Anathema| Kaz Brekker |

Chapter 1: The Storm

              Sanya watched as lightning sliced into a tall oak in the distance causing it to splinter. Fiery meteors of wood crashed down to the earth. The clouds were so dark that they almost made it seem as if it were night despite it being midday. It was amazing what a little shift in the regular pattern of the tides can accomplish.

              This was a particularly nasty storm that had crashed down on the western coast of Ravka. Sanya had washed onto the shore about an hour before the storm did. Near the horizon, she had barely seen the main mast of the ship sink beneath the waves before the heavy rain covered the image like fog.

              They deserved it. Taking a young girl from her home. Disgusting slavers. I hope every one of them is wiped off the face of the earth. They don't deserve life. Ha! She was one to talk.

              She was Ravkan now; they treated Grisha well, right? She shrugged; it didn't matter anyway. she didn't care to find out; no one needed to know what she was.

              She had never been normal, not even when she was born. She wasn't even Grisha. Her tutor who despised her with a passion once told her, "you are an abomination, a complete insult to the small science." Sanya didn't have the right to disagree.

              The storm cleared after an hour. And Sanya began her trek to...somewhere. She would walk until she found the place she was looking for, a place to take care of her until her father was able to find her.

              Sanya had been born to a wealthy Kerch couple in the financial district near the Church of Barter. Her mother, may the saints have mercy on her soul, couldn't have children despite how much she desired to hold a child of her own. And her father needed an heir to inherit all of his wealth and trade allies.

              Luckily, (or unluckily depending on how you see it) Sanya's mother was a Grisha, a tidemaker, and a powerful one at that; she had plenty of connections with many other powerful Grisha. It was how she came across a man by the name of Viktor, who was an excellent fabrikator; he was so talented at his craft that his fellow Grisha liked to call him the choba Sankt, or "again saint," likening him to the Bonesmith. His sister, Vanessa, was just as impressive of a healer. They would have done anything for Sanya's mother. And they did, even going so far as to go against everything they believed in at her request.

              But that wasn't important right now. What mattered was that Sanya found someplace that would shelter and feed her.

              She wandered for a good while, yet she didn't grow tired. The use of the small science was rejuvenating, especially when performing such a big feat as punching a hole in a ship with the ocean water it danced upon.

              On the horizon, she spotted something that she had only seen on the maps in her father's study. Splitting the now cerulean skyline and rolling golden hills was an inky giant standing a few leagues tall and stretching the entire expanse of the horizon. She had heard it called many things: the Fold, the Unsea, Hell itself.

              And she felt it call to her. There was a saying that has been passed around for centuries that described the feeling very well which was "like calls to like." Her entire soul was being yanked toward the eyesore marring the distance as if she were metal being pulled by a magnet.

              It took her a few hours to reach the boundary of shadows. She watched as tendrils of shadow churned and licked at the invisible barrier separating her from it. The pull had increased the closer she had traveled to the Unsea. However, the longing was solely directed at the Fold itself.