Sleep took me without transition. One moment the ceiling, the next this.

  I was standing in the slums.

  I knew them having walked through on my own feet—the smell reached me before anything else. Sewage and rot and damp stone pressed together until they became a single thing, thick enough to feel against the skin rather than just enter through the nose.

  The air was cold the way places with nothing to give were cold, a cold from the ground and the walls and the people themselves rather than from the season. The overcast sky above the rooftops offered the particular flat grey light that made shadows meaningless.

  The street was mud. The memory of jumping between visible stones came back to me, the way I'd moved to keep my boots clean the first time through, and now there were no stones. Just the mud and what was in it.

  The shapes of small shacks leaning against each other, along both sides, their walls made of salvaged timber and cinder stone chunks and whatever else had been findable, fitted without precision, held together by weight and long habit rather than any design stood aligned on the edges. Rags served as curtains in openings where there was no glass. A child's bare foot visible beneath the edge of a low door.

  I was standing at the edge of a crowd.

  They had gathered in the wider space where two broken roads met—fifty or sixty of them, maybe more pressing in from the back. Men with the look of people who had been hungry long enough to stop being angry about it. Women with children pressed to their sides.

  A few of those children old enough to stand on their own were watching with the fixed, attentive expression of those who had learned early that attention was survival.

  None of them were looking at me. All of them were looking forward, at the figure standing at the center of the space where the two roads met.

  I tried to see the figure clearly. My vision wouldn't cooperate. The face was lost somewhere between the distance and the quality of the dream—a blur the eye kept sliding off, unable to find purchase. The build was there, and the clothes, and the colors. White and purple.

  A garment, a sash, something worn deliberately, something chosen. The figure's hands moved as they spoke and the crowd shifted slightly with each movement, a single thing breathing in time together.

  I couldn't hear the words.

  I tried to move closer. My feet didn't respond, or the distance didn't close, or both. The crowd kept breathing. The figure kept speaking. The white and purple held steady in the grey of the slum, too clean for the surroundings, too deliberate, catching what little the overcast sky offered.

  Then the edges of it began to bleed.

  Not blood—darkness. A smoke that had no source, rising from the ground between the figures in the crowd and curling upward past them, thickening until it swallowed the shacks and the mud and the people from the outside in, until the white and purple was the last thing visible and then that too was gone. The smoke closed over it and there was nothing, no ground under my feet, no air, just a flat, pressureless dark.

  The darkness twisted on itself the way a tablecloth twists when caught from the center, pulling into a vortex that tightened and tightened, and as it pulled inward it thinned, and through the thinning places the next scene bled.

  Stone beneath me. A great deal of it, arcing upward on all sides—tiered seating climbing in concentric rings, cut from pale stone, the kind of construction built to outlast the people inside it. An arena. Not the academy grounds—something larger, made to hold thousands, the kind of space that pressed down on you just from its size.

  The crowd filling those tiers was loud in the particular way crowds were loud when they were enjoying something. Below, in the arena itself, a match had been underway. I had no sense of what it was. Only that it had been going before this moment, and now this moment was here instead.

  Five figures dropped from the upper tiers.

  They came in the same breath, one after another from different points in the upper seating, in a controlled descent, aether gathering, pooling and flowing towards each one, a sign their aether pool had long since expanded through the body with their cores dense and practiced. All five of them were in the domain stage. The crowd's noise changed quality, sharpening from enjoyment into something more confused and more frightened.

  They were disguised. Ordinary clothes, no insignia, nothing that named who they were or who had sent them. They landed spread across the arena floor and moved inward from all five points. They randomly launched attacks. Each one of the condensed aether projectiles killed people and caused rubble to fly and flow towards the center of the arena.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Five of the most distinguished guests of the tournament rose to stop the assailants. Fire and stone rushed and met the intruders, killing them fast. Too fast.

  The first went down before he had closed half the distance. The second deflected into the third. The fourth and fifth arrived and stopped the way people stopped when something told them arriving further was the wrong decision—but the decision came too late, and they stopped at the end rather than in time to matter.

  The crowd had not been quiet for any of this. It got louder when it ended, the noise turned into something uglier, and somewhere in the upper tier a section of masonry gave under the aetheric pressure that had moved through the space and a crack ran through the stone and a piece of the lower seating dropped and the crowd near it lurched and surged and the exit nearest them was not wide enough.

