PROLOGUE
This is the world:
A continent called Salvation, three kingdoms, and a war so old that no one has any idea what it’s about. They fight, they retreat, they scheme, and—most important—they forget what should never be forgotten.
Rather, they try. It’s impossible to truly forget the Malice, because in the center of Salvation—at the meeting point of all three kingdoms—is a magical barrier that hums and shimmers. It’s called the Malstop, and it’s the only thing standing between the three kingdoms and the darkness seeping from the Rupture.
In four hundred years, nothing has breached the Malstop. Even the scars from the last Incursion have grown commonplace to the people of all three kingdoms. They just deal with the reality they’ve been given. Avoid malsites, like season traps or gravitational voids. Make sure to bring extra provisions if traveling through the ever-burning forests. Wear obsidian, if possible.
It’s understandable, this wanting to forget. People must adapt, or they’d live in constant terror of the next Incursion. Nothing would get done: no farming or blacksmithing or baking, no ruling or taxing or building, no mining or milling or making babies. Life must move on, and by now, the people of Salvation are experts at that.
Still, adapting is one thing. Forgetting is another.
Since they’re all so busy fighting, forgetting the things they should have made a special point to remember, they’ve neglected to prepare for the inevitable:
Another Incursion.
It always happens eventually, and with four hundred years since the last one, some might say it’s overdue.
This is the world—the continent, the kingdoms, the war—but soon none of it will matter, because the Malstop is weakening, and everything trapped inside will come spilling out, and the only one who could defend this mess of surviving and forgetting and fighting—
Well, she is still sleeping.
* * *
The island of Winterfast lies just northeast of Salvation. No one goes there. It’s all iced-over rock where nothing grows, and the only building is a wind-pitted tower that could collapse any day.
Ages ago, the tower was a work of art, a monument built to honor the people’s champion. The exterior walls were solid limestone, with bands of marble and granite and sandstone ringing the structure at regular intervals. A plating of pure gold covered the southern face of the tower, stretching into the shape of wings splayed wide. When sunlight caught the tower, the wings shone.
But after four centuries of neglect, faint movements in the island have shifted the stonework, first casting off the gold, then loosening the bands so that they slipped and cracked. Chunks litter the ground beside the tower’s base, but no one comes to steal the precious material. Even if it wasn’t covered in snow most of the year, they don’t dare tread too close to the sleeper inside the tower.
Nightrender.
She is a legend, a being of both light and dark, built for the single purpose of defending Salvation against the rancor.
That’s what lies behind the Malstop. Rancor. Demonic creatures that warp everything they touch. Nightmares incarnate, which have nearly brought Salvation to its knees too many times to number.
Only Nightrender can defeat them, and for countless centuries, the people of the three kingdoms worshipped her as a sort of demigod. They built her tower, made offerings, and ensured she wanted for nothing. (Not that she ever desired wealth or land or possessions, but she could have had everything.) In paintings—those that weren’t destroyed after the Red Dawn—she is tall and fierce, with great feathered wings and a sword made of pure night, terrible and wonderful to behold.
No one paints her anymore.
Here, in this tower, she looks like a girl sleeping under a canopy of cobwebs, perfectly still, barely breathing, and ice to the touch. (But no one in their right mind would risk touching her, sleeping or otherwise.) With the storm raging outside and piling snow as high as her window, Nightrender dreams.
Behind her closed eyelids, she sees the Malstop. From a distance, it’s an enormous dome, tall enough to get lost in the clouds, but up close, it is a straight and impassable wall that stops the Malice from expanding. Hence the name.
The truth is that the Malstop is neither a dome nor a wall; it’s a sphere, extending down through the layers of the earth until it plunges into magma. This does the Malstop no harm; if anything, the fire strengthens its magic.
It’s all crackling energy, piercing mountains and valleys, rivers and canyons. There are even remnants of a town sliced in half, and a cemetery where—during one Incursion—the dead got up and left. No one’s buried there now.
In her dream, Nightrender slips through the Malstop.
She enters a nightmare reality that doesn’t observe the same sort of rules as everywhere else. Oh, the topography is expected—hills where hills should be, streams where streams should be—but after millennia of corruption, there have been some…changes.
They are not easy to look at.
But Nightrender has seen it before, and she doesn’t allow it to bother her. After all, she’s been inside the Malice more times than anyone—physically, not just in dreams—and this time is no more difficult than the last.
Except.
Except now there’s something different, something that makes her startle straight out of the dream and push against the boundaries of consciousness. She struggles to wake and fulfill her duty, but she has not been summoned, and until the people desire her help, she’s trapped here, sleeping.
Small, short gasps escape her lips, the only signs of life she’s shown in the last four hundred years. Then, she exhales, long and steady, a puff of breath billowing in the cold air above her, and she is asleep again.
They have not summoned her.
But they should. The people living near the Malstop should pay attention to its shivers and its thin spots, and to their own ominous dreams. The rulers should look up from their squabbles long enough to notice it’s time to stockpile food and water and bring their citizens into the dubious safety of walled cities. And someone—anyone—should wake her.
Because deep inside the Malice, beyond the mutilated mountains and sludgy rivers and strange slips of time, the rancor have raised what some might call a castle, built from millions upon millions of human bones.
As with most castles, this one has a throne room. Two thrones sit in the center of an octagonal space, though only one is occupied. The other is empty. Waiting.
This is the source of Nightrender’s anxiety, her desperation to wake. Rancor do not construct castles, nor do they build thrones. Which means that something has changed in them.
The figure on the throne.
That is the threat.