For Erica,

my light in the darkness

A Traveler and a Stranger

“The dangers of threading through time are many, but one often overlooked is the danger it poses for the traveler. The mind is fragile, and time is pitiless. Even powerful marques have lost themselves to the ravages of their temporal experiments. Perhaps it is best, then, that over the course of recorded history, only a few hundred beings have ever possessed this power, and that most of them are now dead.”

—Meditations on Time by Basara Oboro, renowned Mazabatian scholar

When Simon awoke, he was alone.

He lay flat on his back on a scrubby plain veined with brown rocks and white ribbons of ice. The sky above him was the color of slate, choked with sweeping clouds that reminded him of waves, and from them fell thin spirals of snow.

For a few moments he lay there, hardly breathing, the snow collecting on his lashes. Then the memories of the last several hours returned to him.

Queen Rielle, giving birth to her child.

Simon’s father, his mind no longer his own, throwing himself off her tower.

Rielle thrusting her infant daughter into Simon’s arms, her face worn, her eyes wild and bright gold.

You’re strong, Simon. I know you can do this.

Threads glowing at his fingertips—his threads, the first ones he had ever summoned on his own, without his father’s guidance, and they were strong and solid. They would carry both him and the child in his arms to safety.

But then…

The queen, behind him in her rooms, fighting the angel named Corien. Her voice, distorted and godly. A brilliant light, exploding outward from where she knelt on the floor, knocking Simon’s threads askew and summoning forth new ones—dark and violent, overtaking the others. Threads of time, more volatile than threads of space, and more cunning.

He’d tightened his arms around the screaming child, clutched the blanket her mother had wrapped around her, and then, a rush of black sound, a roar of something vast and ancient approaching.

Simon surged upright with a gasp, choking on tears, and looked down at his arms.

They were empty.

The only thing left of the princess was a torn piece of her blanket—slightly singed at the edges from the cold burn of time.

All at once he understood what had happened.

He understood the immensity of his failure.

But perhaps there was still hope. He could use his power, travel back to that moment on the terrace with the baby in his arms. He could move faster, get them both away to safety before Queen Rielle died.

He pushed himself to his knees, raised his skinny arms into the frigid air. His right hand still held the child’s blanket. He refused to let it go. It was possible to summon threads with a cloth in his fist, and if he released the blanket, something terrible would happen. The certainty of that tightened in his chest like a screw.

He closed his eyes, his breath coming shaky and fast, and remembered the words from his books:

The empirium lies within every living thing, and every living thing is of the empirium.

Its power connects not only flesh to bone, root to earth, stars to sky, but also road to road, city to city.

Moment to moment.

But no matter how many times he recited the familiar sentences, the threads did not come.

His body remained dark and quiet. The marque magic with which he had been born, the power he had come to love and understand with his father’s patient tutelage inside their little shop in Âme de la Terre, was gone.

He opened his eyes, staring at the stretch of barren, rocky land before him. White peaks beyond. A black sky. The air held nothing of magic inside it. Pale, it was, and tasteless. Flat where it had once thrummed with vitality.

Something was wrong in this place. It felt unmade and clouded. Scarred. Scraped raw.

Once, his marque blood—part human, part angel—had allowed him to touch the empirium.

Now, he could feel nothing of that ancient power. Not even an echo of it remained, not a hint of sound or light to follow.

It was as if the empirium had never existed.

He could not travel home. He could travel nowhere his own two feet could not take him.

Alone, shivering on a vast plateau in a land he did not know, in a time that was not his own, Simon buried his face in the scrap of cloth and wept.

• • •

He lay curled in the dirt for hours, and then days, snow drawing a thin carpet across his body.

His mind was empty, hollowed out from his aching tears. Instinct told him he needed to find shelter. If he lay for much longer in the bitter cold, he would die.

But dying seemed a pleasant enough thought. It would provide him an escape from the terrible tide of loneliness that had begun to sweep through him.

He didn’t know where he was, or when he was. He could have been thrown back to a time when there were only angels living in Avitas, and no humans. He could have been flung into the far future, when there were no flesh-and-blood creatures left alive, the world abandoned to its empty old age.

Wherever he was, whenever he was, he didn’t care to find out. He cared about nothing. He was nothing, and he was nowhere.

He pressed the piece of blanket to his nose and mouth, breathing in the faint, clean scent of the child it had once held.

He knew the scent would soon dissipate.

But for now, it smelled of home.

• • •

A voice woke him—faint but clear.

Simon, you have to move.

He cracked open his eyes, which was difficult, for they had nearly frozen shut.

The world was thick and white; he lay half-buried in a fresh drift of snow. He couldn’t feel his fingers or toes.

“Get up.”

The voice was close to him, and familiar enough to light a weak spark of curiosity in his dying mind.

An age passed before he found the strength to raise his body from the ground.

“On your feet,” said the voice.

Simon squinted through the snow and saw a figure standing nearby, wrapped thick with furs.

He tried to speak, but his voice had disappeared.

“Rise,” the figure instructed. “Stand up.”

Simon obeyed, though he didn’t want to. He wanted to tuck himself back into his snow bed and let it gently shepherd him down the path toward his death.

But he rose to his feet nevertheless, took two stumbling steps forward through snow that reached his knees. He nearly fell, but this person, whoever it was, caught him. Their gloved hands were strong. He peered into the folds of furs covering their face, but could see nothing that told him who they were.