Chapter One
Everything happened at once.
Chaos was funny like that.
Glass shattered. Furniture toppled over. Candelabras crashed to the ground, lit tapers rolling along the granite floor. Somewhere, somebody screamed.
And Ember fell.
Falling wasn’t a terribly remarkable event, all things considered. Not because she was clumsy, but because that’s a thing that generally happened when one spends the entirety of one’s life running away from the hungering dead.
Tripping was always a possibility while being chased.
But this fall was more notable for a few reasons. First, she had been completely asleep. Maybe that wouldn’t be spectacular if she had been asleep in a bed or on a cot. But that led to the second—and more important—problem with her sudden jarring impact.
She had been asleep on the ground.
Outdoors.
It wasn’t packed dirt or grass that met her face as she collided with the solid surface. It was stone. Specifically, large blocks of smooth, polished, speckled granite that were arranged in neat offset rows. The floor was the first thing that she processed as she woke up. The second was the pain. She groaned and placed her hand to her forehead.
Waking up by smacking her head into granite was definitely going to make the list of the worst possible ways to be jarred out of sleep. The sound of glass falling onto the stone peppered the bass rumble of the building around her as it shuddered from whatever had just happened.
The third thought she had as she rolled onto her side and saw a vaulted stone ceiling over her head. Dust and debris rained from the cracks in the stones and streamed to the ground like bits of snow.
And that third thought she said out loud. “What the fuck…?”
Her bag and its contents were spilled all over the floor next to her, and a large wooden pew had overturned onto its side and had landed on her metal spear. She yanked her weapon out from under the piece of furniture.
Whatever had just happened, it wasn’t an excuse to stand around and stare. She needed to get her things, and she needed to get to safety. Wherever that was, it definitely wasn’t here. Scrambling to gather up her spilled supplies, she slung her bag on her back. Shoving her long knife into her belt, she immediately looked around for somewhere she could defend herself if she needed to.
It must have just been a weird quake. That’s all. I just smacked my head on a—
Ember’s spear almost fell out of her hands.
There was no explanation for what was happening to her. This wasn’t a simple quake. She had fallen asleep in a clearing and woken up in an enormous building. Archways reached high up overhead toward the vaulted ceiling, almost disappearing into the darkness. Banners and tapestries hung from wooden rods stretched over each alcove, decorated in various colors and covered in weird symbols she didn’t recognize.
One thing she could identify quickly was that wherever she was—wherever she’d been brought—was a place of worship. She would know them anywhere. Altars with toppled bowls and candles stood in front of statues. The windows were huge and must have once been stained glass. But most of them were now shattered, bits of them still falling to the stone as they lost the fight with gravity and tumbled down.
Ember felt faint. She never felt faint. Her heart was pounding so quickly, she wondered if it was going to explode in her chest. It wasn’t because she fell and woke up in a place she didn’t recognize. It wasn’t because she woke up in a church—maybe she had been abducted and carried off.
No. The thing that made her want to pass out was the statue behind the altar at the head of the sanctuary. She found herself staring into the stone features of a…
She didn’t know what it was.
But she knew it sent a cold chill rolling down her spine.
Whatever this temple was built to…I have never seen it before.
The figure loomed over her, towering some twenty feet tall. In each of its many hands it held either a cup or a knife. The knives were being used to cut its own flesh, sending the stony depiction of blood into the waiting chalices.
Its face looked like the skull of no animal that Ember recognized. Huge, empty eye sockets sat over a toothy, grinning maw. The figure was cast in amber by flickering, overturned candles that sat on a cloth of pure white.
Ember knew all the gods of Gioll. All of them. And this was no god she knew. Nor did she particularly think she wanted to. It screamed malice. It screamed fear me.
And Ember had enough fear in her life.
“Excuse me? Miss, are you all right?”
Ember whirled, her spear lifted and pointed directly at the man who had spoken. He jumped back in surprise, his eyes wide saucers. He lifted his hands in a show of harmlessness, but she didn’t buy it.
