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He’d always suspected there were others out there—people that hadn’t fled from the Rim alongside his family or the other refugees. But a whole other world beyond the chasm? It was nearly unthinkable, the cracks in the world were too vast for a human to survive. The creatures they’d birthed too dangerous for a whole army to fight, let alone a few scattered survivors. But that wasn’t what this was. This wasn’t where this elf would have come from. This was something else, because it was something Lore hid from him, and that could only mean one thing.

A world. A whole different world existed beyond the Rim, and they’d basically declared war over the man he loved.

Interlude

The Barn

It’s not the first time Fenrir has seen color, but it’s the first time he’s ever seen so much.

Blue bleeds through the gray of the sky, the ground beneath his feet brown instead of gray while the trees in the far distance almost look green. He’s standing at his mum’s side while she talks to a strange man with a strange tiny horse who’s wearing the strangest clothing he’s ever seen. Behind them, the gray haze of what this man calls the Rim hangs over the horizon like a cloud. He sinks his toes into the brown shale, then corrects himself. It’s what Dad calls dirt and, apparently, it’s better at growing food than the shale, and what they’ve traveled all this way for.

“Head northeast and there’s some mining outfit lookin’ for laborers, pays decent if you’re willin’ to sign a contract,” the man with the strange horse says. Fenrir meets the tiny creature’s eyes and immediately looks away. Why are its pupils square? “Some farms too. Still givin’ away plots of land in exchange for work, last I heard. Been a few months though, but worth yer luck if mine work ain’t to your taste. Y’all from the Rim?”

Mum doesn’t answer. One hand draped over her belly, the other is deep in the pocket of her coat where Fenrir knows she keeps a tiny sword.

“From down south, actually. That goat for trade?” Dad says, Alina crying on his hip. She started last night and had yet to stop, fussing through her sleep with loud, lip-smacking suckles. “Could use the milk.”

They leave another pile of treasure with the man in exchange for a bag of milk, dad grumbling about something getting ripped off though as far as Fenrir can tell their tarp remains intact. Mum keeps her eyes on Alina while she dips a cloth into the bag and then feeds it into her mouth, Milo taking his time, stopping every little while to munch on the brown-green tufts of hair sticking out of the dirt before Dad urges him on again.

The day they arrive at their homestead the sky is thick and gray and beginning to cry.

“It’s rain,” Dad explains when a big droplet lands on Fenrir’s nose. He remembers rain from home—what the people here call the Rim—but it never looked like this. The Rim’s rain was a misty fog that they’d collect in big mesh nets and strain into a trough. This rain falls from the sky, landing in big messy plops atop the dry, brown dirt so it almost looks black.

Fenrir takes Alina and enters the stone building that Mum calls a barn to escape the rain. While Mum and Dad string up their tarp in a way that the rain gets collected in some old barrels, Fenrir explores.

Amongst the musty wooden rafters and the big stacks of old hay, shadows collect, nooks and crannies calling to him like whispers in the dark.

“No climbing,” Mum calls through a gap where a windowpane hangs at a sharp angle when he discovers a ladder disappearing into a loft area that overlooks the ground floor.

The barn is big. As big as a village. It’s got big, gray rocks for walls and heavy wooden bones and a roof that rattles with a metallic clatter. There’s even a door at the far end that hides stone steps leading down into a cold damp subterranean lair, and Fenrir spends a long time staring into its depths while his imagination runs wild, thinking about what kind of sorcerer might make a cave like this his home and what kind of magic he’d cast deep under the world’s crust.

By the time Mum and Dad come inside, they’re soaked with rain, carrying crates with what treasure they have left and stacking them under the loft area where the barn is driest. Fenrir takes Alina and lays at the center of the floor to stare up through a hole in the roof at the churning clouds.

“It’s good,” Dad says to Mum softly, almost inaudible over the storm of rain on the roof.

“It’s expensive,” Mum replies and Fenrir’s never heard that word before. “What if we can’t pay?”

“I’ve seen you get a rock to grow a flower. We’ll be okay.”

That seems to calm Mum. Her and Dad talk about more things he doesn’t understand. Money and loans and interest and something called chickens and Fenrir falls asleep like that, lost to the sound of their voices and the falling rain, Alina a warmth he cradles close.

Chapter XI

Prometheus

“Serval, take Anders and Pip and scout ahead. We don’t want any surprises.”

Here, where earth once cracked open, wind swept across the open plain of the Rim with the quality of a long-held breath. It was different from what he remembered, puckered scars replacing the crevices he had closed. A whole mountainous chain of them reshaped the horizon for as far as he could see—a distance Atticus and his men were determined to traverse.

“I want a rotation of riders covering our tracks. We won’t be able to move fast with the wagons.”

Orpheus kept the horizon in his peripheral when Duluth shoved him towards four wagons tucked into the shadow of a large boulder. Bolts the size of Orpheus’ fists secured iron panels to their cage-like housings, the wheels locked into steel axles shiny with grease. But one wagon was different. Three metal straps as thick as Duluth’s arm held down an enormous cylinder to the wagon’s frame, three white cloaks struggling to crank its brake out of the dusty shale.

He’d never seen tech like it before, the glass slits along its side revealing nothing but shadows within. But it was a tool of some sort, and it was coming with them.

Coming with him.

A pressure hit his shoulder and Orpheus stumbled into the closest wagon. He reached up to climb inside before Duluth could shove him again, but it didn’t matter. Halfway in, he spotted the wagon’s locks. Tarnished silver ringed each with a curious inscription, familiar if not the same as those he would have cast on devices such as them. He narrowed his eyes to get a closer look, and the delay was all the excuse Duluth needed. He shoved Orpheus hard and Orpheus didn’t think when he brought his hands up. The encasement broke his fall on the iron floor with a gonging clatter.