Lightbringer

The Emperor stormed into the yard, a fur-trimmed cloak thrown about his shoulders, and as soon as Jessamyn locked eyes with him, her body stiffened, her bones snapped rigid. She blinked, and the world shifted.

She was alone in the yard. The sky was gray, the buildings of the Lyceum black and windowless. The world vibrated—the air, the Lyceum, the stone underfoot. A child’s sketch given furious life.

In this strange, shaded world, the Emperor was glorious—eight feet tall, slender and long-limbed, his face an exquisite configuration of sharp cheekbones and bright, pale eyes, his hair a shifting black cloud. His clothes floated about him in dark whorls. From his back fanned a set of enormous wings—bright where they burst from his shoulders, tipped in shadow.

Jessamyn cried out, her knees buckling. She wanted desperately to look away. He was too beautiful, too brilliant. She should not be looking at him. Her human eyes were too small for it.

But the Emperor held her in place with his mind, forcing her to stare. She felt him slipping into her thoughts like a snake through a crack in stone. Soon she would shatter, the taste of his fury on her lips as metallic and sour as blood.

“You brought knives into her room,” he said, his voice jagged and booming.

He was too immense for her. His mind in hers made her head ache and her eyes burn with a searing heat. His fingers were deep in the folds of her thoughts, digging, twisting.

The world flickered, then changed.

Jessamyn watched in horror as Nevia and the others reappeared—though now they were emaciated, wild-eyed. They bashed their heads against the walls until their faces were soaked in blood. They leapt on each other and tore with their teeth, feasting.

Jessamyn choked out, “My lord, please—”

“You have been trained by my finest fighters,” the Emperor said, “and yet you were stupid enough to present Eliana with weapons. Your idiocy astounds me.”

A crow swooped down from the sky and pounced upon a small songbird. Jessamyn watched the crow stab the bird’s chest, rip at its throat, and shake it. With its great black beak, it tore away chunks of flesh and tufts of feathers.

Jessamyn’s heart pounded faster and harder. She was frantic to cover her ears, but she could not move her arms, because she no longer had any. Instead, her wings flapped and fluttered. She was the songbird in the dirt, and the crow pecked at her, broke her ribs, peeled off strips of her flesh. The crow’s eyes flashed a brilliant white, as blazing as the Emperor’s angelic eyes had once been, and she knew that this darkness, this huge, roaring weight bearing down upon her, clawing at her, was the crow, yes, but also the Emperor, forcing open her mind.

“Forgive me, Your Excellency,” Jessamyn managed, her throat in shreds. “I grieve for Varos—”

“Your grief is laughable beside my own,” the Emperor replied. He was a shifting column of darkness, hovering over her face as if considering a kiss. She saw his white eyes, wanted to close her own against them, but she had no eyelids. She wanted to scream, but she could not open her lips. When she touched her face, she found that her mouth had disappeared, in its place a flat plane of flesh.

“Tell me,” murmured the Emperor, “why did she stop? What did you see?”

Jessamyn stood whole beside her own body. She watched her other self, mouthless and lidless, twitching in the Emperor’s grasp.

“She jabbed me in the throat,” Jessamyn said, watching calmly. “She pulled a dagger from my belt. She thrust the knife at her stomach, then stopped before the blade could touch her.”

“What did she look like in that moment?”

“Her eyes grew hazy.” It was fascinating to Jessamyn to see what her body looked like when it was in agony. How her muscles distended, how copiously she wept. “She dropped the knife.” Jessamyn paused, remembering. The memory was distorted, as if she were watching it through a veil. “She asked a question. ‘Who are you?’”

The world exploded into brilliant white light, the air shrieking at Jessamyn’s ears.

At last, blackness.

She opened her eyes, gasping, and stared up at the midday sky. The Emperor was gone. She thought she heard the sound of his boots clipping stone. Nevia and the others roused themselves from the stupor the Emperor had held them in, each of them blinking and disoriented.

And only then did Jessamyn realize how strange it was that the Emperor had asked her what had happened in Eliana’s rooms. He seldom left the girl’s thoughts, after all. His mind should have shown him the answer.

Which meant that—even though Jessamyn had never imagined it possible for anyone to match the Emperor’s strength—something, someone, somehow, was shielding the truth from him.

• • •

The following evening, Jessamyn strode through the Lyceum toward the library. She felt sharp around the edges, her skin ill-fitting. She had spent the entire day stationed outside Eliana’s rooms while the Emperor worked.

It rankled her that listening to the girl’s screams could affect her so. She was Invictus, the student of Varos. She had heard worse. She had done worse.

And yet, she could not put from her mind what the Emperor had done to her in the fighting yard the day before. It was as if Jessamyn had died on the ground beneath the Emperor’s hands and had been reborn a shaky, jumpy version of herself.

A hard knot of fury rose in Jessamyn’s throat as she stormed through the Lyceum’s shadows. All of this was Eliana’s fault. She refused to capitulate, and so the Emperor’s temper unraveled.

Jessamyn had heard the whispers at the Lyceum over the past few weeks, fearful and furious: More cruciata were pouring through the Gate every day. The Sunderlands were lost, the Northern Sea choked with beasts. Thousands of angels patrolled the Celdarian and Borsvallic coasts, standing between Elysium and an invasion of monsters, and they used the Emperor’s vaecordia to cut down beast after beast from the sky. None had yet made it past the front line to the mainland, angels were losing their stolen human vessels by the dozens, the toxic blood of the cruciata forcing them to abandon their bodies, and the Empire was struggling to supply them with fresh ones quickly enough. Some angels had even themselves succumbed to the beasts’ poisonous blood, their intangible, bodiless minds splintered beyond repair.

The front would not hold forever.

Jessamyn scanned the library for Remy, her heart pulsing with an unfamiliar, angry fear she couldn’t seem to shake. Her mind felt hot and choked from it. Eliana had the power to seal the Gate and rid the Empire of this problem forever, but she refused to use it. If the Emperor could not break her in time, her inaction would doom them all.

And, Jessamyn thought, it was possible that the Emperor was no longer strong enough or sound enough of mind to crack Eliana’s defenses. It had been months since her arrival, and still the little lost princess had not been beaten.