A giant flew over my head and struck the earth hard enough to throw me onto my hands.
For several heartbeats I stayed there, palms sunk in wet soil, trying to understand what I had seen. Mud stung the cuts in my palms. The air tasted of burned wood and wet iron. The fallen man was three or four times my height, armored in plates thick enough to have been doors, yet something had thrown him as easily as Lenak might toss a blanket from his bed. The earth shook again before he stopped sliding. I looked up.
Beyond the shattered fortification, a wall moved where no wall should move. Slabs of broken stone formed one leg; timbers thicker than bridge supports crossed a torso that rose into smoke. Chains dragged from one shoulder, each link large enough for a person to stand inside. Only when the thing turned did the pieces become a body, perhaps two hundred feet tall, with giants swarming around its feet.
A broken tower filled one shoulder. Masonry shifted across its chest, and five arrangements of stone and timber opened together in a rough imitation of a hand. Blackness moved through every gap. I had seen canyon smoke flatten against cliffs, curl backward beneath an overhang, even plunge into air that should have carried it upward. This was not smoke. It moved against the world around it, deciding where the body should bend.
The colossal hand came down. Giants scattered, and the impact opened the ground in a spray of mud, rock, and bodies. I heard myself make a sound I did not recognize. Water flashed through my memory: Selka shouting, a canyon wall, something reaching back when I reached toward it. The creature stepped again, and the present swallowed the memory.
I understood only later that I had awakened inside one failing hold of a much larger battle. In that moment I saw only the ruined wall beside me, the vast basin beyond it, and thousands of people trying not to be crushed. Giants worked in groups around the colossal body. Fires burned in deliberate lines. Farther out, kneeling figures pressed their hands to the ground while walls of stone forced themselves upward. Above them, half hidden by smoke, people were flying.
Something crashed through the wall to my right before I could make sense of any of it. For one confused instant I thought another giant had broken through. Then its shoulder unfolded and a wagon wheel rolled from its chest. Wall stone formed its legs; shattered timbers, shields, and armor had been jammed together into a body perhaps forty feet tall. The same blackness moved inside it.
People around me turned toward the new body. Nobody ran. Someone shouted, “Arvek!” Ropes flew from both sides and tightened around its arms, waist, and legs while fighters rushed beneath its reach with long hooks. A giant—smaller than those surrounding the colossal form, though still enormous by any measure I knew—charged through the breach and struck it shoulder-first.
The collision dropped them both. Rope crews hauled the manifestation onto its damaged side while fighters drove hooks between the stones of its torso and tore at the exposed joints with hammers and axes. A shield-bearer flew backward; someone filled the opening before she stopped rolling. Two people pinned an arm so a third could break it. Another dragged an injured stranger clear and crawled into the space she had left.
The giant rolled clear, the ropes tightened again, and three fighters hammered a wedge into the manifestation’s chest until the body split. Stone and timber collapsed. A dented helmet rolled from the wreckage and stopped in the mud near my knee. For one breath, the creature was gone.
Then the darkness poured out of it.
Nobody celebrated. They were already clearing everything the blackness might use. Timber was dragged away, armor kicked down the slope, wounded people carried clear. The giant swept aside a mound of broken stone with both hands. They had smashed the stone and timber, but the darkness inside had escaped. Now it was reaching for more wreckage to build with.
It raced toward the broken fortification and began to climb. The lower stairs had collapsed, but the wall above us was crowded with shattered beams, abandoned weapons, and enough masonry to build another body twice the size of the first. Hooks flew upward and fell short. A giant lunged for the wall; damaged stone broke beneath his hands. The darkness reached the upper platform.
A woman below the wall put two fingers into her mouth and whistled. The answer came from the sky: three figures dropped through the smoke, then six more, their clothing opening into membranes between their arms and bodies as they turned toward the wall.
