A Shard of Sea and Bone

by L. J. Engelmeier

  “Penthoseren,” Nori-Rin said behind them. Leather creaked, and Svahta was surprised when she realized that the sound must have been Nori-Rin’s hand tightening around the wrapped grip of her sword. “Like the missing Guardian Penthoseren? That Penthoseren family?”

  Missing Guardian. A sudden sense of unease crawled through Svahta. We follow a note and find a creature connected to another missing Guardian. What are the chances? Why does this feel like more magic of coincidence? She glanced up the High King. Do his hands move the pieces? Or is something really framing him?

  “Exactly like the Guardian of Light. Little Arielle. You aren’t mistaken,” the High King said, seemingly oblivious to the tension building in the room. “Tialu Penthoseren was her father. He was a lovely man. The very definition of a king, I assure you.” He looked down at Svahta. His grey eyes were alight with the dancing flames of the room, his smile friendly. “Tell me, do you know much of them or their homeland?”

  Svahta shook her head slowly. She fought the urge to tense her hand around her flail. “Only know a’ Arielle vaguely. She was before my time. Rumour was she ran from the Council for some reason an’s been in hidin’ since.”

  “Is that really the story now?” he asked. “Funny how it corrupts itself over the years.” He turned their attention to the mosaicked wall behind them and fetched a new torch up to it, the light bathing an image formed by the mosaic tiles: a series of tiny green islands lost in a vast sea. “Llaeaphen-amar Ras,” he said. “These islands were her family’s islands. The Old Ledgers called their dimension the Realm of the Sea of Dreams, but it was the Realm of the Fortune Sea to those outsiders who didn’t know it well. A mistranslation from the ledger’s original Su’net, I’m certain, but still named for its sea. Penthos.” He smiled, fond, as his mouth caressed the syllables: pen-toss. “Lu’van for dream sea. There are some who still call the clearest of crystal Penthos crystal. Here, crystal in High Dash’havani is penjos. The comparison was very popular in older poetry from all Realms.”

  As he continued speaking, High King al-Loriaris smiled. Years fell off his face, one by one. “Thousands of words come from Penthos. Thousands of stories and beliefs. People flocked across the Realms just to see it, to worship, to find their fortunes and futures told in the currents of its waters.” Without warning, his face grew pained, nostalgic, as though time was slipping through his fingers. “You would think I’d remember the water, but I don’t. All I remember of my visit is how sunny it was. That’s all. This warm haze in my memory underneath all the sand. The grit of salt on my face.” He stepped forward and ghosted his hand over the tiny islands. “A haven, weathered to nothing by my old mind. Arielle must have been a spritely little island girl back then, new to her Guardianship, untouched by the turn of her first century. I don’t remember her. Linanu’thos is all I have left of that Realm. She’s its last surviving thing.”

  The High King said the words with grief, the same way Svahta had once said goodbye to her husband’s and twin boys’ caskets, the tail of the last syllable clenched in her teeth. She was distracted enough that it took her a moment to grasp what the High King had just told them. Nori-Rin spoke before she could.

  “What do you mean,” Nori-Rin asked, the singsong missing from her voice, “by last surviving thing?”

  The High King looked at them with a mild expression. “How a story like Arielle’s falls into obscurity, I’ll never know,” he said. “It happened not long after my visit. I remember that much. It was quite the talk amongst the High and Low Realms for decades. To put it simply: one day her Realm was there, and the next it wasn’t.”

  Svahta blinked. “I’m sorry?”

  “Gone? Like vanished?” Nori-Rin asked. “Poof?”

  “That’s what I’d thought, but no. I went myself, to see what had happened. The dimension wasn’t gone. It was an ocean oasis reduced to rubble and sand. Barren.” With a glare, he turned from the wall to face Svahta and Nori-Rin. The torchlight danced across his dark skin and cast writhing shadows across his face. “That Council of yours found millions of bodies over the next few months, but they never tracked down a single survivor. No one ever came forward from another Realm, either. It didn’t seem there were any evacuation efforts.”

  “So everyone died?” Nori-Rin asked.

