Compare the alignment of the stars from the centuries-old charts uncovered at the site of Columbia in Rivenstad to their alignment in the night sky today. When counted, we note several major differences in the appearance of the sky. The constellations that could be charted, and were marked by the old humanity in their own astronomical observations, no longer can be charted, because they are missing pieces. Some of the stars, it appears, died long ago. Whether this has anything to do with the Aether War itself is little more than speculation, but what is clear is that the changes which occurred in the sky appear to at least coincide with the height of the Aether War. The latest charts we found date to 2049 CE (approximately 7 years prior to the start of the modern calendar). But all we know from the old astronomers’ notes tells us that if a star were to die, its light would not disappear from our sky for perhaps hundreds or thousands of years, depending upon the distance of that star from earth. It defies logic that the light itself should have been killed, but the coincidence of timing, combined with the sheer number of missing stars within a time period so short on the geologic scale, is noteworthy in itself. Much further research is necessary to understand this phenomenon.

-From the research notes of Zoe Bari, 240 YT[1]

Etyslund: 243 YT. Five days after the execution of Marga Zelenko.

“I didn’t even know we had prisoners.”

Luca struggled to unclench her jaw, the beginnings of a scream forming inside her mind. She reached out and placed a hand comfortingly on the older man’s shoulder, gave him a brief nod, and moved on down the line. “Anyone else? We need to figure out what happened to the Invictan prisoners, did anybody see them before we came here?”

As she walked the halls of the library, twisted beyond normal human construction by the battle with the Invictan soldiers, Luca found her mind wandering to old days, or what felt like old days at least. She remembered sitting atop the hill, overlooking Etyslund, talking to Marga Zelenko late into the evening. She was so proud of this place, Luca recalled, and despite all the sorrow she’d come to associate with this place Luca couldn’t help but share in that pride. Now the pride threatened to give way before fear and exhaustion and the desire to simply have this all be over.

The Valers were gathered in a range of postured, from tall and on guard against any potential threat to huddled next to, and even over, the corpses of those killed by the Invictan soldiers or by the Aether-touched creature that had torn through the stone walls hours before. Most seemed to tense when Luca passed by, and a few of the Valers even shrank back visibly from her when she moved by them. They could read it in the way she walked, they could see it in the style of the trim on her dress, even if they hadn’t known her, even if her reputation about the town hadn’t given it away.

Everyone knew what Luca Buday had in common with the invaders, and anyone could have guessed at the turmoil raging in her mind.

“Hey, has anybody heard word of the Invictan prisoners?” Luca asked, approaching a group of armed Valers. “Parshir is dead, Kalai is dead, and we need to get all our potential bargaining chips sorted out before the Invictans come back.”

“Bargaining chips?” Mirette, a short and muscular youth, called out back to her, too loud for the small space in which they stood. “You really think we can reason with Invictus?”

“I think that if they come calling again, and we can provide them with something they want, they may just listen to us.” It was an effort for Luca to keep her voice calm and neutral – Mirette’s unveiled hostility rankled at Luca, made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

Mirette scoffed. “When they come calling, they’re going to want us all dead. You too, Luca – they don’t care if you’re a Solist, so you’d better start taking this seriously.”

A wide berth formed around Mirette then, as the other villagers stepped suddenly away from him. They allowed Luca passage as she approached, taking advantage of her height to cast a shadow over him. He did not flinch away from her approach. “Don’t bother trying to –“

“You have some nerve, Mirette,” Luca said. “You still believe that I am not taking this seriously? I am taking this far more seriously than you.”

Mirette tightly clutched the stolen Invictan rifle in his hands, its bayonet still stained with the blood of the soldier it had been wrested from. “I’m fighting to protect our lives and avenge our dead while you’re trying to work out how to negotiate with the people who have killed dozens of us by now.”

“I am fighting to get us out of this situation, not to get us further into it. If that means killing all the Invictans, we do that. If it means negotiating with them, we do that. Because I do not have my head stuck full of foolish notions about vengeance and I’m not so paranoid as to believe –“

“Paranoid?” Mirette reached out then and grabbed Luca by the shoulder, and she felt that she’d made a mistake in trying to physically intimidate him. He was short, but he was massive, and much stronger than her. “Look around, Luca! Invictus wants this village burnt to the ground. As we speak they’re destroying our homes. The longer you spend planning, while your friend the failed Sower refuses to lift a hand, the more they destroy and kill.”