Flyers. My breath caught so sharply it hurt. Their suits were wrong—some broad through the legs, others narrow across the arms—and their formations made no sense to me. One carried a hooked blade beneath her body. Two trailed heavy lines. Another bore something far too large to fly with. But I understood why they had been called. The people below could not reach the darkness before it built again. The flyers could.
The first skimmed the wall and cut the support beneath an abandoned platform. A second struck the weakened line, dropping the structure before the darkness could gather it. Others tore loose timbers or looped lines around pieces too large to move below. Ground crews dragged each piece away as it fell.
One flyer missed his turn. The darkness struck upward, his suit collapsed, and he fell. Another dove after him, then a second. Together they caught him so low that one rescuer’s boot struck the wall, and all three vanished into the smoke. Two climbed back into sight.
I waited for the third. He did not come, and the others kept working. Pain tightened through my chest. I had always thought the best flyers were the ones who never needed rescuing; Selka had spent years trying to beat that stupidity out of me. Her voice returned so clearly that I turned, expecting her behind me. I could almost feel her beside me, but no one was there.
A horn sounded across the basin before I could scream for Selka. Another answered, and every giant around the colossal body changed position. Six great cables ran from its hips and legs into the surrounding forces. Giants took the thickest lines while hundreds of smaller people worked anchors and winches. Stone-workers pressed their hands to the ground. Broad slabs of rock rose through the mud, shedding loose earth as they turned upright into walls. They were not attacking. They were turning it.
A line of giants leaned back, hundreds pulling with them. The colossal form shifted half a step. The answering roar was not triumph but encouragement: they had moved something that should have belonged to the landscape. Stone rose beneath one foot, cables changed angle, and the creature lurched another fraction away from the western corridor.
Darkness burst from its side. Part of the colossal form collapsed outward, but the pieces did not fall. Stone, timber, and broken weapons gathered around another concentration of blackness until a second body stood perhaps fifty feet high. Farther away, the remains of a tower assembled themselves around a third entity. Destroying the creature near me had changed so little because the darkness could wear as many bodies as it could build, and every body belonged to the same enemy.
Every part of the defense held a different problem. Flyers stripped high routes. Stone-workers collapsed roads and raised barriers. Giants forced the smaller manifestations away from openings ordinary fighters could not hold. Lines of fire drove the darkness from one stretch of ground while water flooded another after crews stripped it of debris.
The earth moved beneath me. A root thicker than a house pushed through the mud, pale wood slick with black soil. More followed. Instead of attacking them, stone-workers opened deliberate gaps in their barriers. Roots threaded through the broken rock, and when the colossal body pressed against one wall, the stone cracked around them. The barrier bent without shattering.
I traced the roots toward trees beyond the smoke and mistook their trunks for mountains. Their crowns vanished above my sight. Roots crossed the battlefield like living roads, bracing walls, lifting wreckage, and bridging broken ground long enough for soldiers to carry out the wounded. One raised a collapsed slab while six people crawled free, then lowered it again.
Giants pulled before the ground beneath them was ready and dragged one another down. A wall rose too soon, trapping soldiers until roots cracked an opening. Smoke swallowed a formation of flyers and scattered them across the basin.
I watched the soldiers scramble through the gap in the wall. None of them could have opened it alone. I suddenly wanted very badly not to think about Selka.
Another horn sounded, and the armies closed. A road vanished beneath stone. Flyers cut an upper route, and a cleared field disappeared beneath water. I understood then that they were not trying to destroy every body the darkness built. They were taking away what it could use and closing every escape.
The colossal body was being forced toward the middle of the basin. Smoke covered the place, and broken stone structures ringed its edge. Great roots disappeared downward there. When the wind shifted, I glimpsed open darkness where ground should have been, vast enough that daylight seemed unable to reach its bottom. I did not know what waited there. I knew only that every part of the battle was tightening toward it.
