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“Come with me,” Nuada said, though his voice seemed to falter on his last word.
He led her through a quieter section of the lower tiers, away from the usual routes. The air felt heavier here, the silence more deliberate. The corridor ended in a circular chamber she had never seen before.
“Where are we?” she asked. No one answered, which frightened her more than anything else.
She resisted the urge to look back. He wasn’t there. He was staying away, just as he had promised.
“Please enter, Maia.” Nuada gestured her inside. Then he stepped closer and spoke, out of the others’ earshot. “Do be careful in there, scribe.”
Before she could interrogate him, she was gently pushed inside by one of the other Umbralyn.
Inside the chamber, the pressure instantly shifted. Not just around her, but on her too. The space seemed to close in, as though something unseen had turned its attention toward her.
The door sealed behind her as she turned slowly.
The air was wrong. Too still, too cold. Too familiar.
“No—” she breathed, stumbling back a step, recognising the feeling.
Movement stirred beyond the narrow panes of the glass set high in the chamber walls. Not one shape. Several. Six, maybe more, pale faces settling into watch.
29
The Assessment
“Nuada!” she screamed. “Please!”
A voice came through the walls; not one she recognised.
“You will demonstrate,” the voice said evenly. “What you did in the Archive. When the wraith came for you and the shards answered.”
Maia’s stomach dropped. “What?”
“We want to see if it was chance,” he said. “Or if it was you.”
The air tightened, vibrating along the stone walls. A low hum shook the floor, subtle at first, then sharpening into the jagged pulse of the Fracture.
The lanterns on the far wall guttered in a line, one after another, as though something had walked past them too quickly to see.
Maia’s breath locked. The memory surged: Julen’s blood, Caelith’s ribs split to the bone, the sound the wraith had made as it scraped across stone. But nothing stood where the lanterns had failed. Just darkness and a faint, dry ticking sound, like beads of glass clicking together.
She turned in a slow circle, pulse hammering.
Nothing.
Then, at the very edge of her vision - gone the instant she tried to look at it directly - a shape.
Tall. Thin. A skull with no skin on it, its bones a milky translucent glass, hollow sockets where eyes should have been, its whole frame held together by nothing she could see. A man’s skeleton in frosted crystal.
A glass reaper.
It stood at the far end of the chamber, motionless, its crystalline feet and nails grooving into the floor. The hiss it produced was low, almost contemplative, vibrating through the stone beneath her feet.
Suddenly, it was gone.
Heart pounding almost out of her chest, she turned around, spinning towards the ticking sound but still found empty air. It had moved again.
Her eyes found the shards embedded in the floor and walls around the chamber. They were made to be easily reached - it was part of the design.
