Twenty-third year of the Burning …

Hera crafted a shield out of nothingness to block Pallis’s blast, then reversed the direction on her protection spells to pull in the power from his attack to replenish her own reserves. Renewed, she struck back, weaving elder and arcane magic together into one spell and channeling it through a tunnel of totemic magic.

The dark beam shot out but Pallis deflected it. Here, in his own domain in the totemic realm, he could nearly match her in power, and he had thousands of years of experience. The spell ricocheted, boring a hole through the wall of the fortress he’d created.

But it didn’t stop there. Boundaries were fluid in the totemic realm. There was no real substance other than that which was created by the residents, and there was no difference between up and down or left and right. After cutting through the wall, the magical attack tore a hole in the barrier between the totemic realm and the mortal world. To Hera, the sensation felt similar to teleporting from one realm to the other … but teleporting across the barrier didn’t rip open reality.

The breach sealed itself almost instantly, but not before she received a vision of the damage her wayward spell would cause, the magic somehow magnifying in power as it crossed between worlds. It was a level of destruction she’d seen equaled only once before. Realizing what she’d done, she shared a look of horror—and recognition—with Pallis.

He faded from view, leaving her alone to deal with the fallout. The battle was over, it seemed, but Hera had no way to stop what she’d set in motion. She fled from the totemic realm, not wanting to watch it happen.

Seeking a safe refuge, she teleported to her old apartment in Tir Yadar. The remains of the great city still stood like a silent tomb for those who’d once walked its halls.

The Chosar hadn’t been able to return to their former home since the tunnel road had collapsed. Even the elder mages among the stoneborn children had failed to rebuild the fallen section, plagued as it was by the proximity of the more severe wildstorms nearer to the city.

The overland route remained impassable as well. While the mundane fires across the continent had burned out long ago, the firestorms yet raged in central Van Kir, fed by power slowly leaking from the conjunction of magics the wardens had attempted to take for themselves. Allos thought it might take decades before the hole was sealed for good.

Nothing of interest remained in Hera’s old living quarters—in the months before the tunnel road had been lost, scavenging crews had emptied most of the apartments of anything useful. She left her barren rooms behind and wandered aimlessly through the West Tower residential district at first, but eventually Fortress Central beckoned to her, as it always did when she visited.

There, at the totem walk, she bowed her head in front of Owl’s statue, offering a moment of regretful silence. The People had lost Wisdom that day, and not just Owl’s. The other totems had all but disappeared from the world, offering no explanation for their absence. The most powerful and capable mages among the Chosar had died when Fortress West melted, and the rockfall which buried the military complex had killed many of the most seasoned and experienced soldiers.

It was a loss from which Hera suspected The People would never truly recover. She, Iris, Boreas, and Demea had managed to save the children from the wildstorms, altering them to fit their new environments, but the Chosar empire was shattered. Their remaining settlements were a shadow of what they once were. How many of Hera’s friends in the High Guard had survived the war only to die soon afterward, killed by the wardens’ quest for more power?

There was one bright spot, though. The intact section of Fortress East housed the medical facility with the stasis room where the Mage Knights still slept. Other than the mindless walking dead in the undercity, the knights were the last remnant of The People within Tir Yadar.

And there they would have to remain.

Hera couldn’t open the stasis pods without a physical body, and even if she did, the wild storms would seek out the knights and the firestorms would prevent them from leaving the city.

She checked in on them from time to time, though, making sure they were safe. There were twelve stasis pods in use. She stopped at the last one to stare through the glass at the newest member of the Order. Ariadne. What sort of world would the girl wake up to? How much more would change before it was safe to free her?

A flash of darkness crossed through Hera’s mind, then another and another.

Visions of potential futures. It was difficult to interpret the visions and nearly impossible to control them, but this sequence was clear enough. Ariadne had no future. She would either sleep forever or die soon after awakening, before doing anything of note.

More flashes of darkness, and then one single, hazy vision of the young woman awake and smiling, with a warden’s sigil on her brow. A sigil in the same shade of blue as Hera’s own weapon enhancement spells.

Hera froze, standing in thought. She hadn’t bonded anyone before her death. Could she still do so now? Unlike opening a mage lock or a stasis pod, the warden binding spell didn’t require physical touch. Could it pass through the stasis field?

She’d never attempted the spell before, but it had been burned into her mind since the choosing dream. She cast it now, and the pale blue sigil appeared on the young woman’s forehead—two circles linked side-by-side.