He was dressed in all white. A suit the likes of which she had only seen worn by politicians and rulers when she was a child in the citadel. But the strangest thing about him was the mask that covered a quarter of his face. It was as white as his suit, made of perfect porcelain. It made his skin look less pale only by comparison.
“Where am I?” She tightened her grip on her spear. “Who are you? What’s happened?”
“I—you are in the Cathedral of the Ancients, miss. I’m not sure what’s happened. Everything—everything seemed to… fall.” The man was stammering every few words, looking at her in wild panic. “Are you—are you mortal?”
“I asked you who you were, friend.” She took a step toward him, pointing the end of her spear toward his throat.
“My—my name is William.” He took a step back. “You are mortal. I can smell it in your blood.” The man looked afraid of her. Terrified, actually. “Oh—oh by the Ancients—”
He turned on his heel and…ran away.
Ember blinked. That wasn’t what she had been expecting. Weird man. But she didn’t have time to debate what was wrong with “William” for very long. Instinct and her hammering heartbeat were demanding she act. But do what? Run? To where? Hide? From what?
She looked back toward the terrifying statue at the front of the sanctuary. It was only then that she noticed there were several other similar figures in the alcoves around the room, as well. Each one depicted a different, but no less terrifying monster. They looked skeletal, or like it was made from armored plates in lieu of flesh. And each grinned or screamed in silent rage.
Every one of them promised terror or violence. And clearly celebrated the act.
And in front of each was an altar, swathed in color, like the white cloth in front of the largest statue at the head. Red. Blue. Black. Turquoise. Green. Purple.
It was the eighth statue that truly caught her attention. That one seemed different from the rest. She stared at it and felt a strange and instinctual revulsion.
Empty eye sockets glared at her from a rotted skull. Carved flesh melted from the figure in chunks. Beneath the depiction of its skin, she could see a skeleton that resembled the other terrifying gods.
That kind of monster, she knew. Not in its shape, but in its nature. Simply looking at the stone depiction of the rot brought the memory of the smell to her nose. She would never forget the scent of decay.
She’d lived with it almost every moment of her life.
And there, at the creature’s feet, sat an altar like all the rest. Atop it was a swath of fabric. But unlike the others, it was tattered and stained a sickly and terrible yellow.
Gripping her spear, she turned and fled from the room. If William warned others, they’d come for her. She would try to figure out what he meant by asserting she was “mortal” another time. Sure, she was. But wasn’t everyone?
Her first move was to hide and find somewhere she could make an easy escape outside. Ducking into a hallway, she pressed against the wall behind a column, using the shadows as best she could. And it wasn’t hard—the cavernous building had plenty of them.
She gasped in surprise, jumping as a candelabra in a sconce next to her burst into flame as she approached. She stared at it wide-eyed and reached out a tentative hand to poke one of the candles.
It wiggled in the cast-iron slot. Maybe it’s electric? Nowhere in Gioll had electricity as far as she knew, not for eighty years. But maybe this place had a generator or something like that. She picked up the lit candle and turned it over to see if she could find how the trick was done.
Nothing. A normal wax taper.
She picked up the whole candelabra next.
Nothing.
Shaking her head, she put it back down. It was another thing on a quickly growing list of reasons why she was debating having a panic attack.
But if she had survived the hordes of hungering corpses chasing her for years…she wasn’t going to die because she got startled by a candelabra. I’d be laughed out of the afterlife.
She had to find high ground. Somewhere she could hide, and think, and wait. Somewhere with an easy route to escape if they found her. Who are these people? And what kind of madmen worship gods like those?
Ducking from shadow to shadow, she flinched each time a candelabra lit near her. “Stop it,” she hissed at one of the offending items. “You’re being a pain in the ass right now.”
“She was in here—she just—I don’t know. She had a spear, and she’s mortal.”
Ember ducked behind a piece of furniture, swearing silently in her head. The voice belonged to William.
“Are you sure?” asked a second male voice.
“I’m positive,” William replied. “She must have run off.”
“Well…we need to find her.”
“I’ll go find the Priest. He should know.”
