After he left, Karigan stared at the door for a long time trying to digest it all. It was forbidden, at least dangerous, to speak of the past—her own present. What had been Sacoridia was now part of an empire, and she could only conclude that Mornhavon the Black had defeated her people. She needed to learn details about how this occurred so she could take word of it home and tell the king. Maybe some advantage could be gained in advance warning.

And just how would she get home? The looking mask had brought her forward, but she hadn’t even the shards that had stuck in her flesh.

Her thoughts returned to the professor. If knowledge of the past was forbidden, or at least certain parts of it, then how had he acquired it, even as an archeologist? And how was it that archeology was permitted under such conditions in the first place? She did not understand the contradiction. In any case, she guessed that one reason for holding her here was to prevent her revealing his knowledge of this secret history to others, thus endangering him. And then there was the issue of her name. He had not wanted her to use it—her name was known in the forbidden history.

Why would the empire repress the true history, and what stories did it promote instead? No doubt those that glorified Mornhavon and made the queens and kings of Sacoridia’s past appear terrible tyrants. Anything to ensure the populace saw their circumstances as better than what had come before.

She shook her head. Too many questions and too few answers. It was all giving her a headache.

Then she barked a laugh. “Goodgrave!” Of all the possible names. How very appropriate.

RUINS

Lhean Lifeson, child of leaf and wind, born beneath the verdant eaves of the Vane-ealdar, the forest of Eletia, now found himself curled in a crevice of tumbled rock and earth. A shaft of daylight plunged through the narrow opening overhead. It occurred to him that this must be what the graves of the mortal dead were like—deep, desolate, though infinitely darker than this.

How did the mortal humans stand it, knowing their lives were so short, spanning but a mere breath of an Eletian’s eternal life? That this was where it would end for them, deep in the earth, fodder for worms? And how they struggled to fill that brief life with all the passions humankind could muster. They struggled, struggled as the salmon swimming upstream, only to end, to end forever in nothingness. He did not understand why they did not just collapse in despair, but perhaps he could better appreciate why they clung to myths of their gods and an afterlife—these beliefs of theirs, false or not, gave them hope, allowed them to continue on.

Lhean shook his head. One day, perhaps, he would discuss the peculiarities of mortals with Ealdaen or maybe Telagioth. He never used to care, but now that he had traveled among and with humans, he’d become curious and taken an interest. But that was for another time; at the moment, it appeared he had a problem.

The rupture force of the shattering of the looking mask had thrust him—and likely his other companions—out of Blackveil. One moment he’d been standing in the dying remains of Castle Argenthyne, and the next he’d found himself in this crevice somewhere else. He uncurled himself to climb up, mindful of loose rock that tumbled clattering down if he misplaced his weight. When he reached the rim, he peered cautiously over it, observing only more rocky rubble awash in thin sunlight and stunted scrub trees growing from between black-flecked, gray granite blocks. The air smelled poorly and unclean, of acrid smoke that burned the back of his throat.

He pulled himself the rest of the way out, noting that this upheaved terrain was not just a rending of the land, but the obliteration of some great human work, for the edges of the rubble had not been formed by nature, but by tools. There was also evidence of some great conflagration, for soot adhered to the bottoms and fissures of rock not exposed to weathering.

He turned and found a face of stone staring back at him, its sculpted planes cracked and stained, its beard crumbled away, the remnants of a crown about its temple. The rest was lost beneath the rubble. Despite the ruins and the ill air of the place, it confirmed he was no longer in Blackveil. He knew this place, and he did not. The etherea was nearly gone, sick, dying. A being infused with etherea, as all Eletians were, he could sense inside himself its waning light. It was not just that it was tainted, but that it was almost gone from the land, from existence.

And so it was with his home. No matter where an Eletian may be he could always sense Eletia, the water running through the Alluvium, life throbbing through root and leaf, the spirit of his people. Even in the depths of Blackveil he had felt Eletia as a strong presence within.

He placed a trembling hand on his breast plate, over his heart, seeking but failing to feel a stronger awareness of his people. So alone, so bereft, the despair almost broke him to weeping.

Instead he turned his attention to the devastation around him, the jutting angles of hand-cut stone, rotting, sooty timbers. The ruin was upon a high hill, and more stretched all the way to its base where a city, a human city, stood. It was all symmetrically laid out, long rectangular buildings set in precise rows, their huge chimneys spewing filth into the sky. False streams glinted among them, too perfect to be made by nature. Humans called them canals.

He made out streets straight as swords, and more buildings of varying size and shape but still precisely placed. There was little green among the structures and nothing of nature in the design, no curves, no turnings, which made it all so foreign to Lhean’s Eletian eyes, so difficult to reconcile in his mind. It was an injury to the land, and the injury extended even beyond his long sight, for the city had beat back the forest that once stood there and much of the farmland, as well.