And the farther they walked through the dense woodlands of Iastra, the greater became Rielle’s feeling of uneasiness.

They could no longer hear the waves lapping against the island’s broad beach, nor the seabirds’ cries. The woodlands grew close and tangled, the trees’ trunks large enough to serve as towers of a woodland fortress. Their branches sprawled like ancient black serpents across mossy hollows, their bark lined with silver lichens. Some bore clumps of white flowers that glowed faintly as if they had each swallowed a piece of a star. Torn petals hung suspended in the air alongside dark oak leaves, grains of sand, flakes of crushed seashells, and tiny white shards that Rielle thought might be bits of animal bone. The air was thick, heavy with a slow, spinning weight.

With each step, she felt as though she were moving farther away from her body and into a new realm. Her vision shifted, and she could see more clearly the gossamer net connecting everything around them—a delicate golden sea, forever undulating, forever seeking new shores, on which the rest of the seen world floated.

She smiled, drawing her fingers through waves of light no one else was powerful enough to glimpse.

Ingrid at last broke the silence. “What’s happened to this place? Why is everything floating?”

Ilmaire and Audric answered simultaneously—Audric’s voice hushed with awe, and Ilmaire’s nearly giddy: “It’s the Gate.”

Ingrid cut an irritated glare Audric’s way.

“The nearer the Gate,” confirmed Jodoc, “the higher the concentration of the empirium. And in such a place, the world is not what it is elsewhere.” He held aside a branch so the others could continue unimpeded.

But Rielle didn’t follow. Jodoc, she sensed, was taking them the wrong way.

Well, not the wrong way, but certainly the long way—to confuse them, she assumed, and to make it more difficult for them to retrace their steps. She moved away from them, drifting farther into the trees, and as she walked, she observed how the entire endless woodland was lined with dozens of winding paths. The Obex had doubtless created these paths, treading upon them over and over for centuries, until they had become dirt tracks worn smooth. It was a maze; unwanted visitors would easily get turned around in the trees and never find their way out.

Rielle supposed that she herself was an unwanted visitor. But the call of the Gate pulled her like a distant light through a dark tunnel. She would not lose herself in these trees, no matter how earnestly they tried to confuse her.

Humming quietly to herself, her eyes unfocused, the world dreamy and slow-moving around her, she turned down a particular path that was a little more shadowed than the others, lined with floating browned petals. She pushed them aside, the movement lazy and supple, as if she were drawing her hand through water. She blinked and saw only her hand moving through the air, lightly bumping the petals out of her path. She blinked once more, and the world of the empirium appeared to her—every leaf, every petal, every faint breath of wind, every pore of her skin, painted with stipples of gold.

With her boots on, she could not feel the earth under her feet, so she removed them, discarding them in a nest of roots. Large iridescent beetles emerged from the shadows, skittering away from her presence.

The still, damp air grew charged and sour, as if from a nearing storm. The fine hairs along Rielle’s arms stood up. Each inhale felt like trying to breathe with a hand clamped over her mouth and nose.

Then, finally, her feet hit something cold and hard.

She blinked, clearing her vision of the empirium, and saw an enormous flat plinth of stone, square and gray, immaculately clean, surrounded on three sides by the woods. On the far side of the plinth rose sheer black cliffs that disappeared into a thick veil of low gray clouds. A slender set of stairs had been cut into the stone.

Rielle began to climb them, and at the top, she emerged onto a rocky black plain, slick and gleaming. Flakes of ash floated in the air, slowly turning. A gray and endless fog surrounded her, and what the landscape looked like beyond that, she could not determine. She heard the distant crash of waves but could see no trees, no sky, no water.

She saw only a broad stretch of craggy black rock, as if something terrible had permanently scorched the ground.

And there, in the center of the burnt plain, stood the Gate—an angular structure of unadorned gray stone framing a dim, shifting blue light.

Trapezoidal, the Gate stood on yet another flat plinth of stone, this one circular. The two pillars that formed the Gate’s sides, and the singular piece of stone connecting them at the top, were enormous, each slab as thick as twenty men standing with arms outstretched, finger to finger. The height of it made Rielle’s head spin. It must have stood some five hundred feet in the air, and another five hundred feet across—and even that, Rielle thought, was an underestimation.

She approached it, her breathing slow and thin, as if approaching a wild animal she wished to tame and claim for her own. From her reading, she knew the structure itself was merely for show, to demonstrate the clear boundaries of where the Gate ended and began. The Gate itself was in the air—an opening into the Deep, carved out of the empirium by the saints before they banished the angels inside and sealed the opening shut.

But that seal, Rielle saw at once, was breaking.

She saw it as clearly as if someone were holding before her a piece of glass cracked by the impact of a stone. Shifting her thoughts outside her body to the eerie world around her, she unfocused her eyes and imagined her blood and bone extending beyond her fingers and toes, beyond the reach of her tongue, and into the ground—along the rocks beneath her, skimming the flakes of ash floating in the air. She tilted her head, inhaled, exhaled, and the picture of the breaking Gate sharpened before her eyes.

The empirium was a white-hot sun at the Gate’s center, a solid wall of light—except for thin, dark cracks, fine as the threads of a spider’s web, that drifted through the empirium’s light like the alien shapes that floated across Rielle’s vision after rubbing her eyes too hard. One moment, they existed, long and delicate; the next moment, they had faded, only to reappear seconds later in a different location.

It would be easy, she thought, to mend these holes. All she would need to do was sew them back together, as her father had tried and failed to teach her with a needle and thread long ago. She had been terrible at mending clothes, and impatient, pointing out that they had servants to do such things for them, and now she found herself wishing she had paid more attention during those long hours bent over her father’s worktable.

She swallowed hard, dislodging the hot lump in her throat, and closed the door on her father’s memory. She stepped toward the Gate, her hand outstretched.

Then a terrible scream pierced the air.

Rielle stumbled back from the Gate, just as Atheria landed on the rocks before her. The chavaile looked more ferocious than Rielle had ever seen her—ears flattened, sharp teeth bared, head lowered as if preparing to bite. She held her wings fully extended on either side, enormous and dark.