Looking down at the Destroyer screaming in his arms, Tal knew it would be too late.
Her eyes suddenly focused. Her gaze snapped to his. He closed his eyes, because she had owned his life for two years; she would not own his death, too.
He thought of Nyx.
He thought of home.
And then the Destroyer’s magics exploded out of her, and Tal thought of nothing at all.
WHEN THE GIRL WOKE, A GRAY SNOW WAS FALLING, and the world was silent in the way it only ever was in the aftermath of a great cataclysm.
She lay on her back for a long moment, enfolded in an empty sort of peace. The sky above her was an even darker charcoal than the snow. The clouds grew ponderous while she watched, lumbering in and out of her field of vision, their fat dark bellies scraping against the saw-toothed mountains that surrounded her. A blizzard was imminent—but for now, the strange and lovely snowflakes were drifting on the merest of breezes, and she had the sudden impulse to stick out her tongue and taste one. So she did.
It didn’t dissolve the way she’d expected but was instead uncomfortably hot and horribly bitter. In a fit of shock, she thrust herself onto her side and up on her elbows and spat into the snow. Not a snowflake at all; it was ash. And she was covered in it.
She jolted to her feet, shaking out her hair and her clothing—which was charred and burned through in spots, and definitely not warm enough—with an unfamiliar sort of desperation. She didn’t want to be covered in ash.
Her gaze caught on a twisted piece of blackened wood that might have been part of a column. She paused. She raised her head and, for the first time since waking, looked at her surroundings.
She stood in the middle of a pit. Tall snow walls curved around her, pocked here and there with smoking, twisted debris that was slowly melting its way to the frozen earth. Lying half a dozen feet away was a chunk of something that looked like it might once have been a train wheel. The ground beneath her feet sparkled coldly, not with frost but with glass, shattered to dust and shards.
A great cataclysm, she’d thought earlier, but she realized now she had no idea what it had been.
She frowned. She reached for the memory, but only emptiness greeted her. Her brow wrinkled and her concentration turned inward as she dug deeper, rummaging for a memory that might spark more recollection, but nothing came at all, not even her own name. After a moment she shook her head. It would return to her eventually, in the way that memories did, when she wasn’t trying so hard to search for it. In the meantime, there were more urgent things she needed to be doing. It was freezing, and a blizzard seemed to be looming on the horizon, and she was, as far as she could tell, alone. She needed to—what? Build some sort of shelter? Calculate her location based on the stars, or the alignment of the mountain peaks, or…something?
She suddenly realized she was not well-versed in matters of wilderness survival.
She huffed an irritated breath, which clouded the air for a moment before dissipating. Her apparent lack of specific knowledge aside, she did possess a basic grasp of logic, and that was all she needed to be able to address her most pressing concerns. Shelter would be important, as would warmth and food. She should attempt to ascertain her location too, though the stars would be of little help there, both because they were hidden behind the heavy clouds and because she had no idea what their arrangements meant with regard to her position. First things first, though, she needed to climb out of this pit so she could get a better look at her surroundings. Perhaps something up there might give her a clue to what had happened to her, or jog her memories.
She turned in a circle, glass crunching beneath her boots, eyeing the walls of snow as she considered the best path by which to reach the top. There was one slope that seemed both slightly shallower and pocked with fewer bits of debris that might have melted and caused instability in the wall, so she strode to that section and began her climb. She learned quickly that she had to punch her hands and the toes of her boots hard into the snow, as it wasn’t snow at all but permafrost, compacted tightly and slick as ice in some places. Her arms began to tremble after only a few seconds of being off the ground, and by the time she was halfway up, her breath was coming as hard as if she’d been sprinting.
She gritted her teeth. She would not be defeated by snow. She gathered her strength and punched her hand harder than usual into the frost for her next handhold—and yelped aloud when her fist sank straight through a patch of mostly-melted snow and into something sharp. She yanked her hand back out with a wince and inspected it. Her knuckles were raw already from punching through the permafrost, but now there was a jagged wound in the side of her palm just above her wrist. Dark red blood leaked from it, trickling down the lines in her hand like tiny rivers.
She stared at the blood. Something in her mind lurched at the sight. Wrong, it whispered. She squinted harder at her palm, trying to lure that little voice out further, but it vanished. She growled in frustration. What was wrong about her blood? Was she worried about infection? Did she have some sort of hemorrhaging disorder that made bleeding deadly? Did it simply make her squeamish?
Not the last one, she decided. Somehow, she didn’t think she was a squeamish person
