Were it not for the fact that the walls were piled in a city street, the Dawn Spire could have been mistaken for a broken mountain. The early sun, true and warm and gold after a night of rain and smoke, washed across the shattered marble. Dust rose in pale blue-gold clouds, catching the morning in drifting halos. Where once the great bell had tolled, only twisted metal hung like snapped vines from the ruin.
The city was quieter now. Not silent, but quiet the way a body is quiet after fever.
Sena knelt to check the cracked earth at the base of the fallen pillar. Her fingers brushed soot, then damp clay, then nothing of use. Her Kelthi sense of wyrms showed her only a hollow space. She sighed through her teeth. “No sign,” she said quietly, though she’d hoped Rhalir might disagree.
He didn’t.
“We keep moving,” he murmured. His voice was hoarse from shouting orders all night, and from inhaling the dust of falling stone and mortar. “People could be trapped in the lower vaults.”
People. Kelthi and Dagorlind alike. That word meant all of them now.
Behind her, three Kelthi lifted a slab of granite as if they had rehearsed it for years, moving like a single body. The oldest hummed under her breath, the same working-song the elders had used when repairing dockside houses back home. It carried strangely through the ruin, so hopeful and stubborn.
Sena swallowed around the ache in her chest. Lain would have answered that hum with harmony. She wondered if Lain knew how often she sang – to herself, humming sweetly, harmonizing with every whistle or squeaking hinge.
Rhalir must have read the shift in her posture. He paused beside her. “We will find her,” he said. His tone was cautious, careful, the way he’d spoken when he’d first pulled her from the sea, trembling and half-drowned in his arms.
“You don’t know that,” Sena whispered.
“No,” he admitted. “But we will look all the same.”
He touched her elbow, brief and steady.
They moved deeper into the broken underpass, where the sunlight dimmed to smoky gold. Bits of scale-lantern glass glittered under the rubble. Holes in the outer walls sent thin bars of morning light through the dust, making floating motes glow like drifting starbloom pollen.
Sena stopped suddenly, ears swivelling at some soft wet sound.
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She pointed. Rhalir signaled the others with two sharp snaps of his fingers, an old Kelthi gesture, one Sena had seen him using once before.
They cleared the debris. Sena’s heart hammered in her throat as she wedged her shoulder under a broken beam. Rhalir grunted as he lifted, his hooves skidding on marble dust.
A hand slid into view beneath the rubble. Sena dropped to her knees so quickly her hooves clattered. The Kelthi behind her swarmed forward, pulling aside the debris with careful efficiency. Rhalir took the main weight; Sena tugged debris away in handfuls, breath shaking with each movement, until at last a man’s face emerged from the gloom.
He was bloodied, dust-caked, half-buried, but alive. He was on his side, a weight of rubble nearly crushing his shoulder, and he shuddered as they pulled more of the stones off of him. He’d held this pose for hours. He had to. Because under him was Sister Hellen. Lain’s friend.
The girl breathed faintly, her brow stitched in pain, eyes closed, but she was alive.
“Ashborn?” The man said, and with his voice she recognized him as Elder Tanel. “Please, spare the Sisters and Brothers, do what you must with the rest of us, but they’re young, they –”
She pressed her forehead to his for only a moment, long enough to ease his gasping fear. “We’re here for you.”
Kelthi hands took hold of Hellen to pull her free. At once Tanel collapsed and more came forward to bring him out of the rubble.
Rhalir lifted Hellen with the same careful precision he used with a wounded soldier. She sagged against his chest, exhausted. Her hair was plastered to her forehead, her wreath of flowers crushed under the stone that had shielded her. When her head dropped against Rhalir’s shoulder Sena felt a strange, brief pang. It wasn’t jealousy, but something older, something that recognized tenderness where she had expected only command.
Rhalir glanced at Sena over Hellen’s bowed head.
“We keep going,” he said softly.
They laid both gently on canvas stretchers. Sena pressed her ear to Hellen’s chest, listening. Her heart trembled but held.
“Lain?” Hellen whispered.
Sena’s breath caught. She tried to keep her voice gentle, the way Rhalir had. “Not yet.”
Hellen’s eyes flooded with patient, painful hope.
“We’ll find her,” Sena said – because she needed to believe it to stay standing.
“I saw her,” Hellen said, whispering. “They flew out together. It was a miracle. They flew out into the daylight. The glass rained down and it was all so… beautiful.”
Sena glanced up to see if anyone else had heard – they flew? – but she was alone, the others moving on to other debris piles with potential pockets.
“We’ll find her,” Sena said again. “We’ll find all of them.”
She tucked one of Hellen’s crushed flowers behind the Sister’s ear, a small act of comfort, and turned back to the rubble.
The sun had reached the edge of the ruin now, laying shine across the broken stone. Dust swirled in the beams, all glowing, beams that had not seen sunlight since they were brought into this place.
She touched her bell – the bell of Lain’s father – hanging at her belt. She closed her eyes briefly.
“Guide us,” she whispered.
Then she opened them, and moved forward again beside Rhalir, into the light, into the ruin, into whatever came next, searching for Lain in what remained of Ivath.
The first chapter of Book Two launches December 5, so stay tuned!