Waiting for the next time it is needed.
Nura is twenty-eight years old when the unrest begins to stir again. It starts small, a few rebellious Lords fighting with the young queen over taxes or land rights. But even that single thread of growing tension is terrifyingly familiar. She thinks of the day she and Max had sat in the library all those years ago, and how it had been so easy to dismiss the possibility of coming war.
She can no longer sleep at night. The days pass, and the whispers continue, and she wakes up in sweats dreaming of fire.
They do not understand, she tells herself. The Queen is young and naive. Zeryth is selfish and stupid. They do not understand the importance of acting quickly.
And she will not, will never, allow all the sacrifices she has made to be in vain.
Eventually, she has had enough. One sleepless night, she goes to that secret corner of the Towers. She stands over the lifeless man in the room of white.
Nearly a decade ago, she watched this magic end a war, taking a thousand lives to save hundreds of thousands. And in the same stroke, she watched it destroy everything that mattered to her.
If anyone is to Wield it now, she decides, it must be her.
She has already been ruined by it once. She has nothing left to lose. And she hates it so much that she needs to be the one to dominate it, this time.
She withdraws her dagger, and she tries to Wield Reshaye for the first time.
{Who are you?}
The voice sounds so strange. Odd, to hear it this way, in a pure form rather than coming from the lips of a human being.
You know who I am.
It turns over her memories like stones. {I do know you.} It stops at the memory of Sarlazai, at her moment of betrayal. She feels its disgust.
I am offering you a new home, she says.
{I have long forgotten what it is to have a home. But I know a place like this, so cold and hostile, is not one.}
Would you rather stay in an empty mind and a white room, then?
A low hiss. {Where is Maxantarius?}
The protectiveness rises before she can stop it. Reshaye grabs onto the emotion.
{You dislike that I ask about him.}
This is between you and me. Not him.
It reaches for another emotion, one she cannot hide away fast enough. The way she felt every time he was praised. Every time he was promoted. The day he was the one to be granted such extraordinary power, power he could not even handle.
A low laugh ripples her thoughts. {You can not lie to me. I know the truth of why you are here, and what you seek to gain.}
I seek to gain the power to stop another war.
{You seek power, yes. But I do not wish to give it to you.}
It begins to pull away. But Nura’s magic grabs onto it, refusing to let it leave.
She will Wield it. She will dominate it.
You took everything from me, she snarled. You don’t get to win this, too.
And so quickly, it turns. Reshaye rails against her control.
{I have fought stronger magics than yours,} it hisses. {I have broken stronger minds.}
The fight is worse than any battle Nura has been in. It is savage, asking for everything she has and more, reaching for all the tender parts left in her mind. They clash, and she is tangled up in a web of the thing she hates more than she has ever hated anything, the thing that destroyed the best person she knew and murdered the innocent children that were practically her siblings.
In a battle of wills, her hatred alone will make her stronger. She is sure of it.
Later, she will only remember bits and pieces of this time. Their battle could have lasted hours or days or weeks. Time, after all, belongs to the world above. They are somewhere deeper than that now, and falling further still.
Reshaye rips her apart.
{You are all always the same. You bind me and break me and use me. Do not think I do not remember what you have done.}
But Nura is not ready to concede.
With all of her strength, they clash one final time, and she Wields all of Reshaye’s magic until it burns her veins, until she thinks that it might kill her, until—
Suddenly, it all goes silent.
Nura opens her eyes.
Rolling plains surround her, extending in every direction. The sky is black and bright all at once, blue light shuddering in the darkness and floating like wisps of smoke. It is lifeless and airless here. Everything about it reeks of magic, so powerful it could peel the skin from her flesh.
For a moment, everything is still.
And then a sudden burst of light rolls from the horizon, and she doesn’t even have time to brace before it consumes her.
What Nura sees, there in the depths of that light, makes the horrors that she had lived in the Ryvenai War look like mere inconveniences.
She sees death and torture and indiscriminate destruction.
She sees the Towers shattering, glass twinkling overhead like razored rain.
She sees creatures made out of shadow and twisted flesh crawling across the countryside, many-jointed fingers tearing apart screaming people.
She sees an armada of ships on the horizon line, stretching out as far as she can see, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and—
She sees the beaches of Ara so leaden with rotting bodies that not one stretch of sand is visible.
She sees a man with golden hair and a raised sword, wings spread out behind him, face hard and merciless with rage.
She sees many of them, these people — these creatures — with strange, unfamiliar magic, their ears pointed, spitting violet blood.
And at last, she sees him:
One of them, shrouded in shadow, leaning over her. Upon his head are the peaks of a crown, echoing the points of his ears. He is so close that she can feel