Blackness erupted beneath two giants, ripping anchors from the ground and snapping roots upward. A broken cable lashed through the soldiers behind it. The colossal body turned toward the breach, and a broad corridor opened between two western ridges—the escape the armies had spent so much blood closing.
A horn sounded three long notes. “Xelvar broke west!” someone screamed. The warning leapt from voice to voice. “Xelvar west!” “Hold Xelvar west!” Until then the darkness had been a thing without edges. Now it had a name, and thousands of people knew exactly what that name meant.
Xelvar took another step. Giants threw themselves onto the surviving cables while hundreds of smaller people added their weight, but he dragged them all. Stone-workers raised a barrier and watched his foot break it before it reached his ankle. Flyers arrived with new lines and found nowhere secure to fasten them. The roots of the western defenses lay torn across the ground. For the first time since I had arrived, every group seemed to be doing everything it knew and still losing.
A sound rose behind me—not a horn, but voices. One name moved through stone-workers, soldiers, and giants alike. “Ashren!” The crowd opened, and a white bear walked through.
He stood upright in soot-blackened armor, white fur visible at his head, hands, and broad shoulders. Blood darkened one side of his face. He was large enough that I would have stared anywhere else, though beside the giants he seemed almost ordinary. Then I saw how people looked at him: not as if a commander had arrived with orders, but as if someone had finally come who could see everything they were failing to hold together.
Ashren stopped at the broken western line. While Xelvar advanced, the bear looked past him to the fractured ground, the flooded southern field, the torn roots, the surviving cables, the smoke, and the open chasm at the center of the basin. A stone-worker caught his arm and shouted that they could not raise another wall strong enough to stop Xelvar.
“What can you raise?” Ashren asked.
She stared at him. “We have raised wall after wall. Forty of my best have died trying to stop him. We don’t have much more we can do.”
“I heard you.” His voice remained steady. “Show me what you still have.”
She pointed to a broad strip of fractured rock beneath the ruined defenses. “That ridge. We might persuade it into a wall twenty feet high. It won’t hold him, though.”
Ashren nodded as though she had given him good news, then faced the nearest giant on the surviving right-hand cable. The line had cut through the giant’s gloves and bloodied both palms. His armor hung open at one shoulder.
“How long can you keep him?” Ashren called.
The giant reset his hands on the cable. “Not long.”
“How long?”
He planted one foot behind the other and looked toward the smaller crews braced along the same line. “Ten breaths,” he boomed. “If they stay with me.”
Every person on the cable leaned back harder.
Ashren looked south and smiled—not because anything was funny, but because ten breaths was enough. “Open the river.”
Someone hesitated. Ashren roared the order again, and the stone-workers broke open the dam they had raised across the river.
Water burst through the broken southern barriers in a brown wall, rolling stones and shattered timber ahead of it. Fighters scrambled from its path. The stone-worker beside Ashren caught his arm and shouted that the flood would wash out the entire western line.
“It’s necessary.” Ashren raised both hands.
The river climbed out of its bed.
There was no graceful beginning. Thousands of tons of water tore upward, dragging mud and wreckage into a sheet high enough to swallow towers. Even the giants looked up. Ashren turned one hand, and the river curved with it, crossing the battlefield hard enough to change the wind around us.
The flyers suffered first. Air cooled by the raised river plunged through their formations, throwing them sideways. Ashren opened his other hand, and the air divided: one current took the river’s weight while another rolled beneath the flyers. Their wings caught clean air. They dropped, accelerated, and swept along the edge of the water toward the western breach with cables strung between them.
Flyers crossed above Xelvar’s shoulders and released the lines. Others dragged them wide while giants below seized the falling ends. Xelvar swung at the formation. Ashren split the river before the blow landed. Half struck the raised arm and drove it aside; the rest crashed down behind him, flooding the open ground he had been using to break west.
“Now!” Ashren shouted.
