Page 46 of Mother of Death and Dawn

Time did not flow the same way in Ilyzath. Seconds stretched to months and the months compressed to seconds. I wasn’t sure if this was a dream, or one of Ilyzath’s tricks.

The shift happened all at once, as if something intrinsic to the world tore painfully apart, like flesh parted by a too-dull blade.

The next thing I knew, I was being dragged down, down, down, falling through the floor and through the earth and into something that felt deeper, rawer than all of it.

I felt the cold spray of sea salt on my face. The overwhelming sensation that I was being watched.

I felt a presence that I knew—a stranger that Iknew,soul-deep— envelop me, the familiarity of it jarring, like something I had forgotten I was looking for had drawn close enough to touch.

They called my name.

I reached out for them, and then I was somewhere else entirely.

And then I felt another presence, someone encased in stone, someone looking down over a beautiful city in the mountains. That, too, lasted only for seconds.

The heat, the pain, tore me up. I felt burning, like flames were eating me alive.

I felt everything shattering.

An intangible understanding snapped into place:something is wrong.

Something is breaking.

This is dangerous.

The flames consumed me.

* * *

I wason my feet before I even realized I had moved. Blood pounded in my ears, driven by sheer panic.

There were so many things I didn’t understand. But when I opened my eyes, two certainties stood clear in my mind, the sharpest things I had felt in months.

One. Something cataclysmic had just happened. I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain what it was, or even how I knew it. I felt it in a sense deeper than sight or sound, like an earthquake shaking the basest parts of me, leaving irreparable damage.

Two. Someone was looking for me. Someone important. I felt a connection to them like a rope knotted around my throat, pulling closer.

My hands met the wall before the act was a conscious decision.

Let me out.

A frantic attempt to use my magic resulted only blisters bubbling under my fingertips—my magic redirected by the Stratagrams inked over me. I barely felt the burns.

I NEED TO GET OUT.

Ilyzath’s voice never sounded like words, exactly. Just a collection of sounds. Now, it enveloped me in creaks and groans. The carvings on the wall shuddered.

You feel this change, too. How strange. And yet, perhaps it is unsurprising, that a fly can sense the tremors of an incoming storm.

I pressed my palms to the wall, my breath heaving and heart pounding. The carvings shuddered just as frantically. I had never seen them do that before.

“What is that?” I rasped out. “What just happened?”

The groans of stone sounded like laughter or sobs.It was the beginning of an end, brought upon by mortal hubris. Hands reaching into forces that should not be wielded, and thinning boundaries that should not be torn.

“I don’t understand.”

No. Of course you do not.

---