The platform the guild hall is set upon ends at a garden, as many of the platforms in the upper third of Grim do. I find Dovik there after the sun has already set, leaning against a silver bannister as he stares out into the ink of night that stretches away from us. Below, lights twinkle like fireflies in distinct rectangular formations of the descending shelves of city that jut out from the great wall. There is something enchanting to it, but the quiet is cold tonight, almost frozen.

  The four-foot pond that abuts the cliff of the platform is set in a hemisphere. Blue light from the water shines up to glow on my friend's face. The light inside the water is a thing all its own, given off by shifting balls of magic that float beneath the surface, balls of power that float in a mimicry of life. A black cat sits still on the railing Dovik leans against, its eyes closed as the man runs a finger behind its head. There is no sound other than the purring of the cat and the shifting drip of the shallow pond.

  I fall against the railing next to him, letting my shoulder bump his as I release a sigh and look down into the water. The cat pulls away when I reach to pet it, opting to jump down and pad off into the dark rather than let me touch it.

  “My mother said she is stable enough to move,” Dovik says, staring down into the glowing water. The way the dancing lights color his face makes him almost appear as a statue, a marble man made of melancholy. “That is what she was able to do. If my mother can’t fix it, then it can’t be fixed.”

  “She did more than my brother could,” I say. When he refuses to look at me, I search the water as well, looking for whatever he is watching down there. “She is hurting right now. Give her time.”

  “Of course she is,” Dovik says. He breathes a sigh, letting his hair fall over his eyes. “Of course she is.”

  “I can’t even imagine it,” I say. “I might not have had these abilities long, but losing them, and losing them like that…”

  He scoffs. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Charlene. You bounce back from everything.”

  “I don’t think that is true. I’m just good at healing, and I don’t know if everything heals back the way it is supposed to.” There were footsteps accompanying me on my walk here, slight sounds drifting in my wake. The night is cold, but it never really reaches me anymore. I’ve stopped thinking that is a good thing.

  “I could do with some of that now,” Dovik says. “I’m starting to think that I did everything wrong. You can see it right? That eye of yours lets you see my conflux.”

  Instead of answering, I keep my silence. He is on the edge of something.

  “I envy you a lot, Charlene. It’s bad to be jealous of friends. No one ever tells you that, but it has to be true, doesn’t it? It’s such a pathetic thing, to be jealous of someone for not having something you had.” He snorts and shakes his head, looking down at the pool.

  “I have a folksy idiom for that if you’d like it,” I say.

  That finally gets a reluctant grin from him. “Me and Jor would talk about it sometimes, growing up so close to all of them. It made me really understand how in the middle I was. You got to be away from all of them. Your family…I knew after meeting them just the one time. They didn’t have the feel to them, that control that comes from being in the presence of your betters day in and day out. They were real people. It’s such a spoiled thing to feel, isn’t it? Tell me I’m being an asshole.”

  “You’ve never introduced me to your family,” I tell him. “Who am I to judge?”

  “You met Jor’s family, some of them at least. Imagine that my family was like their butlers and you will get the picture. Only, even the servants of noblemen and ladies probably have enough emotion to extend a kind word to their children.” He shakes his head, running his hand over his face. “I’m probably exaggerating. What was that folksy idiom to help?”

  “The pears are always sweeter the next farm over,” I tell him, earning another laugh.

  Dovik stares down at the water for a long while. Slowly, his face falls, growing still and distant. “When I was six, I saw my first murder. My father believed in teaching his children about the world as soon as they could understand. He filled my head with stories, histories, and lessons on right and wrong. In a boy’s eyes, his father is everything. One day, he called us to attend to him at a meeting. My older sister was thirteen at the time, and I was six.

  “The Willian Guild is a professional guild of magicians. The power of its institution maintains this city. It is an army that can be called upon, but it isn’t a very large one. My father is a rank five magician; his power is so great that only kings and emperors can out-muscle him, and he is centuries old. I thought he could beat the gods. I had pride in that, being the son of such a great man.

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  “The meeting was a routine thing. I can’t even remember why it was being held anymore. There were a few representatives from lands South of here, across the sea. I remember their faces more clearly than anything now, the poised self-assuredness of their schooled faces. When they spoke, they only spoke in the high elven tongue. Even at six, I could hear the insults couched in their words. The noble elves will do that; word games are some of their favorite pastimes. Then, a cup of coffee was spilt onto the robes of a baron’s son. It wasn’t even the girl’s fault. Two of the barons had started to argue, and she was knocked aside while trying to serve them their drinks.

