There was no falling. There was unraveling.

  There was no falling. There was unraveling.

  The Void Space was like a tunnel but not really, it’s not a road. It is the place between places, where the seams of creation showed. It was a deafening silence that pressed on the soul, a kaleidoscope of impossible geometries and colors that had no name. Daggeroth felt his mind, already frayed from the Purifiers, the alien palace, the cavern of screaming ice, begin to unspool. He saw glimpses of vast, indifferent shapes moving in the deeper dark—things that might have been gods, or the dreams of mountains, or cancers on reality itself. It scraped against him, leaving psychic welts.

  He wanted to scream, but he had no mouth. He wanted to close his eyes, but he had no lids. He was a mote of dust in a cathedral of cosmic indifference.

  Then impact.

  Not of landing, but of re-knitting. The world slammed back into place with the violence of a door slamming shut. Sound returned: the crash of waves, the cry of strange birds. Smell: salt, wet stone, decaying seaweed, and a faint, sweet floral scent. Sensation: warm, humid air on his skin, solid, gritty rock beneath his knees.

  He was on his hands and knees, retching, but nothing came up. His body had already emptied itself of everything in the throne room. He dry-heaved, tears streaming down his face, mixing with the cold sweat of trans-dimensional terror.

  Around him, the others materialized from the fading violet bruise in the air, which snapped shut with a sound like a cracking whip.

  They were in the center of a stone circle: a henge of massive, weathered black granite monoliths, but unlike any he’d ever heard of in Samiran tales. Set into each stone was a huge, rough-hewn crystal structure, like quartz grown to the size of a man, catching the late afternoon light and fracturing it into rainbows on the ground. Beyond the stones, he could see the glittering, impossibly blue expanse of a warm sea, dotted with the green smudges of other islands. The sky was a softer lavender here, and the moon was still the wrong moon. The moon they were looking at was actually their home.

  The wrongness was absolute. The air was thick and warm, a shocking contrast to the Bergian ice. The smells were alien. The very light was different.

  Hybornyesis was gone, buried in ice. Pericles was gone, left bleeding on a crystal floor. For what? For this? Another alien rock under another alien sky?

  A low, wounded sound escaped Daggeroth’s throat. He curled in on himself, arms over his head, as if he could block out the universe. The simple guide from the Samiran jungles was gone. In his place was a hollowed-out vessel, packed with too much horror. He shut down. The world became a distant, muffled hum.

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  Koronos landed in a crouch, the stone warm beneath his palms. His senses, expanded and raw from the transition, exploded outward. He felt the deep roots of the island, the teeming life in the warm water, the migratory paths of huge, unseen creatures in the deep. The majik here was different; not the sharp, crystalline order of Bergia, but a deep, fluid, potent force, like the pulse of the ocean itself. However, it was still the same realm.

  He was on his feet in an instant, spear in hand, placing himself between his broken group and the widest gap in the henge. Corvannafax was already at his shoulder, the stolen crystal sword held low, her golden eyes scanning the tree line beyond the stones. She was a statue of red vigilance, but even her shoulders were slumped with a weariness that went deeper than bone.

  Shelove pressed against his shoulder, a low growl in her throat. She smelled water, and things in the water and something else, something new.

  Zeyzey was the only one moving with purpose. She scrambled to the edge of the henge, ignoring Daggeroth’s catatonic form, her witch-sense reaching out. “The portal residue is gone. Sealed. The sabotage was… thorough. This place is steeped in power. Old power. Different.” She looked at the crystals in the stones with a mixture of hunger and fear.

  Koronos nodded, his jaw tight. They were stranded. Again. But alive. He counted the cost in the silence where Pericles’s solid presence should have been.

  Then, the sea began to boil.

  Not with heat, but with movement. Sleek, iridescent shapes broke the surface a hundred yards from the shore and began gliding silently toward the beach. They walked out of the surf, water sheeting from bodies that seemed carved from mother-of-pearl and moonlight. Their skin was a pale, lustrous white, shot through with darker, scale-like patterns of blue and grey. Their hair was black or deep blue, flowing like seaweed. And their eyes… large, and the pale, clear blue of a shallow tropical lagoon.

  White Malataks, they are completely unknown on Terra Primius. A dozen of them. They carried weapons of carved coral and sharpened, ultra-dense ivory, and they moved with a silent, fluid grace that spoke of absolute mastery of their element.

  They formed a loose semicircle at the edge of the henge, their strange eyes taking in the scene: the barbaric blue Kazarian, the fierce Red Malatak, the cowering human, the pantera, and the wary witch. Their expressions were unreadable, alien. There was no hostility, yet. Only a profound, assessing curiosity.

  A lithe female with pearlescent patterns across her exposed skin, she wore attire that was made of tiny shells and polished coral, took a step forward. She did not speak.

  Koronos met his pale blue gaze. He saw no kinship there, as he had mistakenly hoped for with the Blues. This was something else entirely. Another branch of the genetic tree, shaped by an ocean of majik.

  Slowly, deliberately, Koronos lowered the point of his spear until it touched the sun-warmed stone of the henge. It was not a gesture of surrender. It was a statement of grounding, of arrival. It said: We are here. We are wounded, but we are not prey. We have crossed worlds and bloodied gods. You will speak first.

  The silence stretched, filled only by the sigh of the warm tide, calls of the soaring seabirds and distant rolling thunder from an encroaching storm. The apparent leader’s opalescent eyes flicked from the spearpoint to Koronos’s face.

  Then she spoke.

  Koronos the Kazarian | Royal Road