The stone-workers drove their hands down. The strip of fractured rock they had called too small rose beneath the flood, slanting upward behind Xelvar. Before it could break apart, Ashren caught it. A mass of stone large enough to carry buildings ripped free of the earth and hung in the air with water streaming from its edges. The stone-workers cried out. Ashren’s arms began to shake, but he forced the mass across the corridor and dropped it into the breach.
The impact closed half the opening. Ashren staggered, blood appearing beneath his nose. Xelvar turned toward him as if the darkness had finally recognized the person changing the battle.
Ashren wiped the blood away without looking. “We must do it again.”
The northern trenches ignited. Ashren called the wind, lifting the flames in long ribbons and driving them across the part of the western corridor the stone had not closed. Water hammered one side of the breach; fire denied the other. Between them, the shattered barrier sagged under its own weight.
Roots surged into the fractures. The stone-workers shouted that the barrier was failing. Ashren told them to let it. Roots split the raised rock wider, and for one terrible moment he seemed to have destroyed his own work. Then water packed mud through the openings. Stone settled around the roots instead of against them. When Xelvar struck, the barrier bowed and held. The giants hauled on the cables, and his entire body turned.
A roar crossed the basin and passed through my body. Flyers descended through the currents Ashren had opened—some carrying more lines, some burning vessels, some nothing but speed. Fire heated the air rising from the west while the river dragged cold air down beside it. The two currents should have torn their formation apart. Ashren folded them around each other, and the flyers climbed between them.
I knew wind. At least I had believed I did. Ashren was not merely finding currents hidden in the battlefield. He was taking forces that interfered with one another and keeping each useful without making any of them cease to be what it was. Water still wanted to fall. Fire still needed air. Roots still split stone. Giants still needed ground strong enough to answer their weight. He was not making any of it agree. He was holding the disagreement long enough for everyone else to act.
Cable after cable fell across Xelvar. Giants pulled; ordinary crews locked the lines into anchors; stone-workers drove them into flooded ground; roots reinforced what stone could not hold. At a downward sweep of Ashren’s hand, part of the river fell from the eastern sky and struck Xelvar. Wind pressed from above, and fire closed the western route. The two-hundred-foot body began to give and shift.
Xelvar went backward, one step and then another. Smoke cleared from the center of the basin. Beyond him, the earth stood open—not a trench or canyon but a vast broken mouth whose rim stretched farther than I could judge. Water vanished down one side. Great roots descended through the surrounding stone into darkness daylight could not reach. Only later would I understand how carefully the battle had hidden its true center. In that moment I understood only this: every line, barrier and current had been forcing Xelvar toward that opening.
He understood too. Across the battlefield, bodies of stone collapsed as darkness abandoned timber, armor, walls and towers. Every dispersed stream raced toward the colossal form. The ground brightened behind him, and the place where he stood became terrible.
Ashren dropped to both knees. His hands struck the earth, and the suspended river fell far enough to scatter the nearest flyers. Someone shouted his name. He looked up without recognition, as if the battle had vanished from his mind. When awareness returned, pain came with it.
He looked toward Xelvar, and grief moved across his face—old and deep enough that for one heartbeat the battle seemed smaller than whatever history stood between the white bear and the darkness. Xelvar saw him too. The broken head turned. Blackness thickened through the architecture of its face.
Ashren whispered something I could not hear and forced himself upright. His knees shook. Blood soaked the fur around his mouth, and one arm barely lifted. He lifted it anyway. The river rose with him, all of it this time, until sunlight broke through the suspended water and cast blue and silver over the basin.
His other hand came up. Shattered fortifications, fallen pillars and slabs large enough to crush giants tore from the ground and hung around Xelvar. Fire climbed between them. Wind caught the fire. Roots ripped through the suspended stone, cracking it even as they bound it together.
For several breaths I could not understand what I was seeing. Ordinary things had grown too large to remain ordinary: a river above us, a forest moving through broken mountains, fire crossing the sky. At the center stood one white bear, bleeding and shaking, holding forces that should have destroyed one another.