Priest. Great. When footsteps came her way, she scrambled through a nearby doorway. Moonlight streamed into the room, bright enough to let her see the upended furniture. The whole building looked like it had really taken a hit. A bookcase was laying on its face on a table at an angle, its contents spewed all over the carpeted floor.
She picked her way over them toward the window. It didn’t look like that far of a drop. Maybe she could open it slowly and scramble out that way.
It wasn’t until she edged closer to the glass that she realized the moonlight…wasn’t quite right.
Ember stood by the window and gazed outside.
Her spear fell from her fingers and clattered to the floor. Her jaw might as well have joined it.
It was a city. A sprawling, beautiful city. Electric lights illuminated the windows. Moonlight shone off rooftops and on cobblestone streets. She could see carriages and people on the road below.
Looking up, she had to grip the window jamb to keep from collapsing to the ground. Her hands were shaking. She felt a cold rush pour down her back as if she had been thrown into a frozen lake.
The moonlight had seemed off. And that was why. Instead of a single, faded yellow moon hovering in the sky…there were two. One was pure white, and the other was purple.
She had asked the man in the sanctuary where she was. And he had told her what building she was standing in. But now she realized she needed to ask a bigger, more important question.
“What world is this…?”
***
Lyon groaned from the floor where he had landed. It wouldn’t have been so bad, perhaps, if the entire shelf of pots and pans had not upended and crashed down on top of him. He had been simply minding his own business making tea when the world seemed to drop away.
There was no other way he could think of to describe it.
It was as though the floor, and everything permanently attached to it, fell a foot from where it had been a second prior. He, and all the rest of the objects that were not bolted down, hovered in mid-air for what seemed to be a strangely long fraction of a second before crashing back to the ground. He had caught himself and managed to stay on his feet. But the pots and pans could do no such thing and came down on his head, knocking him to the floor.
He shoved the objects away from him, sending them skittering. He hissed and snarled in pain as his hand struck the burning-hot kettle that housed the boiling water he intended to use to make said tea.
Standing, he glanced down at his hand. The burn was already healing, and the sting was already gone.
He walked from the room. He would deal with the mess later. Or, more likely, one of the servants in the cathedral would scramble to clean up before he returned. He didn’t enjoy being fussed over. Even though it was his right as the King of Blood to have servants do what he liked, he could never quite get used to being tended to. He was fully capable of brewing his own tea.
Today’s events notwithstanding.
Everything in the hallway was knocked over as if it had suffered the same fate as the kitchen. Candelabras were laying wherever they landed. Candles, lit and unlit, were strewn about the floor. Benches were overturned. A few of those who served in his house were already picking themselves up and doing what they could to right the fallen objects, tipping the wrought iron receptacles back upright.
He leaned down to help one woman up to her feet. She smiled up at him warmly. “Thank you, my king.”
He smiled gently back. “You’re quite welcome.” He was a royal. It was still laughable. It felt strange even if it had been four hundred years since he was made king through no action of his own.
Four hundred years of more peace and quiet than Under had ever known. Ever since the tragic and violent events that occurred during the rise of the new Queen of Dreams, things had been…simple. No assassinations. No games. No wars. Nothing more than the typical squabbles between houses. Even the antics of the House of Shadows could be explained away by their king and his subjects being a bit bored with no schemes and masterminded games to unleash upon the rest of them.
He smiled again despite himself. There was a very good reason for their peace and quiet.
Lydia, the Queen of Dreams, and her unlikely love for Aon, the King of Shadows. Oh, she hadn’t changed him. The reclusive and violent warlock was just as he had ever been. But, perhaps, she had tempered his bitterness enough to soothe his desires to unravel the rest of the world around him in his wrath.
It was to her that he could credit the peace that they all had enjoyed.
Lyon reigned as the King of Blood during the easiest period he had experienced in his well over two thousand years of life. It was almost insulting to call him such a thing when he had done so little to prove himself worthy of the title.
An idle king was merely a caretaker.
But that was a role for which he was far more ready to admit that he was suited. He had always been a mindful soul. For all his faults and all his so-called skills, the one thing he would admit he was good at was being aware of those around him.