  “The man’s son was still a child. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. He took one look down at the stain soaking into his sleeve, and in the next instant, he flicked his finger. I couldn’t see his presence snap out like a whip, just his fingers flexing like he was getting rid of a fly. Sometimes I dream about that moment, about her teeth flying out of her mouth as he head snapped to the side or of the way her cheek split open. The snap of her neck is so loud, louder than anything I have ever heard, and that is when I know it is a dream, but I can’t wake up from it. She lies there, her head turned the wrong way on the floor, staring right at me with a nervous smile still in her eyes, a heartfelt apology ready to bubble up from her twisted throat. She was younger than we are now, but she will always be looking down on a little boy frozen by his father’s side.”

  “That’s horrible,” I say. There really is nothing else to say.

  “It is, but it is commonplace.” When he turned to look at me, his smile is a dark and sad thing. “The real horrible thing is knowing that my father could have stopped it. He could have made it across the room before that brat even figured out he was offended and ripped his arm out of its socket. But he didn’t. That was the moment heroes died for me, Charlene. They died the moment one of the barons barked at my family’s staff to take out the body, when a six-year-old boy watched a long line of red be scraped against the marble floor of the meeting room. My father held his tongue through it all because we don’t have the right kind of power.

  “This.” Dovik opens his hand, and his sword appears from his storage ring in his palm. The end falls flat against the ledge of the platform, the tip ringing against the stone. He stares down at the edge, and for a moment I think he might let it go, might allow a priceless weapon to slip away and sail out into the night. “This isn’t the right kind of power. It doesn’t protect things, Charlene. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to realize it. My father can destroy a nation, maybe; a barony at the least. But the instant he takes the life of even a single one of them, they will remember this city still sits here. If a god and the first emperor couldn’t stop them, then we have no chance of doing it now. We can only ever hope to destroy, and I can’t even do that.

  “I thought about that moment for years. Even now, I don’t think that I learned all the lessons from it that I can. My family has wealth. I had every essentia in the world to choose from, and I picked the ones that a scared child might. They will never touch me like that. Their magic bounces off my skin like water, but it’s worthless, isn’t it? I can’t save anyone, can’t really help anyone. I could have chosen something to allow me to heal others, to help the sick and dying. I could have chosen something to destroy the monsters that come for my friends and family. I could have chosen something with real power. But no, a scared little boy only wanted to make sure that it was never his neck being snapped like a twig.” Dovik hisses and lets go of his sword. It falls back and splashes into the water in front of us. “Immortal. What a fucking joke.”

  “I can’t do those things either, Dovik.” Together, we watch as the lights collect around the blade in the water. They seem almost attracted to it, moving around it in a dance. “But you’re wrong. Your father protects this city because he can destroy. Those people out there know it, they know that even if they came here with an army the the Willian Guildmaster could be on their doorstep and destroying their cities in a few hours. I saw it in the faces of people back home when they learned how strong my brother had become. The constable who had always been so horrible to my father stopped coming around, the lord gave us priority in our dealings with him, and he even invited my parents to dine at his manor three times. That is what let everyone know that the rumors were real, and they all treated us differently after that.

  “The lord didn’t grow a new conscience. He didn’t rethink what he had thought about humans, but he respected the power of a man who could topple cities. Destruction is protection, Dovik.”

  He hangs his head, staring down at the water. “Then, I’m still too weak to even do that much.”

  “Yes,” I agree. The chill at my back grows stronger as I stare down into the water next to him. A shifting reflection joins the two of us on the surface of the water, and I can almost feel the presence next to me. Just to my right, the burnt remains of a corpse stare down at the water alongside me, standing brazenly in the open because it knows only I can see it. Blood still trickles from cracked skin, and I know that if I turn around, I will see bloody footprints staining the ground. How long has it been since I slept?

  “That isn’t very reassuring,” Dovik says.

  “I’ve seen the death of a world,” I whisper. My friend turns and looks at me, concern in his eyes, but I have to get the words out. “There are worse things out there than noblemen, much worse. For all their authority, all of their long-standing power and tradition and godly oversight, the empire couldn’t stop a duke from being murdered in his palace and one of their capital cities from being ruined. Even now, those idiots in Mari are thinking about how to turn their infestation into a hunting ground so that another disaster can happen again one day, the same way your family has done with the forest north of here. They think they can control them, but I have seen with my eyes what happens when the monsters slip the leash.

  “It can’t be allowed to happen. They need to wake up to the war they are in before it is too late. Power, strength is the only way to do it. We have to take all the power for ourselves that we can so that we can force them to see. Every single one of the monsters in this world has to go. It might take the power to destroy the world itself to make them see, the power to destroy the gods to move them, but I will see it done.” A charred hand slips over my own as I continue staring down at the water. It doesn’t feel like anything. “Because I have to. It can’t have been for nothing. It can’t.”

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