Ashren brought his hands together. The world moved.
The river struck Xelvar. Wind drove down from above as the stone beneath him tilted toward the opening. Roots climbed the broken rim and wrapped his lower body. Giants hauled every remaining cable while flyers dropped through firelit air and dragged the upper lines outward. For one heartbeat Xelvar stood against all of it—two hundred feet of stone, timber, darkness and fury. Then one foot left the ground.
The armies screamed. His second foot slid, and the rim collapsed beneath him. The colossal body struck the edge hard enough to break stone the size of buildings loose into the dark. Roots snapped under his weight. Giants lost their lines and fell backward; flyers released before they could be pulled into his falling orbit. The river followed Xelvar over the edge, carrying fire, debris and shattered rock into the depths of the chasm.
As he fell, the last streams of darkness tore free and joined him.
Then his presence turned toward me as his body fell. The distance between us vanished. I could still hear the battle, but I no longer felt myself inside it. The falling darkness had no face I understood, yet I knew it was looking at me.
Something in me reached toward him before I wanted it to. Or something in him reached toward me.
His voice came from beside my ear. “I remember you.”
The words struck harder than the giant had. Ashren shouted, and the river crashed down. Xelvar vanished into the opening in the land with roots, fire and falling stone behind him. Something closed beneath the battlefield. I did not see what. I heard an impact so enormous it seemed to pass through my bones, and the vision broke.
Cold water filled my mouth. I woke choking in the shallows of a pool, rolled onto my side, and coughed until my ribs hurt. The battlefield was gone. One hand clawed at the muddy bank while the other found smooth stones beneath the water. Leaves hung above me where the river had filled the sky. For several breaths I could still hear snapping cables and the roar of the armies, but the sounds faded with each cough. Water moved around my wrist. I could hear my own breath, and no one else’s. “Selka?” I called. No one answered. I stayed where I was because sitting up seemed ambitious.
Pain had arranged itself almost everywhere. My right shoulder burned when I moved it, my hip felt as though I had landed on a mallet, and one knee sent a bright line of pain up my thigh whenever I tried to straighten it. My flight suit was still on me, which mattered enough that I checked it before anything else. One membrane had torn nearly from elbow to waist. Several fastening cords had snapped, and the fabric along my left leg was dark with water and grit. I touched my ribs and decided none were obviously trying to escape my body. That should have reassured me. It did not.
I pushed upright and waited for the world to settle. Green crowded the pool—not the gray-green of a shrub surviving in shade, but the deep, wet green of a place with more water than it knew how to spend. Fernlike leaves filled the spaces between stones. Vines climbed the canyon walls. Moss softened cracks that should have held dust. Trees rose from the narrow cleft, their trunks dark with moisture and their branches woven so thickly that sunlight reached the water in moving pieces.
In Mazakhal, green meant work. Springs hid beneath ledges. Gardens survived behind settlement walls. Channels lasted because generations of hands kept clearing them. Someone found water, and everyone afterward fought the heat to keep it from being wasted. This place looked as though water had never learned fear. I stared until my neck hurt.
The pool was clear near the bank, pale stones visible beneath its surface. Water entered through a split at the back of the cleft, widened around a cluster of roots, then disappeared beneath another wall instead of running openly down the canyon. I could hear more than I could see—water moving under stone, behind rock, through roots.
Red cliffs rose beyond the trees, sunlit above and shadowed where the cleft narrowed. That much belonged to the world I knew. Everything below them did not. I searched the shadows where stone met green, waiting for a familiar movement.
A branch shifted behind me. I turned too quickly and nearly fell into the pool. Pain tore through my shoulder, but I barely noticed as I searched the bank, the stones beneath the trees and the narrow ground along the canyon walls. No familiar figure crouched over a torn suit, deciding which part of my stupidity deserved attention first. No whistle cut through the leaves. No dry voice reminded me that surviving a bad decision did not improve the decision. I called her name, and it sounded small in the cleft.
