An abandoned boy, a grieving prince, and a reclusive sorcerer find themselves caught in a web of peril and mystery...
Domi, a young thief abandoned on the street at birth, just wants to save his dying foster mother. But first, he must survive the m...
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Home. He needed to get home. But the more Domi staggered through the streets toward the Black Flight, the farther away home seemed to be.
People kept getting in his way. Hands grabbed him. Voices shouted. Domi would have found their anxious meddling funny if it didn't delay him every few steps. The well-meaning dunces kept trying to stop him, binding him with their frantic questions and efforts to take charge.
"Is not 'cause of the blood," he slurred at one woman, twisting out of her grip as she tried to force him to slump down on a bench. "Not really."
He held his bloodied middle, wavering on his feet, and craned his neck to peer at the alley behind her. So close. The slums lay just beyond.
"Come now, you're badly hurt," the young woman said. At least, he thought the blur of steel gray and brown was a young woman. "Please, I just want to help."
He ignored her, shouldering past and staggering into the alley.
"Young Erus, please, you're bleeding! You need aid!"
Domi snorted and swiped a bloodied hand at the cold sweat trickling in rivulets down his face and blurring his eyes. The blood had nothing to do with her desire to help. Not really.
Sure, she cared. They all cared. But it was not the wound that made them care. It was not the warm, sticky lifeblood soaking his paenula that made them gasp with horror and try to help. Any Pullatus who'd ever collapsed into a gutter and been ignored by passersby understood that.
It wasn't the blood. It was the paenula.
Now the dunces cared. Now they wanted to help, all because a stupid lavender mantle made them mistake him for one of them. Someone worth caring for. Someone whose life mattered. Someone not Pullati.
He didn't need help. He needed to go home. Why didn't anyone understand that?
"Lemme... 'lone." He swatted at another set of grasping hands. Someone wrestled him to the ground in the alley. Black shadow.
He kicked their face and gasped, curling around the agony in his belly. Bad idea, moving like that. But he was so close to home. So close.
"What the hell, Domi!" He scarcely made out the voice over his own sobbing groans. Even so, he recognized its bell-bright fervor and squinted through blurry eyes. A riot of auburn curls. "What the hell happened to you? What do I do?"
He had never heard Radix curse. What the hell, indeed?
"Don't let... Vis hear that," he managed. She hated when people cursed. He whimpered and swatted the air in their general direction until his fingers snagged a fistful of tunica. "Up. Help me up. Need to go home."
"What? No, absolutely not. I need to stop this bleeding right now." Radix pawed at his belly, clasping Domi's hands to pull them away as he tried to fend off the unbearable touch. Their beautiful face started to come back into focus. Wild-eyed and gray with dread, they bit their lip hard.
Domi suspected he should be scared if they were scared, but he lacked the energy for fear. A vague sense of relief seeped into him that their face might be the last thing he saw.
"Crap, where is it coming from? There's no cut." They pressed two palms to the center of his stomach, and Domi convulsed around the pain.
"Radix, I need to go home," he said, panting as he struggled without success to escape their restraining hands. He was not sure anymore why he needed to go home. He just did.
"No, Domi, it's all right. Lie still." But his body refused to obey the other Pullati's tense command. He couldn't stop shivering, and the agony in his stomach kept his body in constant motion, legs digging at dirt, the rest of him writhing. Yet Radix still restrained him, touched him. The pressure of their blood-slicked hands on the wound made him twist and convulse with a strangled scream. "Hush now. You're not going anywhere."
"Indeed, you're not."
Within the shocked stillness following that soft, chill pronouncement, a weird scent gathered. Ozone. And a Lightbearer dropped from the sky.
The young man landed, silent and calm, before them. Tall, he loomed over them like a statue, his face and demeanor as serene and sharp as polished glass. Topaz eyes, bronze-bright and frozen like amber, regarded them without interest in a deep-olive face.
A smoldering black laurel glittered above the neckline of his long paenula, shimmering like an opal. A worldholder.
Domi knew it would not be blood loss that killed him today. This man would claim his life first.
If Radix guessed the same, they didn't show it. The waifish redhead gaped up at the worldholder. "P-Promerenti... Wh-what?"
"Move aside." The Pullatus only stared in confusion. Amber eyes narrowed. "I said move aside. Unless you want to die with him."
"D-die? W-what—"
"Do it, Radix," Domi choked out between shuddering breaths. The fear crept back, its bright acidity muddied by hopelessness. There was naught the other Pullatus could do to stop this. "Go."
"But why?" They shook their head hard and for the first time, he realized tears streaked down their dirty face. "I don't understand."
"You don't need to understand," the Lightbearer said.
Domi gave Radix a gentle push. "I grabbed one of th-them. A girl. Just g-go." He barely made out the firm set of Radix's jaw. A blurry impression of flaring nostrils. He loved their stubbornness, but now it filled him with fear. He shoved them as hard as he could, and they at last stumbled away. "Go."
It took him three tries to rise and face his death with the little bravery he had left. He was freezing, chilled to the soul with swelling terror, and yet bloodloss offered a strange kind of mercy. Everything lost its immediacy, its edge. The growing roar in his ears and sickening drain of strength muffled all other thoughts and emotions.
He propped himself up against the alley wall and gave the worldholder a helpless stare. "I'm sorr—"
The Lightbearer stretched one hand to the sky. The scent of ozone thickened, and the hair on the back of Domi's neck stood on end.
Then incandescent white light seared the surrounding air with a deafening concussion, filling his vision and awareness.
There was no pain. He did not even feel himself strike the ground.
