The morning I left the House of the Orphaned Flame, the sky wept embers.
It wasn't rain, not really—it was flake-light, firedust that drifted from the upper isles when the winds changed. The Ash-Mothers called it a bad omen. I thought it beautiful.
Warden Voss did not speak as he led me to the edge of the Isle. He only handed me a pack of duskbread, a flask of dream-milk, and a small bone token etched with the shape of an silver eye surrounded by circle of fangs. I didn't ask what it meant. He wouldn't have told me anyway.
Riftkeep was gleams away, suspended at the rim of the Middle Reaches, where the sky bent and the Hollow whispered most clearly. The vessel waiting for me was not a ship, but a skybeast—a pale, antlered windwyrm with wings stitched from veined glass. Its handler bowed to Voss, never once looking at me.
"You are to observe, not belong," the Warden said at last.
I nodded.
The wyrm lifted off with a cry like breaking glass.
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The flight was slow. The air grew colder with each passing span, and the sky changed—from bruised violet to oil-black, then to a colorless silver that made my skin itch. The isles below grew larger, more structured. Temples. Fortresses. Floating farmlands where dusk cows grazed and crystal-trees shimmered with fruit that pulsed like stars.
The Upper Realm was not one world, but many stacked upon one another like drifting thrones. Each tethered by magic, each ruled by different laws, some ancient and cracked.
We passed the Tower of Aesthyr, where the Dream Seers live, and the Beacon Islands, where firebirds nest. I felt a twinge in my chest every time we flew near a place that shimmered strangely.
The thing inside me pulsed like a second heart.
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Riftkeep appeared like a wound in the sky.
A jagged fortress built into the cliff-face of a torn isle, half in light, half in storm. Its gates were carved from shadowbone, and its watchtowers glowed with sunfire glyphs. As we landed, I felt the wind shift, heard voices not spoken but thought.
She has come.
Too soon.
No. Just in time.
I stepped off the wyrm. My boots hit stone etched with runes that pulsed softly under my feet.
This place knew me.
And somewhere within it, waiting in silence, the truth about what I was began to stir.
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