Page 143 of Blade of the Nightking

The Eidrae.

Unease prickled down my spine as I turned to the passage scrawled across the top of the opposite page.

“And where the Keepers of Self walked, disorder followed.”

I slowed over the words, reading them twice to be certain I understood.

“For unlike all others, they did not diminish with time, nor surrender their gifts to death. From mother to daughter passed the gathered inheritance of ages—power layered upon power, knowledge amassed across lifetimes, until even nature strained beneath the weight of it.”

The lantern flame guttered softly beside me.

“And so the Keeper of Self chose mates not for affection, but for strength, for only mighty blood might bear daughters capable of enduring such inheritance.”

Outside, rain began to patter softly against the courtyard stone.

“For where the Keeper of Return restored the order of all things, the Keeper of Self strained ever against it. No power was meant to gather without end. Thus they stood as opposites—perfect counterweights upon the Star.”

I frowned, blinking down at the passage before me.

The way the author wrote of the Eidrae, they sounded terrifying. But more so than Tharnyx? Than creatures capable of infecting corpses and puppeting the dead? I found that difficult to believe. Perhaps whoever had written this had never encountered the Bone-Wrought up close.

Or perhaps they’d simply hated the Eidrae. After what they’d done during the Firstborn Wars—the way they’d reduced the Court of Flame’s army to ash—it was no surprise they were feared.

But this book was far older than three hundred years. Which meant the fear had existed first.

I squinted at the words.

What in the gods’ names did the author mean by the Star?

I yawned, my eyelids beginning to grow heavy at last. Perhaps if I skimmed ahead, I might find another mention of it. I turned a few more pages, pausing here and there over shorter passages as sleep slowly began pressing at the edges of my thoughts, but nothing else caught my attention for long. Then, closer to the back of the book, my hand stilled.

Sprawled across two full pages was an illustration unlike anything I’d seen so far.

I reached for the lantern on the nightstand and dragged it closer, the warm light spilling over the parchment.

The image was strange, abstract in a way the others weren’t. No creature stood at its center, no battle, no tale unfolding in painted scenes. Instead, the pages had been overtaken by sweeping strokes of faded ink and color that slashed and curled across the parchment in every direction, crossing over one another in tangled sweeps that somehow seemed deliberate despite their chaos. Blues threaded into bright reds, charcoal swept through muted gold, the colors winding and twisting through some larger shape that contoured the spread, though I couldn’t make sense of what I was looking at.

It was as though someone had tried to capture movement itself. Wind, perhaps. Or currents beneath water.

I leaned closer. There were three marked points within the storm of lines—one near the middle of the left page, another toward the bottom center, and the last far to the right. Each bore the same strange symbol: a narrow black line ending in a pointed tip, angled sharply downward like an arrow indicating due south.

Strange.

Maybe there was an explanation for the drawing.

I flipped back a page—and recognized the image immediately.

It was the well that had caught my attention earlier when Levinica and I had skimmed through the book together. Ancient but plain, its smooth stone was bare of any ornamentation, its dark mouth a black abyss. I understood at once why it had drawn my eye. Etched into its side was a star.

Not seven-pointed.

Eight.

I froze. My pulse quickening, my finger traced each point again, just to be certain I wasn’t imagining it. But no—one point extended directly downward where no point should have been.

Exactly like the carving on the bone knife my father had given me.

I'd always thought it was an error. A flaw, a mistake made by whoever had made it. But here it was again, staring back at me from the pages of an ancient book bound in Fae skin, hundreds of miles from home.