Thelian used to wake from dreams. He used to break the surface of sleep and find the senses of morning waiting for him. When dawn came, the dream held him. Did not release him. Bled into the world, laying its promise over the first light.
He stood at the edge of the cliff.
The heat was not a temperature. It was a weight. A wet, suffocating palm pressed against the back of his neck. The air clung to his skin as if it had hands. It tasted of dust and baked mineral, of dead fern-grass turned brittle and sour from yesterday’s burn. Sweat did not drip. It pooled at the neckline of his shirt, darkening the fabric, then slid down his spine in a slow, crawling itch.
The ground beneath his boots had baked into ceramic-hard plates, cracked and separated by fissures of powder-fine grit.
Except for the patch behind him.
The small Largtree did not touch the earth. It hovered, suspended shin-high above the stone, a defiance of gravity the eye accepted without argument. Its roots dangled in the empty air, a knot of fibrous nerves grasping at nothing. Beneath the suspended root-ball, the ridge broke its own stillness.
There, the soil was dark. Wet.
The earth had been turned. Shattered. Mixed with damp loam from beneath and patted back into place with trembling care. It looked like a wound packed with mud. The water he had poured there made the dirt smell rich and black, a violent contrast to the sterile dust of the cliff.
Thelian turned his back on the tree. He faced the drop.
Gravity pulled at his heels. A hunger in the stone.
“A blow for the wretched,” he said.
The wind took the words before they could settle. His throat kept the shape of them for a breath longer, cold where the sound had been, and the cold did not leave with the wind.
“Ten thousand imperial credits.”
Northward, the city rose.
Not at his feet. Far out, across the open basin and the broken ridges, it stood twenty miles away like a reef on a dark sea. Dead Iru towers pricked the horizon in a thin, uneven line, their frames stripped to shadow. The living clung to them as a second skin, too distant to resolve into roofs or walls, only a roughening along the silhouettes.
A small pulse reached him first, not in his eyes, in the flat place under his ribs. It stuttered, paused, stuttered again, a stranger's heartbeat knocking at the wrong door. Only after that did his eyes climb to find it.
Light was what reached him. Neon, small and restless, pulsing through the haze in nervous spasms. Arram script flickered as tiny cuts of brightness, died, and returned. Mist choked the lower levels and spread outward, dense and luminous, catching color and turning it into a low, bruised glow that made the city look injured from within.
Distance swallowed everything else. Whatever noise existed down there never climbed this high. Only the heat breathed, and the wind worried at the cliff’s edge.
Uhiel was still under the skyline. The primary light hid below the rim of the world. Namii had already risen.
The red sun wrestled the horizon. It did not illuminate. It stained. It drew a smear of crimson across the haze and the far glass.
He looked into the throat of the fall. The heat pressed at his back, frantic and alive.
Finally, he felt it.
The winter wind rose from the deep. It hit his skin. It bit through sweat and dust. For years he had watched snow in his mind, observed cold from behind the glass of sleep. Now the glass broke.
He shivered.