  The High King shrugged. “I suppose they must have. The Council said it may have been a sudden storm that swept the area, but any talk of the incident was quickly hushed by them in the following months. To be honest, I’d always considered the possibility that they were ashamed about failing to find Arielle in the wreckage.”

  “If everyone died,” Svahta asked, frowning, “then why’s the story that Penthoseren’s missin’?”

  “Hope. Wishful thinking. Denial. Why does anyone believe anything, child? It’s been the story since it happened,” the High King said. “I suppose it’s because rumour abounded that her soul was never recovered from the wreckage, so she must still be out there somewhere. Mortaigne and Dven were the Guardians of Spirit and Darkness then. I knew them in a manner of speaking, but they divulged little to me in the way of truths about Arielle’s missing soul. Within the next few months, they wound up dead. One burned, the other poisoned along with a slew of his family members. None of us could wring any answers from them after that.”

  The skin underneath Svahta’s armour rose up in sudden goosebumps. Her hair, bundled on her head, felt too tight. A missing Guardian. A missing soul. It all sounded so similar to what the Council had told them in the meeting. Far too similar.

  The High King kept talking. “Some say Princess Arielle was responsible for the attack, you know. That much power must go to someone’s head after a while. Not all Guardians can be good, surely. High bar to set.” His face turned apologetic. “That’s what the others say anyway. Many still pray for Arielle’s safe return. She was young, yes, but extremely beloved by her subjects and by her followers. She had a reputation for pure kindness.”

  Svahta caught Nori-Rin’s dark eyes as the High King’s trailed off. She could tell with just a glance that Nori-Rin was as on edge as she was, and just as reluctant to leave. It was important that they were here right now—at this moment, hearing this information. It was too much of a coincidence for this not to have been planned by someone.

  “You’ve turned me into a reminiscing old man,” High King al-Loriaris said, chuckling, “but as you can see, my pet is in outstanding health. While the letter carried information its author shouldn’t have possessed—and I will investigate that breach of secrecy myself—I hope it’s obvious that the information was falsified.”

  Svahta nodded stiffly. She glanced up at Nori-Rin again, but her legs felt leaden. She didn’t want to leave. “Guess we should be on our way then, Your Excellency? If it’s just a matter a’ stolen identity.”

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t have you leave quite so soon,” High King al-Loriaris said. “In fact, I would go so far as to say you should definitely stay here.”

  A peculiar feeling curled in Svahta’s stomach. “Why?”

  “Because you haven’t asked the right questions yet, darling. I didn’t send you that letter,” the High King said. “That much was the truth. But I do know exactly who did, and I know why they did it, too.”

  When he smiled this time, his fangs glinted in the torchlight. Svahta took an immediate step away from him, smacking backward into the tank. She brandished her flail. Nori-Rin lowered her sword until the tip was inches from the High King’s stomach. Her face was murderous.

  “You see, my dears,” the High King said, unfazed by it all, spreading his arms wide, “that letter is meant to frame me for when you turn up murdered after this meeting.”

  ON A PRECIPICE

  _______________________________

  Sway not me, but my rage.

  tattooed on a shoulder in the Realm of Glass Rain

  THE MULTITUDINOUS REALM OF BLACK WATERS

  MEISMOOR, OUTSKIRTS OF XIAGAN, GHAHANI COUNTY,

 
; WESTERN ZHO LIANG, SOUTHERN NIJAGI

  Travelling to an unfamiliar Realm was always dangerous.

  Without a specific, working knowledge of the new dimension’s terrain and geography, it was unpredictable where a reconjurer might end up. They might land in a volcano or the middle of an ocean—might misjudge the altitude and come out a thousand feet in the air, falling to certain death—might show up in the wrong area of town and get attacked by the locals, guards, or policemen—might end up in the wrong dimension entirely, which spelled problems anywhere from a non-breathable atmosphere to crippling gravity. Or—and this had terrified Kinrae as a child—one might even get stuck in the ether, remaining suspended in nothingness for the rest of eternity. For that reason, he had perfected the art very early on under the supervision of his tutors. He never erred.