I waited. Water moved over stone. Leaves shifted overhead. Nothing sounded like a person climbing, coughing, swearing or answering. I got one foot beneath me, then the other. My knee shook hard enough that I caught myself against a tree until the dizziness passed.
“Selka!” I shouted again. Her name traveled through the trees and returned changed by stone and water. No one answered.
I followed the pool because it offered the only clear direction. Walking hurt, but standing still was worse. Selka could be unconscious beyond the trees—with a broken leg, a head wound, or a suit too damaged to climb. I carried each ordinary explanation to the next bend, where I had to invent another.
The grove was smaller than it had seemed, its trees leaving only narrow strips of damp ground beside the closing walls. I checked beneath branches and behind roots, climbing one fallen trunk before my knee nearly folded. At every turn I expected a boot, torn fabric, blood—anything belonging to a person. I found nothing.
I gave the sharp rising whistle we used when distance or wind made words useless. Selka would know it from me; we had used that call across too many canyons for distance to disguise it. I waited through the echo. Water answered beneath the rock. A bird called above in a voice I did not know. Selka did not whistle back.
The pool became harder to ignore. If I had come through it, perhaps she had too. I was already wading in before I decided whether the thought made sense. Cold climbed over my boots and tugged at my torn suit. I searched beneath overhanging roots, across the pale stones near shore and into the places where the rock folded under itself. Beyond the shallows, the bottom dropped into shadow.
“Selka?” I called beneath the roots, hating how foolish it sounded and hating more that I had to try. I lowered myself until water reached my chest. My shoulder burned as I reached beneath a ledge. For an instant panic closed around me—the pressure of water, Selka shouting, my hand reaching toward something I did not understand. I jerked backward, slipped and went under.
I surfaced coughing and furious. “No.” I struck the water as though it had done something wrong. “No, it can’t be.” The words broke apart in my mouth. I dragged myself onto the bank and stayed on my hands and knees, shivering despite the heat above the canyon.
I knew why Selka should be here. The truth was hiding beneath the vision of her, the pain and choices I had made. She had not chosen to come here or followed some separate assignment to end up here. She had come after me because I had gone where she told me not to go. That was the part I could not turn into weather, bad luck or mystery.
I sat against a tree and tried to make the memory behave. I remembered the route I had studied until I mistook study for experience; Selka realizing what I intended; my certainty that I could do it anyway. She had taught me routes so I could return from them, not so I could pretend I was ready. After that came pieces: wind where I expected wind, water where I did not, Selka’s voice, and the sense of something answering me when nothing should have answered. Then came Xelvar, Ashren and waking alone. None of it told me where Selka was.
I searched again, slower because panic had made the first attempt sloppy. I checked soft ground for a second set of tracks and the waterline for displaced stones, caught fabric, or any mark of someone crawling away. My knee shook; my shoulder throbbed. I found only the impressions where my own body had lain and the uneven tracks from my first attempt to stand. Beyond them, the ground was whole.
At the far end of the grove, I climbed a narrow rise until I could see beyond the trees. Red canyon walls folded away in both directions. There was no settlement, maintained trail or smoke. Nothing moved except a hawk circling in the heat. I shouted Selka’s name until my throat hurt, then sent our whistle farther and louder into every stretch of canyon I could reach. Nothing answered.
The silence stopped feeling temporary. I had searched the water, ground, trees, ledges and canyon beyond them. I had called in words and whistles. There was no body, voice, trail or evidence to follow.
I had gone because I wanted to prove I was ready. Selka had followed because she knew I was not. Whatever had happened between the canyon and this grove had happened after I forced her to come after me. I called her name once more and listened until the echo died. Water moved. Leaves shifted overhead. Nothing in the grove answered, and no ordinary explanation remained that I could make myself believe. Selka was gone.