this night is irreparable. but where you are, it's still light;
Of all the courts, Elchanan should find Solterra the least attractive. It is everything he hates: a vast expanse of arid, lifeless desert, populated by a people so delusional that they dare to worship the sun.
But he has heard whispers on the wind. Gossip, passed from mouth to mouth—letters flown on the backs of birds from court to court and back again. Apparently Solterra, despite its new, foreign king, is returning to some of its old ways. Elchanan cannot claim to know everything about the situation, but what he does know has intrigued him enough to outweigh even the discomfort of a desert. What he does know is this: a spiderwebbing tunnel of catacombs that had been lost for years in a bubble of stasis has opened up again, and the warriors caught inside it are out in the world now.
Wandering. Vulnerable.
When night falls—and it is early today, just as it has come earlier and earlier since the solstice all those weeks ago—the archpriest slips out from his apartment in the Denoctian city center and takes to the skies in one easy beat of his wide, white wings. Now that fall has settled over Novus, the air high up is colder and thinner than usual; it prickles at Elchanan’s lungs as he breathes it in deep. And down below, as minute after minute passes, the landscape changes like an unrolled scroll painting. First the silver mirror of the lake’s surface fades away, then the Arma mountains rise and fall. Past that open up the forests, then the fields, long oceans of grass prickled with flowers; then finally it slopes into bone-pale dunes of sand, and he lands on a hill near the entrance of the Day Court on light, nimble feet.
Elchanan has never been here (or anywhere, really) in the daytime. He cannot know with full confidence just how strange it is to witness Solterra like this. But he knows on instinct that this is not how anyone was really meant to see this place. The dripping moon casts strange globs of lights on every surface and stretches the shadows longer than a life. He slinks through the empty streets with ease, noting the eerie feeling that follows—the odd silences, the flapping of flags in the breeze; the ringing in his ears, like the sound of a church bell.
The dark slip of a woman he sees at the end of the street.
Elchanan’s tattoo, so many rings stacked inside one another on his forehead, seems to glow. And when he calls out to her, his voice is calm and easy: "Are you lost, too?"
"Speaking"
But he has heard whispers on the wind. Gossip, passed from mouth to mouth—letters flown on the backs of birds from court to court and back again. Apparently Solterra, despite its new, foreign king, is returning to some of its old ways. Elchanan cannot claim to know everything about the situation, but what he does know has intrigued him enough to outweigh even the discomfort of a desert. What he does know is this: a spiderwebbing tunnel of catacombs that had been lost for years in a bubble of stasis has opened up again, and the warriors caught inside it are out in the world now.
Wandering. Vulnerable.
When night falls—and it is early today, just as it has come earlier and earlier since the solstice all those weeks ago—the archpriest slips out from his apartment in the Denoctian city center and takes to the skies in one easy beat of his wide, white wings. Now that fall has settled over Novus, the air high up is colder and thinner than usual; it prickles at Elchanan’s lungs as he breathes it in deep. And down below, as minute after minute passes, the landscape changes like an unrolled scroll painting. First the silver mirror of the lake’s surface fades away, then the Arma mountains rise and fall. Past that open up the forests, then the fields, long oceans of grass prickled with flowers; then finally it slopes into bone-pale dunes of sand, and he lands on a hill near the entrance of the Day Court on light, nimble feet.
Elchanan has never been here (or anywhere, really) in the daytime. He cannot know with full confidence just how strange it is to witness Solterra like this. But he knows on instinct that this is not how anyone was really meant to see this place. The dripping moon casts strange globs of lights on every surface and stretches the shadows longer than a life. He slinks through the empty streets with ease, noting the eerie feeling that follows—the odd silences, the flapping of flags in the breeze; the ringing in his ears, like the sound of a church bell.
The dark slip of a woman he sees at the end of the street.
Elchanan’s tattoo, so many rings stacked inside one another on his forehead, seems to glow. And when he calls out to her, his voice is calm and easy: "Are you lost, too?"