Before Hera could consider the implications, she felt echoes rippling through the barrier, and then Boreas appeared in front of her.

It was time to face what she’d done.

“Hera!” he said, his voice terrible.

“Did I hurt anyone?” she asked. She had to know for certain.

“Hurt? You killed twenty-seven people! A hunting party of twenty-two brave souls who left the shielded region to do their duty, and five of the older stormborn children who accompanied them in case they encountered a wildstorm. And those are just the ones I know about! There’s a crater fifty miles across in the Storm Heights!”

Twenty-seven lives.

“I didn’t know what would happen!” she exclaimed. “We were nowhere near Tir Navis. We weren’t even in this world! It shouldn’t have …” She trailed off, her excuses sounding hollow even to herself.

“And the last time you fought?”

“That was Pallis!” She’d assumed Pallis had tried some sort of twisted, evil new magic against her, resulting in the massive impact on the east coast of Aravadora. She hadn’t realized how easy it would be to cause the same sort of destruction herself.

“It doesn’t matter who it was!” Boreas shouted. “You both knew it could happen! Iris is having this same talk with him right now.”

There was nothing Hera could say. No justification she could give.

“Never again,” Boreas said. “If you or Pallis attack each other again within the totemic realm, the rest of us will band together to bind your powers for all time. And if we can’t do that, we’ll destroy you. Arodi and Allos have already agreed—if it comes to it, they’ll shed their mortal bodies and return. Don’t make them give up the lives they’re trying to build.” Arodi and Allos were the only two who’d managed that particular trick, though Arodi thought any of them should be able to learn it.

“He’s trying to bury the truth!” Hera said. “Why are you letting him get away with it?”

It had taken seventeen years after the ritual for Pallis to return, and once back, he’d refused to discuss what had happened to him or whether he knew anything about Zachal’s fate.

After mastering his new powers, Pallis had set his acolytes to destroying any books or scrolls they could find which described wardens, the ritual, or the true cause behind the Burning. As he’d gained in followers, he’d begun pressuring leaders among The People to suppress that knowledge in exchange for the protection of totemic magic.

“He’s right, Hera.”

“How can you say that?” she asked. “How can you believe it?” Hiding the truth about the ritual was necessary, but Pallis had gone too far.

Boreas sighed. “Because we don’t have a choice. Even the Chosar barely tolerate us enough to accept our aid. You’ve seen the visions as well as I have. The wildstorms are holding things at bay for now, but once the storms fade, the wars that come after will be worse than anything we’ve seen before. We can’t do what we need to do unless the people trust us. All the people. If we’re ever going to repay the debt we owe, the world will have to forget who we are.”

“You’re just making excuses to hide our crimes so we don’t face any consequences.”

“I don’t really care what you think about it,” Boreas said. “We’ll spend eternity serving this world. That will have to be consequence enough. As for Pallis’s plan, it won’t be the first time we’ve rewritten history.”

“What?”

Boreas shook his head. “There are things we haven’t told you, and I’m too angry to discuss it with you right now, but we know how to make people forget the past. We’ve done it before. Don’t try to interfere, Hera. I mean it.”

With that, he left.

Hera stood alone in the stasis room with the sleeping Mage Knights, a hollow feeling in her gut. The other wardens would allow Pallis to continue with his scheming in the hopes that someday the people of the world would no longer remember what they’d done. Boreas’s instructions were clear. Hera would have to let it happen.

She glanced again at Ariadne. Boreas hadn’t noticed the girl’s binding sigil. Did the world really hate the wardens as much as he’d suggested? Would the other wardens take issue with Hera binding someone? Would Boreas somehow construe it as a sign of interference in Pallis’s plan?

Hera’s visions of Ariadne’s future were still hazy and indistinct, as if the details weren’t yet known. When the girl awakened, she’d be new to her powers, unable to fully defend herself, and in a world that was far different than what she remembered.

She would need additional protection—something to ensure she wasn’t punished for Hera’s crimes.

Hera would have to hide not just the sigil but the underlying bonds that would otherwise be visible to anyone using arcane sight. There was a time she wouldn’t have been able to accomplish that, but the ritual had freed her of the limitations of a Mage Knight’s magic. In the years since, she’d gained a greater understanding of what was possible. Both arcane and totemic magic could be used to craft warding spells. Combining the two would allow her to create a ward that not even the other wardens would be able to pierce.

She worked the complicated magic, then left Tir Yadar and returned to her domain in the totemic realm.

She never noticed the tiny wildstorm which had formed in the machinery connecting the pods to the stasis generator.