And it was perhaps for that reason that he sensed something was amiss.
Far more felt awry than the fall of the Cathedral of the Ancients. But the question remained—what precisely was wrong?
It was with a heavy heart that he saw that whatever had jostled the building had also shattered most of the stained-glass windows in the sanctuary of the cathedral. He walked along the pews, straightening up a few as he went, to stand in the center aisle. He looked to the altar, and there at the head stood the many-armed Ancient he served.
He served all of the Ancients in their slumber in the great pool beneath the building. But the one at the main altar was the one to whom he was joined. For he, as king, was the branch that flowed from that creature’s power and into the world around him.
As were all the Ancients and their kings and queens. All seven of them stood as an extension of their power so that they might rest.
An itch that wound up his spine told him the days of peace might be over. Shattered and broken glass lay scattered around the floor, glinting in the light like snowflakes. It would be beautiful, if he didn’t suspect that it represented a warning for the destruction that might have come to their world.
Something terrible had happened. He could sense it in the air.
And then…he saw what it was.
There should have been seven altars stood arranged around the room. The House of Blood in white. The House of Shadows in black. The House of Flames in red. The House of Moons in green. The House of Words in purple. The House of Fate in blue. And the restored House of Dreams in its brilliant shade of turquoise.
But there were not seven altars standing around him.
There were eight.
He walked slowly to the newcomer, to the statue that should not have been there. It was tattered and terrible, like its flesh was rotting from its bones. The decayed and open face that stared back at him seemed to be laughing at his horror. Laughing at his shock.
An altar stood before it. Clothed in tattered, decayed cotton. Stained in a terrible, fetid shade of yellow.
There was no house whose color was yellow.
Or…there shouldn’t be.
He stood staring into the carved visage of an Ancient, but not one that he knew. Questions flooded his mind. One after another, and each of them he could not answer.
For the first time in many centuries…Lyon knew fear.
And while he might not know how this had come to pass—or what had truly happened—he knew one thing for certain.
The time of peace had come to an end.
This meant wreck and ruin for them all.
“My lord?” Someone asked breathlessly from beside him.
Lyon turned to look at the young man. “What is it, William?”
The young man looked out of breath. And caught in the same fear that Lyon was experiencing, if for different reasons. “There’s—there’s a mortal girl. In the Cathedral. She had a spear, and—”
Lyon furrowed his brow. “What? Where?”
“I—I don’t know. I ran to get help, and she must have disappeared.”
He sighed and rubbed his forehead. William was a sweet boy, and he meant well. But he was a moderate fool. He needed to go to the Great Hall—to speak with Ini, the Queen of Fate. He needed to deal with the fact that there was a new altar in the Cathedral. Not muck about with William and his flights of fancy. “Are you certain you are not mistaken? There are no mortals in Under. We are not due for another alignment with Earth for a few more years.”
“I know, Sir. I’m positive. I—she was dressed strangely, and—and—I promise, she was mortal.” William was tripping over his words in his nervousness.
“Very well. I will find her.” He let his body take the shape of the white bats that he preferred and swarmed through the building. It would simply make it easier to find someone as a hundred smaller creatures, rather than one bigger one.
There was no possible way that William was correct. A mortal finding their way to Under was impossible.
But so was a new altar.
So was the world seemingly dropping out from beneath him.
It would not stall him for long to do a quick search of his home.
He caught the scent of blood with a strange tinge to it. Something odd that he couldn’t place. He focused himself in that direction, and took shape just outside the room where it was the strongest. Stepping inside, he froze.
There was a young woman standing by the window, staring out at the city beyond. She was dressed in a collection of tattered, mismatched clothing, with bits and pieces that were stitched together to form full garments. She wore a heavy leather coat with fur that had been added on, and boots that were the wrong size for her and looked as though they had been through hell and back.
Her hair was half black, half white, split down the middle. A rusty, broken pair of blast goggles sat atop her head. A tattered, stained bag hung from one shoulder. And at her feet was a metal spear, lying amongst the overturned items in the room and the broken glass of the windowpanes.
