The grass under me is the wrong color, a deep emerald that glows faintly from inside. The sky is layered: blue overhead, and behind it a second blue, darker, carrying veins of gold that branch and fade and reappear. Mountains rise at the horizon. Three ranges stacked, each larger than the last, and the stone of them is producing its own light, an amber glow that traces the ridgelines and bleeds upward into the sky.
The air is thick with magic. Different from the kind Seraphina builds into her wards. This is environmental. Structural. As fundamental as oxygen.
Light. The kind that has weight. It doesn't burn. It presses. The magic in it is saturated. Ambient. The shadows under my skin lean toward it.
They settle.
I think about the cracked cup at the Accords signing. The pressure behind my sternum I couldn't locate. The same force is here. My shadows responding the way they responded to the cup.
Behind us, the Veil opens.
Seraphina steps through. The grass beneath her feet deepens a shade.
Then Mira.
She stops two paces in. Her body goes rigid.
The grass around her feet brightens.
Seraphina rests a palm on her daughter's shoulder. Neither of them speaks.
Celeste's hand finds mine. She squeezes once.
Then she pushes herself up. I rise with her, my hand at her back the whole way.
She sways. Small. A shift in balance that lasts half a second before she corrects it.
"This way," Seraphina says.
Seraphina starts walking, and the realm answers her.
A flagstone surfaces under her foot before her foot touches the ground. Gray-white, smooth, edges fitted to the grass like it's always been there. Another rises ahead of it. Then another. The green folds back where each stone arrives. She doesn't look down.
Mira follows at her right shoulder. Heat shimmer rises above the stones beneath her feet, the kind of warp that comes off summer pavement. The grass at the path's edge brightens where she passes. Mira keeps her eyes forward and her hands at her sides. Her fingers are spread.
Celeste steps onto the path beside me. The gray-white veins in the stone beneath her foot pulse once, slow. Then they go still. The stone holds her weight like ordinary rock.
I take the next step.
The stone beneath my foot is cold. Cooler than the grass it's surfacing through. The shadows under my skin stir. Quieter now.
The four of us walk in a loose diamond. Seraphina ahead. Mira at her shoulder. Celeste beside me. The path forms under all of us, one stone at a time, exactly as far as we need and no further. Behind us, the grass closes over the trail like water closing over a thrown rock.
Trees line the approach. Trunks of pale wood with bark that shimmers, and canopies that move without wind, slow and purposeful, following our movement. Their leaves are silver on one side and deep green on the other and they turn as we walk, showing one face and then the other.
Celeste’s hand goes to the nearest trunk. Her fingers flatten against the bark.
The tree shudders. Every leaf flips silver to green and back. A sound rises from the roots, low and resonant, and Celeste pulls back, fingers curling into a fist.
“It pushed back,” she says. Her voice is even, but she’s flexing her fingers open and closed. “I reached in to find the structure and something came through in the other direction.”
Her gaze tracks from the trunk to the entire line of trees. Every tree has turned to face her directly, canopies tilted, leaves silver-side out.
“The trees are part of the Lithenmere,” Seraphina says from ahead. She doesn’t slow down. “Everything here is connected. You just introduced yourself.”
Celeste doesn’t touch another tree. But the ones we pass afterward lean toward her rather than away.
The ridge drops into a wide valley. A river runs along the floor of it, silver, heavy, the look of mercury poured between the banks. It flows upstream.
