—The Unknowable Essence: An Examination of the Empirium by Humans Without Elemental Magic, a collection of essays compiled by Celdarian librarian Vaillana Morel for the First Guild of Scholars

Raindrops landed on Rielle’s cheeks, and she turned up her face to welcome them.

She spread her arms wide, because a terrible heat surrounded her, and in her blood raged an inferno. She was desperate for the cool splash of rain.

But the rain was hot, and when it hit her lips, there was a pungent thickness to it, a red tang. Something coiled tight in her chest, and when she opened her eyes, she saw that the drops wetting her face were not water but blood.

She was standing in a shallow pool of it on a cliff-side overlooking a rocky line of coves. Her memory slowly returning, she recalled that Obritsa had taken her to Meridian’s eastern shore in pursuit of the Meridian Obex and Saint Nerida’s trident. The wind from the ocean below gusted up into her blood-matted hair. Waves crashed and roared like beasts battling for meat, and the horizon flashed with lightning.

Many storms, Rielle learned, casting her power out across the flat plane of water and reading the words the empirium had etched upon it. A thousand storms rippled out from the Gate and carpeted skies across the world.

Rielle laughed, licking her lips, and braced her palms against the slick ground. The earth rippled at her touch, for her hands were still blazing hot. The humming echo of Saint Nerida’s destroyed trident lingered against her skin. A shattered arrow lay at her feet. The Obex had actually tried to shoot her, as if she were some ordinary attacker. How they had screamed just before she unmade them.

Rielle looked over her shoulder and locked eyes with Obritsa. The little traveler, the Kirvayan queen, with her tangled white hair and her light-brown skin gone sallow with the storm. The girl glimmered, gold painting her hands where the empirium lay waiting for her to thread. Gold painting her mind, with all its meticulous control and focus. There was gold in the ocean, and gold in the sky, and a pulsing gold underneath the black rocks and the restless ocean, rising, rising.

“Well?” Rielle rasped, mocking. “Have you anything to say?”

Obritsa’s furs were also streaked with blood. Flakes of charred flesh lingered in the air, but she did not flinch away from them.

Instead, she held Rielle’s gaze and said, “Have you ever considered killing him?”

Rielle laughed. The hairs stood up on the back of her neck. “Kill him?”

“You could, I think.” A flake of ash stuck to Obritsa’s eyelashes. She paid it no mind, her face blank as washed stone. “Obviously you can destroy bodies. I think you could destroy him too, if you wanted. Unmake his truest self from the inside out. A mind, a body—they’re the same, aren’t they? At their deepest level, they are of the empirium, just as everything is.”

“Could I kill him?” Rielle tried out the words, but the thought slipped through her mind like a sharp-toothed eel, vicious and elusive. It wriggled its coils inside her, and its eyes were as pale as Corien’s in his moonlit bedroom, its plump flesh the sleek obsidian of his hair. She had destroyed that angel Malikel in Patria, though it had been clumsy, unintentional. Could she do the same to Corien, who was so much stronger? Would he even allow her the chance?

Rage flared swiftly inside her. She stalked toward Obritsa and knocked her flat. The girl’s head hit a soft spot amidst the rocks, a flat patch of black mud. Rielle saw the angry red-black flare of the pain in her skull and the stars blinking fast across her eyes.

“You will not speak of that, or of him, ever again,” Rielle hissed. Only a short hour ago, she had been tired down to her bones. Now, blood all around and her veins sizzling with the violence of destruction, she was reborn.

Obritsa stared up at her, breathless. “I should have stopped you from killing the Obex. You are not yourself. Your eyes are changing so quickly. Gold devouring green.”

“Stop me?” Rielle smiled wide. “You could never.”

And then she felt a change in the air, this air that obeyed her and was in her and of her, this air that would gather into a bludgeon and crush Obritsa into the earth if Rielle so desired. It shifted and folded, allowing room for three more bodies on this black cliff thrusting out into the sea, and when Rielle looked up, she saw two rings of light snapping closed. Her nostrils stung with the familiar smoky scent of threads, but these did not belong to Obritsa.

They belonged to two marques—a man Rielle knew, and a woman she didn’t. The man was tall and blue-eyed, scruffy of face and hair. The woman was tall and lean and pale. The man lowered his glowing hands, his body stiff with tension—and his face, Rielle thought, softening with pity, even as he was so obviously afraid.

“Garver?” Rielle whispered. The sight of him was incongruous and deeply unsettling. She imagined ridding the world of him with one swipe of her arm through the air. She did not want to think of home, of Audric with that jealous question twisting his face, and yet there was Garver, reminding her of it all simply by existing.

Another man stepped past Garver, and this was worse, this was a blow that left Rielle unsteady on her feet and shaking with anger that he would have come after her, that he could have found her here. He was shaggier than he had ever been, and thinner, his tangled blond hair gathered in a messy knot.

Tal. Her heart constricted around the word.

He was hurrying toward her, his face alight with joyous relief, and all at once, Rielle realized what he would see—her, spattered with blood, her hands pinning Obritsa to the dirt. A ruin of ash and death encircling them.

The last time he had seen her had been on her wedding night. She had been a gilded creature, trussed up in lace and velvet, stupid and happy, and she had still been slender then, her belly and face not so plump as they were now.

“Rielle! Oh, sweet saints, thank God you’re all right,” he said, the words bursting from him. When he reached for her, a bolt of terror cracked through her like lightning.

“Get away from me,” she snarled, not releasing her hold on Obritsa. The girl would run; the strange little alliance between them had doubtless been shattered the moment Rielle attacked her. Without her, if Rielle couldn’t snatch Garver or his friend before they threaded themselves to safety, she would be stranded here on this awful, storm-bitten coast, and it would take Corien months to retrieve her.

Tal startled to a stop, the joy falling from his face. His gaze flitted across the cliff-side, the blood-sprayed rocks.

Their eyes met. “Rielle, it’s all right,” he said, as if placating a child. “I understand what happened here.”

She laughed. As if, with his simple mind and unexceptional talents, he could understand anything of what she felt or what she was.

He approached her, hands raised. “You don’t have to be ashamed. You’re destroying the saints’ castings, aren’t you? You’ve chosen not to open the Gate.” There was a small smile on his lips. “I knew you wouldn’t help him. I knew you would come to your senses. You were angry and afraid. I understand that.”