Lyon stepped over books from an overturned case, carefully approaching the young woman. When he drew close, he reached out and placed his hand gently on her shoulder. “Excuse me, but—”
She whirled. Wide, dark eyes looked up at him in shock. A black line was drawn across her face from cheek to cheek in soot. Lyon blinked in surprise, for she had no other marks on her face.
And he also blinked in surprise, because her hand was wrapped around the handle of a long knife that was now protruding from his stomach.
***
Ember had reacted without thinking. She had drawn her long knife and stabbed the man who had snuck up behind her.
By the Grandfather, he was tall. His all-white clothing stuck out against the darkness of the room and almost seemed to glow purple with the light of the bizarre and terrifying moon outside the window.
Crimson began to bloom around the blade, turning the white fabric of his vest to red in the process.
For one second, everything seemed to hang. She expected him to scream. To fall to the ground.
Instead…he smiled.
It was a kind and sympathetic expression.
“Hello.”
She took a step back from him, hitting the jamb of the window. There was nowhere for her to run. Nowhere for her to hide. And he had her knife! She reached down to grab her spear, but he placed a foot atop it.
“Please, no. I’d rather not be skewered twice in one day.” His voice was quiet and deep. Calm. Nothing that had any business coming from a man who had just been stabbed.
She scrambled back against the wall again, her heart pounding in terror. The man was handsome, but his pale skin and white hair coupled with his clothing made him resemble a statue more than a man.
He took a step closer to her. It was then that she noticed the writing on his face—white ink in strange patterns ran down his face from hairline to jawline. His eyes were a pale blue that was almost as snow white as the rest of him.
“Don’t—” She held out a hand to stop him from coming closer.
He held his hands up in surrender and retreated the distance he had crossed. “I am not sure how you have come to be here. But I mean you no harm, young one. My name is Lyon. I am the lord of this place. I will not hurt you.”
She could help but glance at knife sticking out of his stomach.
“Ah. Yes.” He grasped the wood handle and pulled. The blade slid out of him without resistance. Crimson dripped to the carpet. She watched as he tugged a handkerchief from his coat pocket and wiped the knife clean before offering it back to her, handle first.
She had stabbed him. Stabbed him! And it did nothing! She was shaking now in fear. This was far more than a simple swarm of corpses trying to kill her. This was something else entirely. With a trembling hand, she took the blade from him.
Even though it had done nothing, she held it in front of her just in case.
“What is your name?” Lyon was still smiling gently at her.
“Ember…”
“Ember. I must ask. How is it that you are here?”
“I—I don’t know. I fell asleep, and then I woke up here. It felt like I…I don’t know. It felt like everything—” She broke off nervously. She shouldn’t be talking to him—it—whatever Lyon was. But what else was she going to do?
“Fell?”
She nodded.
“As did we all. I fear I am just as confused as you are.”
“None of this makes sense. None of this is possible. You’re—I stabbed you.”
“Yes, you did. And I have had far worse done to me by mortals in a fit of panic, trust me.” He smirked briefly. “One blade to the stomach is hardly notable. You are not armed with guns.”
Ember wasn’t usually one to consider herself the type to panic. It wasn’t really a helpful emotion. Fear led to adrenaline, which was useful. But panic made for stupid decisions and rash choices. And that almost always lead to death.
She’d never panicked once in her life. She figured she was immune to the emotion.
But right now?
Right now, she was really considering changing her mind.
“I need to ask—I need to ask a really weird and stupid question.” She cleared her throat, trying to sound firm. And not nearly so squeaky and afraid, even if she was.
“Of course.”
“This isn’t Gioll, is it?”
His forehead creased and then smoothed again. “I do not know that name.”
“My—my world—doesn’t have two moons. Or any city like this. Or people who can get stabbed and be fine—or statues worshipping terrible monsters.” Ember felt her fingers begin to go numb. “This isn’t my world…is it?”
“No.” He bowed his head. “Welcome…to Under.”