Luca yanked at the bunch of fabric in Mirette’s hand and, stumbling only slightly, pulled herself away from him. He pulled his hand back, while the other one – gripping the Invictan rifle – rested against the wall. Mirette didn’t let up even once Luca was free and backing away. “Why don’t you go bother Stepan Zelenko and see if you can get him to be marginally useful, instead of acting like we’re supposed to know what happened to your prisoners?”

“Mirette, that’s enough,” one of the villagers standing nearby said, stepping forward and grabbing Mirette by the wrist. His face grew angry for a moment, then softened when he saw the other Valer’s face. “Luca, I thought you put Taras in charge of watching the prisoners while Kalai and Parshir were with you?”

“Yes,” Luca said, “I did. But Kalai should have relieved Taras when…” she trailed off. Kalai was dead. He must have left Taras with the rest of the prisoners when he retrieved the one for the prisoner exchange, which meant Taras should still have been in the cell with them when the fighting began above. Due to where the prisoners were being kept, there was little chance Taras had heard the battle, the shouting, the running. He was probably still there.

Luca found herself dashing through the twisted corridors, climbing over bits of haphazard brick and smooth, unnaturally-polished stone. More than a few times she nearly slipped and fell onto the stones, but caught and righted herself. As she continued to make her way through the halls, she spoke to Eirchais in her mind: Help me so I don’t get lost, will you?

Stepan is not far now, Eirchais immediately responded. Take the next right. Luca turned at the end of the hallway, to find a blank stone wall in front of her. Look up, you’ll have to – Eirchais couldn’t finish his sentence before Luca leaped up, gripped the bottom of the opening, and dragged herself into the passageway. Yes, exactly. Luca crawled forward, arm over arm, her head brushing as lightly as she could manage against the cold, hard stone above her.

It wasn’t quite cold enough, the stone, Luca noticed. It was unnerving to touch, stone that had not long ago been a living thing, a vicious defender, the very spirit of a cornered creature given form as the guardian of those almost lost to the ravages of a war that was not their own.

She fell into the library’s central office even before she noticed Stepan sitting at his desk, staring blankly at the wall.

Stepan startled as Luca hit the floor. His knees struck the bottom of his desk and he nearly fell back in his chair, just managing to catch himself with one hand as he turned to the source of the noise. “Luca?”

Groaning as she pushed herself up from the dusty ground, Luca looked up to meet Stepan’s gaze. “Stepan…” She stood. “It’s Taras. You can use Taras to scry on the prisoners.”

A few seconds passed before Stepan blinked and broke eye contact with Luca. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t just scry on someone I don’t know and have no connection to, it doesn’t work like that.”

“But Stepan, it’s Taras. That’s why I think you should use him as your focus. He’s not here, and Kalai didn’t relieve him before he…” she trailed off, unwilling to finish. Luca stepped forward, bent down, tried to make herself level with Stepan so she could look him in the eyes. Outside the isolated office, surrounded by stone, she could hear gathered whispering and murmuring.

Stepan would not meet Luca’s eyes.

Luca groaned. Internally, she wanted to scream. Stepan’s distance, his excuses, his refusal to look Luca in the face… She stood up again and stepped past him. “Stepan Zelenko, do you want to save the lives of your children or not?”

He jolted up from his seat and turned toward Luca then, cupped hand darting toward her throat. “You don’t –“

Luca felt Eirchais shift, and Stepan stumbled, interrupted, the wind nearly torn from him, and his hand struck the stone wall to his left. Stepan tried to right himself, and only when Luca indicated for Eirchais to let up was the older man able to pull away from the wall and turn back to Luca.

Stepan, glaring across the miniscule distance between them, started to raise his hands. Luca tilted her head and raised her own hand, flicking fingers toward the wall. Stepan closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the pupils had shrunk. Stepan’s jaw unclenched and, just from looking at him, Luca felt a little more relaxed.

