(Page 10) Chapter 1 – The Celestial Thread | The Flight

Night folded over the palace like a cloak. They rode through alleys that had been streets, past doors barred with planks, past windows that watched with candle eyes. Elira felt the city recognizing her without naming her, as a body might recognize its own blood in a stranger’s face. She did not look back; to look back is to turn pillars of salt out of those who must go on living.

At the eastern gate, a final detachment stood under Maera’s command. They had piled pitch and oil in the sally lane, had stacked stones for a fall, had tied their courage to each other’s with simple words: with you, with you, with you.

Maera took Elira’s forearm, soldier to soldier. “If you see the Ring brighten,” she said, “come home.”

“If the Ring brightens,” Elira replied, “home will find us.”

They might have laughed once, but the hour had spent its laughter. The gate rose, chains clanking like old hymns. And in its lift, Elira heard what the messenger had heard: a horn from under the world, long and patient, the sort of sound a hunter makes when he knows the path has only one end.

They went. Kieran rode tight to Elira’s flank, his mother’s blade wrapped as if it were sleeping. Myla rode with her journal open against the saddle, copying by moonlight the map Aram had inked fresh: a way through the Northridge, a cut around Astrenval’s fallen bridges, a climb by the Three Sisters to the high plateau where the Spire stood like a thought reaching up to touch its Maker.

Just before the road bent out of sight of the walls, Elira looked back once. In the distance, a great, low fire billowed—Maera’s wall remade in flame. Behind that, smoke took the stars and made them few.

The night took the rest of it.

Days later, on a ridge above the Borderlands, the Spire had first come into view—dark against a paler darkness, the last of the Sunring washing it in a faded halo. Kieran had dismounted and knelt without knowing why. Myla had lifted a hand to shade her eyes and whispered, “It looks like a keyhole.” Elira had said nothing, though in her mind a line rose up, unbidden and older than ink: Lift up your heads, O gates, and be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in.

She did not say king aloud. She had given up enough names already.