  So after a long debate outside the castle gates, a lot of grumbling, and a vote, everyone agreed to side-along with Kinrae. A side-along would ensure they ended up together, wherever they happened to land.

  Snow coming down around them, everyone grabbed onto Kinrae: Draven taking his hand, Naliah his elbow, and Artysaedra his shoulder. Nervous, Kinrae closed his eyes. He called back the memories of the Realm he’d seen in the dying crystal and tried to settle on a neutral territory within it. After a short, silent deliberation, he made his decision: an empty field he’d seen flashes of, one with bracken, rushes, bell heather, piles of exposed granite, and low hills. He painted the picture in his mind as clearly as he possibly could, then visualized a doorway to it hovering directly in front of him.

  The Realms of the Infinity existed beside, above, below, and on top of one another, all simultaneously. They constantly shifted, only separated by paper-thin but depthless layers of ether. Kinrae imagined twisting the cogs of the multiverse to align to his own configuration, joining the barren field in his mind’s eye to the exact expanse of air in front of him. Then, letting his soul seep through his pores with a gut-wrenching feeling of lightness, he stepped forward into the ether.

  The ether felt like nothing. It was the only way to describe it. It was like ceasing to exist. It was the end of sensation. The end of time. He had no eyes to see, no fingers to feel. He had no lungs. The air around him and himself were indivisible, no barrier separating him from it. He was the multiverse. He was nothing. He kept his focus and quickly forced himself through the other side of the ether before he could get lost in the emptiness.

  When Kinrae broke through the wispy veil between the Realm of the Infinite and the Realm of Black Waters, it was like surfacing from the ocean to a shock of cold air.

  Kinrae was pulling his body out of the ether with millennia of practice before he’d even bothered to look around at the time-layered mess of a landscape around him, the heavy feel of his body snapping into place between one second and the next. His hair brushed his cheeks. The cold breeze bit at the insides of his nose. He pricked the side of his jaw with the pointed finger of his gauntlet just for the sensation.

  Reconjuring was strange, every time. His insides always felt like they sat wrong in his stomach for few minutes afterward. Even now, his body felt lopsided, though that could have been because of his armour. He wasn’t sure if it was because it had been fitted for someone else or because it had been months since he’d worn anything other than formal dress, but the armour pulled around his waist and at his shoulders awkwardly. It was heavy and restricting, and there was an itch between his shoulder blades he couldn’t get to through his backplate. He respected the Royal Guard of Lutana a bit more for enduring it, but it was driving him crazy.

  Artysaedra, Draven, and Naliah materialized nearby, their souls having clung to his in the emptiness of the ether, life blindly seeking out life. They were already bickering about something, and Kinrae turned away from them to survey the landscape.

  They were in the barren field he’d aimed for. A moor.

  Something about the landscape was strange, though. Kinrae couldn’t put his finger on what it was. The moorland’s uneven ground stretched out for miles as far as Kinrae could see in every direction without a hint of civilization. At the sight, a faint memory brushed against the forefront of Kinrae’s mind unexpectedly—something thousands of years old, covered in dust. He could hear the clop of hooves and see a fair-haired man tugging at his braid, calling him champ, but the memory slipped away before he could pin down anything else about it. Letting it go, he turned his attention back to the moorland.

  The ground was hard, as though it hadn’t seen rain in months, and it was covered in both dead grasses and a layer of hoarfrost. It crunched beneath Kinrae’s boots as he wandered over to a short bush of bell heather a few feet away from where he’d landed. Growing from a mound of rocks, the plant trembled in the faint breeze. Winter had browned it and stolen away its dainty purple flowers. Kinrae crouched and fingered the plant. One of its spiny stems snapped off under his touch.

  He blinked in shock when the stem disintegrated into nothing in his hand. He stared down at his empty palm, but there wasn’t the smallest trace of plant matter to prove the stem had ever been there at all. It was like a dream, there one moment and gone the next, lost to the freezing wind. He wondered if he’d imagined it completely.