With the Sower’s Gift over him, Stepan immediately returned to lean over his desk and motioned for Luca to follow suit. The nervousness, the detachment, the refusal to look her in the eye was gone. He met her gaze immediately and spoke with calm. It was almost reassuring, but the suddenness of the change in him gave Luca pause. “I’ll try to learn what I can of Taras. But beyond that, I’m going to need your help. It’s been hours since the Invictans left the perimeter of the library, and they haven’t breached the walls since then, is that right?”

“Yes,” Luca said, instinctively snapping to attention as though Stepan were an officer in some army. “I’ve been around the whole library multiple times and nobody has made it through, or even attempted to do so. As far as we’re aware there is nobody out there. Although, the bodies of the dead – Invictan and Valer – are still where they fell, and it would be best to remove –“

“We will take care of that. Do you require a fire?”

“A fire, si-“ Luca cut herself off. Sir? She would have laughed, were the tension in the air not still so intense.

“Yes, to give the Solist Invictans proper cremations?”

Luca chuckled then, not sure how to react. “Right. Of course. Yes.” She wasn’t sure what was stranger, hearing Stepan speak calmly and plainly or realizing that Stepan not only knew but cared how a Solist might wish to be buried. “But Taras first.”

“Of course.” Stepan nodded. “Luca, I need your help – and Eirchais’ help. The Invictans must be somewhere in the village still, but I know little of most of them.”

“You’ve met Zoe Bari, yes?”

“Yes.” Stepan nodded. “Multiple times, in fact. I can tell you where she is and what she is doing, but what we need, in our position, is something more than that. We need to be able to map out where all of them are in the village.” He pulled a sheet of paper close to the front of the desk, reached to a cup near the back of the desk for a pencil, and put it to the sheet.

“It’s strange,” Luca cut in as a thought came to her. “I could have sworn that I saw Taras in the run to the library, now that I think of it. But he wouldn’t have heard the fighting if he was underground with the prisoners, and Kalai wouldn’t have relieved him of his guard.”

“No…” Stepan said. “You know better than I that he never got here. Perhaps he was stuck, hidden under the gathering hall. Or maybe he was just scared.”

Luca nodded. “Maybe. What exactly do you need me to do?”

“Take my hand.” Stepan reached out.

When Luca wrapped her hand around the inside of Stepan’s elbow, and he wrapped his around hers, she felt a coldness wash over her, a foreign sort of numbness that lay not in her skin but in her mind. Eirchais almost fled from it, but she called out to him: heed me now! Without knowing what she was doing, Luca guided Eirchais out through the air, further than he’d ever gone from her, out of the library’s walls as tiny holes formed in the stonework. Flowing over the village, Eirchais felt the contour of every building and the heat of every flame. Many houses still smoldered, piles of bricks and torn clay strewn about like the remains of a sandcastle when high tide has just arrived. The warmth Luca felt was stinging and hateful, yet another, more reassuring voice said: It is not as bad as I feared.

It’s awful.

They could have done worse. And look – there – in the gathering hall.

What Luca did could not be described as looking, though in a half-hearted way her eyes did form images before them. She perceived the gathering hall from the inside and the outside at once, as Eirchais reached through the air all around that construction, as Stepan’s Gift kept them close in spite of the physical distance between them. Even as this scene came clear in her mind, within the library Luca saw Stepan, with his free hand, drawing out a crude map, marking the gathering hall and several other buildings with X’s. His brow furrowed in concentration, his mind on something beyond Luca’s perception.

There’s Taras. We couldn’t reach him because there’s nothing to reach. Luca did not know whether the thought was hers or Stepan’s. The thought was dull and sad and quieter than it should have been. Taras lay in the dirt outside the gathering hall, an Invictan bolt-thrower in his hand and a gaping wound in the side of his head. Away from the splay of limbs he was scattered, across every blade of struggling, short, brown grass for half again the length of his body.

And the prisoners? Luca’s not-quite-vision flashed disorientingly into the basement of the gathering hall, beneath where the tired and confused Invictan soldiers gathered.

Eirchais could feel it in the air: the bodies were long since cooled in their cellar, and beginning to stink.

Stepan’s pencil continued to glide, scratching, across the page.

[1] five months before Zoe Bari’s recruitment to the Invictan army.