“He did it,” she said in a rush. “He harnessed the Advetis Bone! He took us to the others!”
“Explain,” I signed with one hand, bouncing Owyn as his fussing worsened.
“I feltLyvia. I don’t know how to explain it, other than it was the strongest pull,” he began when Evony cut in.
“We were bringing the agrippa mares to the castle stables, and Drystan just grabbed his chest,” she began, her blue eyes wide as she waved her hands in the air. “I touched his shoulder, and wevanished!”
“Something is wrong,” Drystan continued. “I took us to a cave. It had to have been Kayj. Everyone was there. Seconds after we arrived, something happened. A blast or?—”
“It was like a storm,” Evony blurted, shaking her head wildly. “The cave got windy, and it smelled different, and then there was this woman screaming. It was the worst sound I’ve ever heard… It was like she was in my head?—”
“She screamed into our minds, becauseI could hear her,” Drystan finished, his chest rising and falling rapidly as he looked out the window. “I don’t know how, but I somehow got us back here after that. I’m worried about the others.”
Drystan rubbed at his chest as his eyes focused on the glowing spire out the window.
“Is that—” Evony began.
“Drystan,” I cut in, noticing the glowing tip of skin peeking through his tunic beneath his robes. “Your chest.”
Drystan’s head bobbed as he looked down and split his tunic. There, on his chest, sat an eight-pointed Bellator star. His copper fingers drifted over the fresh marking.
“The bone is gone,” he finally signed.
“And when we returned,” Evony murmured, stepping toward the window, “this happened.”
“What is it?” the nursemaid asked, her voice shrill.
The four of us moved to the ornate window and gazed at the exterior of the castle we stood in. Everyone knew Mount Telum was hewn from precious white stone. King Saros IV began the construction of the castle at the start of the Second Epoch.
What the world didn’t know, and what the Rising and the crew of theEvectaknew, was that it had been the original Saros, all along, who’d struck the deal with Dark King Daimos over a thousand years ago to get access to this precious stone. We’d never really deduced why or bothered to care.
“It’s a rubelline,” Drystan answered. He held his hands out in front of him. His crystal blue eyes were wide in shock as he scanned his palms, attempting to access his magic and failing to do so.
The bright red glow filtered into the room, as if the walls of Mount Telum continued to grow in their strength. My eyes fell once more to the turret across the sky, to the smooth stone bricks stacked one on top of the other, the Larimer stone used to createrubellines.
I followed Drystan’s gaze as he traced them over the walls of the castle, of the massive rubelline activated in the center of Aedrialis, Sultira’s capital. A rubelline this large…
“How far do you think its power reaches?” Evony asked as she stepped forward, her eyes scanning the city below and the Juniper Sea in the distance.
What was the purpose of this? Why create a rubelline this large, construct a godsdamned castle with it? Saros had expended so much of his energy on his shields… A way to protect his kingdom. Was that what this was?
And now, in Aedrialis and perhaps farther, Mount Telum stood like a massive nullifier. King Saros had essentially wiped all magic from the Kingdom of Sultira at the start of his reign, the lost art scrubbed from our history. He’d secretly constructed his castle using a material that would nullify it, but why?
A war was coming. Weapons, Lord Astraeus had claimed. The cannon balls, the arrowheads, even the cuffs… Weapons that would be vital in a war where the magically gifted outnumbered the powerless, and Sultira was a kingdom without magic, once again.