  “It’s morning in this Realm,” Naliah said, and Kinrae’s focus was drawn away from the plant. He glanced over his shoulder. In Naliah’s hands was his tempus. The enchanted gold watch caught the dull light of pre-dawn and glimmered underneath its attention. Kinrae had forgotten his own. It was back in his chambers, tucked away on his bookcase next to his grandmother’s creature indices. “A little past nine here, but there are eight extra hours in the day, so it’s still early.”

  “And that’s relevant to our mission how?” Draven asked. Hard, Artysaedra wacked him upside the head with one of her gauntleted fists. “Ow!” He rubbed at the back of his scalp, and his garnet eyes narrowed. “What the hell was that for?”

  “Rule One: shut up,” Artysaedra growled. “You weren’t invited here, and your opinions don’t matter. This assignment is ours, and the second you weigh us down, I leave you behind. Is that understood?” When Draven opened his mouth, her eyes bore into him like a blade. “Is that understood? I’m not carrying your body back home because you were a complete idiot.”

  “I’m not a complete idiot,” Draven groused, looking away. He rubbed his head again. “At the very most, I’m three-fourths.”

  “You brought a dog to a battlefield, Draven.”

  “She looked at me with sad eyes, Saedra. You know I can’t resist sad eyes.”

  “I’m going to give you black eyes.”

  With a sigh, Kinrae tuned out their bickering. He noticed Beaker snuffling at the grass away from their group. Draven must have pushed her into the ether earlier without them noticing and pulled her back out when they’d landed. As she roamed around to sniff at patches of dead weeds and paw at the dirt, Kinrae decided she could at least scare off predators for them. She looked more like a white wolf than a street mutt. Her paws were larger than those of dogs her size. Her tail was shorter. Her shoulders were broader. As though she’d heard his thoughts, Beaker perked up and trotted over to Kinrae. She nudged at his face with her cold, damp nose, and he removed the sheepskin-lined gauntlet from his sweaty hand to run his fingers through her fur. Her icy blue eyes held his, and her tongue lolled.

  I’m certain Artysaedra will believe you have more use than I.

  Huddling together, Artysaedra and Naliah began debating what to do next until Draven finally ditched them and sauntered over. Kinrae thought his brother looked strange in the pilfered uniform of a castle guard. He’d only ever seen his brother in button-down shirts, jabots, and velvet suits, but more often in tattered trousers and a stained apron, goggles strapped over his eyes. Now, his brother was bound in steel, a sword at his side. It looked good on him. He’d pulled the black cloth down from his face and had tied his onyx hair up high on his head with a strip of leather and a ribbon. It looked sleek with the way his
black horns curved back with it. His eyelashes fluttered over his cheeks as he stared down at Kinrae and fidgeted from foot to foot. As always, Kinrae waited for his brother to speak.

  “I only brought Beaker so Mother wouldn’t toss her out in the snowstorm, you know,” Draven said apropos of nothing. “She howls when I’m gone.”

  “You needn’t explain yourself to me.”

  “I know,” Draven said, looking anywhere but at Kinrae. “I appreciate it.”

  Smiling softly, Kinrae turned to the bell heather again, but this time, the entire plant had vanished. He opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, Artysaedra heaved her scythe over her shoulder and commanded, “All right, so here’s what we’re going to do.”

  She told them that the easiest way to survey as much land as possible would be to fly and listen for cries of help or keep their eyes open for signs of distress. There was no telling how long it would take them to do it, though. They didn’t have a map of the Realm or know how large it was, and even if they only found a handful of people in each city or village, it could take weeks to heal everyone and relocate them to other Realms, but those calculations were if they had Guardian backup. And they didn’t. It was likely they could be here for months.

  And that was if they found any survivors at all. There was a niggling feeling in Kinrae’s gut that his brother had been right in the crystal cavern, when he’d looked at Kinrae with terror and confusion. I think they’re all dead.

  Regardless of what would happen or how long it would take, Kinrae was determined to see the mission through, no matter how many times he had to leave for meetings and return again.

  Immediately after briefing them, Artysaedra walked off, farther out into the moorland. She put a couple hundred feet between herself and the rest of the group, and once she had, she stopped. Then she began to transform.