Page 5 of Veinblood
With one final, desperate surge of will, I force my eyes to open.
Light explodes across my vision, bright enough to make my eyes water. I blink rapidly, waiting for the blurred images to settle into focus. Everything hurts—my head, my eyes, my chest. But I can see.
When the world finally clears around me, my heart stops.
I’m not in Thornspire Keep. I’m not even in the forest surrounding it.
My heart slams back into motion, beating hard enough to hurt.
The crystal didn’t just separate us.
It’s torn me out from Meridian completely.
Chapter Two
SACHA
“The path between worlds is walked by those who have lost everything, and by those who seek to lose nothing more.”
Wisdom of the Wandering Sages
The worldaround me tears apart, reality splitting at the seams.
One second, I’m standing in Thornspire Keep, my hand locked with Ellie’s as our combined powers rush toward Sereven and the crystal he’s holding. The next, I’m falling through absolute darkness, every thread of my being stretched and compressed at the same time. The sensation defies description. It’s not pain exactly, but a wrongness that reaches beyond any physical experience.
My consciousness splinters.
Disorientation comes next, where up and down lose all meaning. The world spins in directions that violate natural law. Gravity becomes negotiable, and direction meaningless. For several heartbeats, I can’t determine which way leads to thesky and which to the ground. The void stretches in every direction, consuming coherent thought until only instinct remains.
Then … impact.
Cold hits me first. A shocking, penetrating cold that is nothing like Meridian's mountain air. This cold cuts through flesh and settles into bones. Pain follows as my body slams against an unyielding surface, driving breath from my lungs in a visible cloud that dissipates instantly. Each bone registers the collision separately before combining into a comprehensive ache that radiates through my entire frame.
I roll to my feet, shadows surging around me in protective response, and find myself in a world of nightmares.
Light assaults me from every direction. Harsh, unwavering brilliance that is nothing like fire or sunlight. It emanates from towering poles topped with glass spheres, each one burning with a strange radiance that never flickers. A similar illumination streams from countless windows of structures that stretch toward a sky rendered almost invisible by their combined unnatural glow.
The buildings themselves defy my understanding. They're taller than any I've ever seen, constructed with strange materials I don't recognize. Metal and glass combine in ways that create surfaces that reflect light in ways stone and timber never could. Some gleam like mirrors, others seem to absorb the light and transform it into something else entirely. Together, they create a maze of brilliance that makes tracking movement difficult and concealment almost impossible.
But worse than the overwhelming light and the strange buildings is the noise. A constant roar fills the air—sounds that have no equivalent in my world, no frame of reference I can draw upon. It batters against my eardrums, reverberates through bone, forces my jaw to clench against the assault. The cacophony never ceases.
“Ellie?” Her name escapes me before caution can stop me.
Calling out could mark me as foreign, vulnerable, yet the need to find her overrides calculation. My voice disappears into the wall of sound, swallowed completely. In this chaos, anyone could approach without my hearing them. The constant noise renders me deaf to approaching footsteps, whispered conversations, the subtle sounds that have kept me alive through years of war, betrayal, and imprisonment.
I force myself to focus on immediate surroundings rather than panic. Cold white flakes drift down from above. Snow, finer than any I've seen in Meridian's mountains. It melts as soon as it touches my skin, leaving damp traces that the wind chills. I ignore both the snow and the cold while I scan my surroundings.
I’m standing in a narrow passage between two of the towering structures, partially sheltered from what appears to be a main thoroughfare. The position offerssomeadvantage. It gives me concealment from the broader area while allowing me to keep visual access to what’s happening around me. The ground beneath my feet isn’t earth or stone, but some strange black substance marked with yellow and white lines. They appear deliberate, purposeful even, but I have no idea what they mean.
The one thing Idoknow for certain is that I need to move away from here and find shelter. Cold weather can kill you quickly in Meridian, and I have no reason to believe it will be any different here. The way the wind cuts through my long-coat suggests this world's weather carries the same lethal potential.
I’m about to step out of the passage when a deafening roar almost ruptures my ears. It sounds nothing like any creature or natural force I know. The noise nearly drives me back to my knees. It pounds against my eardrums, reverberates through my skull, making my jaw clench.
I press back against the wall as something immense hurtles past. It’s made of metal and glass, and moves at incredible speed without any sign of horses or other draft animals. Lights blaze from its front, and my shadows coil tightly around me, responding to both the threat and my body’s instinctive recoil.
More of these contraptions follow the first, each one producing the same bone-deep rumbling that vibrates through the ground and up into my body. They follow the marked lines on the dark surface. Some move slowly enough for me to see inside, where people sit and somehow direct them from within, as if the thunderous noise doesn’t affect them at all.
What are they? A weapon?
