Page 209 of Children of Fallen Gods

Suddenly, it all goes silent.

Nura opens her eyes.

Rolling plains surround her, extending in every direction. The sky is black and bright all at once, blue light shuddering in the darkness and floating like wisps of smoke. It is lifeless and airless here. Everything about it reeks of magic, so powerful it could peel the skin from her flesh.

For a moment, everything is still.

And then a sudden burst of light rolls from the horizon, and she doesn’t even have time to brace before it consumes her.

What Nura sees, there in the depths of that light, makes the horrors that she had lived in the Ryvenai War look like mere inconveniences.

She sees death and torture and indiscriminate destruction.

She sees the Towers shattering, glass twinkling overhead like razored rain.

She sees creatures made out of shadow and twisted flesh crawling across the countryside, many-jointed fingers tearing apart screaming people.

She sees an armada of ships on the horizon line, stretching out as far as she can see, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and—

She sees the beaches of Ara so leaden with rotting bodies that not one stretch of sand is visible.

She sees a man with golden hair and a raised sword, wings spread out behind him, face hard and merciless with rage.

She sees many of them, these people — these creatures — with strange, unfamiliar magic, their ears pointed, spitting violet blood.

And at last, she sees him:

One of them, shrouded in shadow, leaning over her. Upon his head are the peaks of a crown, echoing the points of his ears. He is so close that she can feel his breath on her face and yet cannot bring his features into focus.

Did you think I would not come for you?he whispers, as gentle as a lover.

And then she feels steel through her gut, and the world crashes down.

* * *

Nura wakes up gasping.She empties her stomach, then collapses onto the floor, reeling from what she had seen. She is covered in sweat and blood.

It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, except for what she had seen.

It is real.

Of this, she is certain. She had been trained extensively in the art of deploying and unraveling illusions, and she knows the difference between falsehoods and the truth. Seering is rare, but not unheard of. And she felt the truth in it. The certainty of what she had seen — that it was a horror still to come — burrows deep into her bones.

She is so terrified that she can barely breathe.

But then, she forces her mind to work. This is what she does. She thinks her way out of the impossible.

Fey. They are Fey. She saw those pointed ears. They could be nothing else. Everyone thought they were extinct, but everyone had been wrong.

And they are coming. Here.

When? She can’t be sure. The Ara she saw was the Ara she knows, not one of some distant future, but could it be tomorrow? Next month? Next year?

Maybe there is time. Time to stop it from happening.

Who will believe her? Who can she trust?

No one.

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