  The shouts and the grinding stone arrived all at once. More cracks. The arch above one of the gates buckled inward and more people scattered and some of them didn't scatter in time and I watched and couldn't do anything.

  The smoke came again, rising from the rubble and the dust, thickening until the arena was gone and the screaming was gone and there was only the vortex pulling inward on itself, thinning at the center—

  Dark.

  Not the grey of the slum or the open air of the arena. A real dark, the kind with no sky in it, bounded and interior and absolute. I was standing on a floor. Paved stone, the joins between the slabs just visible under my feet in the small radius of light that existed around me, sourceless, not cast by anything I could see, just present, ending cleanly a few steps out in every direction.

  I took a step. Then another. The light moved with me and the dark stayed where it was.

  Something on the floor caught the light.

  I stopped.

  A lock of hair, dark, spread across the join between two paving stones. The length of it curved the way hair curved when it fell and settled without being placed.

  I took one more step.

  The radius of light moved with me and revealed what was just beyond where the hair began.

  Cassia's face.

  Her eyes were open. Her expression had not had time to form a reaction to what happened to it. The eyes still had their particular sharp quality to them even emptied of everything that had made them hers. Her hair spread on the stone around her in the same dark fan that began with the lock I'd stepped past, and the stone beneath was darker still in the way wet stone was darker.

  Her head had come to rest with the cheek against the floor. The neck ended just below the jaw.

  I could not look away. The dream didn't permit it. I stood with the radius of light holding steady around us both and I looked, and my chest was overwhelmed by a cold that had nothing to do with temperature, that came from inside the body and did not disperse.

  The darkness outside the light stayed where it was. Waiting, maybe, or just there.

  I looked. The dream made me look.

  The smoke rose from the floor this time, curling up through the joins between the paving stones, thickening faster than the last two times, and the radius of light shrank against it until it was gone and there was only the dark and then only the vortex, pulling and pulling—

  I was on my back.

  Stone above me, arched, faintly lit from somewhere below my eyeline. My arms were not moving. My body was not moving.

  The figure above me was dressed in red and purple, the colors layered. No hand held what hovered over my chest. That was the first thing I understood, the detail that arrived before anything else—there was no grip, no arm extended, no physical thing a hand had made. What hung in the air above me was aether given edge and intent, condensed into the shape of a blade and held there by will from a distance, its form shifting slightly at the boundaries the way constructs shifted when the power behind them was immense enough not to need stability.

  The figure's hands were at their sides.

  And my own aether was frozen. Not spent, not overextended—frozen, the way a current went when dams closed upstream and downstream. The channels were there, the pool was there, but nothing moved through them. The air sat on my chest like a stone and my limbs refused the signals I sent and there was nothing to push against, nothing to call on. The particular suffocation of a body that was present and intact and entirely unresponsive. A domain, pressing down on everything within its reach, the aether of the space claimed and held and made unusable by whoever owned it.

  The construct began its descent, unhurried, controlled from afar.

  I woke up.

  Cold sweat on the back of my neck. The blanket. The ceiling of the tower, stone and familiar, nothing else.

  I lay still.

  The breathing came first, forcing it slow and deep. The heartbeat followed after. The room stayed the room. No paved floor, no arena dust, no open eyes looking at nothing.

  'Not a nightmare.'

  Nightmares lost their edges the moment the eyes opened, details already dissolving. Visions didn't do that. They sat on the chest with the solidity of something real that hadn't happened yet. Every detail still sharp. The lock of hair on the stone. The five figures landing in the arena. The white and purple in the mud and grey of the slum, too deliberate, too clean.

  The construct, drifting without a hand to guide it. The stillness of my own aether beneath it.

  I stared at the ceiling for a long time.

  'The tournament.' The arena was built for thousands, for spectacle, for events that drew crowds. The five that dropped from the upper tiers—domain stage, all of them, cut down like beginners—had been sent to cause chaos and nothing more. Disposable. Whatever broke the structure had happened because of what moved through it to stop them.

  The white and purple figure in the slum, speaking to people who had nothing. The figure in red and purple with the aether construct descending above me.

  And Cassia's face on the stone.

  I didn't know the face above me. I hadn't seen it. I'd seen the construct and the domain closing around me like a fist, the aether gone as if it had never been mine to use, and that was all.

  The cold in my chest wasn't getting smaller.

  I pushed myself up and sat on the edge of the bed. The tower was dark, the candles long out. Through the narrow window the sky showed the deep blue of the last hour before dawn.

  Three months.

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