PROLOGUE
This is how the story went:
It was early morning in Ordellun-by-the-Sea in the Kingdom of Navenie. King Alaric II was wide awake. He had been awake for hours, unable to sleep. He paced about the city’s central keep, stopping every once in a while to gaze out at the still-foggy waters of the sea. And always following in his wake was Taryel Aharis, royal advisor, sooth-sayer of a sort. In some stories he was called a mage, a sorcerer, a wielder of power. Some called him a healer.
Whatever his title, Taryel stayed a step behind the king, clinging to the shadows.
The two men stood in one of the keep’s many chilly hallways. Cold bit at Taryel’s fingers and nose. He followed as the king descended stairways, wound through corridors, until they were outside in the gray, fish-smelling cold of early morning Ordellun-by-the-Sea.
King Alaric proceeded to the city’s central square, a short distance from the keep. It was quiet, the shouts of distant fishmongers drifting toward them from the port. And Taryel followed obediently in his king’s wake.
A thick, fishy breeze wafted in from the water. A beggar woman, stifling a cough, dropped a curtsey to her sovereign, leaning so far forward in her deference that she nearly touched the damp cobbles with her lank hair.
The king’s lip curled.
They came then to the center of the square; Taryel and the king stood now side by side, as if carrying out the steps of a dance.
King Alaric spoke then. His eyes were wide, rimmed in fire, the rising sun reflected in his gaze. “Festra wills it.”
Taryel, the wind in his dark hair, remained silent.
Here is where the story gets murky. Academics have argued for centuries over what exactly happened next. Was it a feat of powerful engineering and chemical work? A combustion, far ahead of its time? But this isn’t a story for academics — it exists outside of history, impossible to quantify, the bones of a memory, a suggestion of something that might have happened once, long ago.
According to most versions of the tale, it went something like this:
Taryel knelt on the dew-wet cobblestones, dark robes spreading around him like ink. He planted his hands, palm down, firmly on the ground. He chanted something unintelligible, and a great blackness exploded from his hunched form, as if night were gleaming outward from him, a reverse sunlight.
And then there was silence.
And then everything, everything — Taryel, King Alaric II, the beggar woman, the square, the keep, the city of Ordellun-by-the-Sea… all engulfed in complete darkness. There came a wave of impossible destruction, a rupture from the nucleus of Taryel.
And when the sun was finally able to break through that thick dark, days later — it was gone. The city of Ordellun-by-the-Sea had been demolished. Completely eradicated. Some called it the lost city, but it wasn’t really lost.
It was shattered.
Taryel Aharis is known as many things — sorcerer, traitor, villain… genocidal maniac. But more often than not, he is called simply the Destroyer.
CHAPTER1
Ahot midday sun hung in the sky. Ruellian Delara squinted, pulling her brimmed hat lower on her head. The stiffly woven brim was so wide that it impeded her vision, but it didn’t matter. She was focused on what lay at her feet.
Dig Site 33 was one of the Cornelian Tower’s smaller sites. It was certainly the smallest that Ru had worked on — a cluster of dwellings, probably once a farmstead; it was a manageable expanse of building-shaped holes in the dirt, bits of wall protruding from the ground here and there.
Ru was crouched over an item she had just unearthed from the “ancient soils,” as Professor Thorne loved to call it. One of several professors at the Tower, he looked at the Tower’s archaeological digs as a source of amusement rather than serious scientific discovery. To him, and many other academics who studied at the Cornelian Tower, true learning came in the form of books and experiments. History had its uses, but progress…thatwas the future of science.
Ru, meanwhile, had always loved getting her hands dirty. She relished the grime under her fingernails, the hot sun on her back, the way soil fell away from curved vases, bowls, and plates, all shapes in the earth. Almost as if they were waiting for her — vessels that told stories, held memories long forgotten.
To Ru, there was a magic to the discovery of ancient lives. There was power in the souls that had come before. Connections were everywhere — energy flowed through every living being, the electric buzz of a nervous system, its billions of neurons firing. The beat of a heart. The clench and stretch of muscles.
But her love of history, of the ancient denizens of Navenie, went deeper than the notes she scribbled with charcoal, the sketches she made in her notebooks.
Ru now held her latest discovery, a large squat vase, and turned it slowly in dirt-caked hands. Even after centuries in the ground, it was in shockingly good shape. She couldn’t begin to tell its original color. She would need to clean it first, gently and with purpose. But the vase was mostly whole, only a few shards were missing, a rarity among ancient artifacts.
This was Ru’s fifth vase of Dig Site 33. She strongly believed that she’d been assigned to excavate a cellar of some kind. Perhaps herbs and spices had been stored here, in these vases. Or maybe, whoever had lived here in this farmstead was also a potter.
Maybe, Ru imagined, with the fervor only a true academic could feel with such a thought, every room in the house would contain similar items. A house of vases.
She would know soon enough. After she finished excavating what she thought was the cellar, she would move on to the next room. The thought of that centuries-old dirt waiting for her, concealing stories and histories, filled her with a low hum of excitement.
