubt upon his judgment? You know that, for the sake of all, we cannot leave you unpunished.”

Something moved, but did not move. It – the person – the creature – disappeared from one place ahead, and reappeared in another. The person’s aura was too quick to trace, never fully forming in one place before it was gone again. Instead she felt the trace of its step, from one spot to the next through the woods until it drew close. Past the thinner trees, up the hill, Hilda came to the edge of the thick forest.

She held out her hand to rest against the nearest tree trunk, taking a deep breath to recover from the exertion. Her tattoos burned. Her breaths slowed over the course of minutes, and she shut her eyes for a moment.

When she opened her eyes again, there was another hand on the tree-trunk next to hers. The hand slipped a little, leaving behind the trails of a bloody print. Hilda raised her head, and heard Lucian gasp next to her, heard the rasp of a knife being drawn.

A man leaned against the tree, clad in a hide cloak with a heavy hood, antlers emerging from the corner of the garment. His hair was light and wild, strands of it stuck by sweat to his forehead.

His eyes were bloody voids.

His voice was shaky and cold and came in short gasps.

“Isn’t it… the place of a prophet… to scorn the king? But I’m nothing, of nowhere…”

He collapsed to the ground, his face buried in the cold dirt.

Hilda glanced down and then, turning to Lucian, held her hands out in a gesture of confusion. “Well? We’re going to help him, right?”

Lucian stood over the man, the tip of his knife still turning in the air, returning to point at the prone man. The knife continued its dance for several seconds. Then he raised the blade.

And thrust it into its scabbard.

“We’d better get help quickly – he’s lost a lot of blood.”