The forest was lush and alive. Squat oaks and towering pines gathered in glens. Flowers of kinds he had never seen bloomed almost aggressively from the tangles of roots, the fallen bodies of trees, and the soil beneath his feet. The smells hanging in the air were lustrous, rich, like the perfumes that had filled the halls and terraces of his family’s manse.

  Yes, Telos had once belonged to a noble family. Technically, he still did. But he had walked away from that life and would never return. His family were dead to him and he knew he was dead to them.

  He could pinpoint the exact moment his awakening had occurred.

  It had been on a visit to the theatre with his mother, father, and sister. He had been seventeen years old. The Golden Lion was the most prestigious playhouse in Gorgosa, possibly in all of Yarruk. The greatest playwrights had all produced plays there, and the greatest actors had trodden its boards. The great epics of the past were performed alongside the hottest new plays. He remembered they had been going to see The Seduction of Lileth, a play which depicted a drama of the Divine Age, when the God of War, Talon, had seduced the then wife of Beltanus, Lileth, Goddess of Love and Sex. He recalled the play had been surprisingly dry considering its subject matter, with only a smattering of bawdy innuendos to alleviate the boredom of weighty monologues. It was hardly a seduction, more a moral treatise by an overly puritanical author. Still, he always enjoyed trips to the theatre: the energy in the room, the sight of all the beautiful ladies dressed like goddesses themselves, and the moments of total wonder and immersion, where the falseness of the play slid away, and one lived another life in another world.

  As the colourful peacocks of the nobility mingled in the afterparty, Telos had wandered off in search of wine and possibly a girl. Though seventeen, he had led a relatively sheltered life until that point, and so he was after little more than flirtation and maybe a kiss if he played his cards right.

  As he wandered—lost in the mazes of hallways behind The Golden Lion’s facade—he’d heard a sound, an animal sound. It was a woman, moaning in pleasure. He’d laughed, at first. Then his cheeks flushed red. His heart started to beat faster with excitement.

  He followed the sound.

  The moaning, which was also accompanied by the sounds of two bodies colliding, was coming from a cupboard. A tawdry place for a romance, he’d thought. The only eroticism he knew of was found in outlandishly romantic books, where the hero and heroine inevitably made love on some rocky precipice or the battlements of a castle or in the boudoir of a foreign king.

  He stood beyond the door, listening. He knew he should leave, but the curiosity of the young is a force of nature, and Telos was more curious than most. His curiosity had already gotten him into trouble, such as when he had stolen several rare books from his father’s library and—perching on a tree above a river to read them—had dropped them into the water. By the time he’d fished them out, they were beyond recovery.

  But a lesson often needs to be learned many times before it is cemented. Telos had gone right up to the cupboard door and peeked through the keyhole.

  What he saw in there changed him forever.

  It was that moment, much later than most, Telos shed the innocence of childhood. He became aware, then, of sin. It was an instant thing, a crossing of a threshold that could not be re-crossed. He saw before him the naked glory and ugliness of mortal desires.

  He also saw his mother with a man who was not his father. In fact, the man was probably half her age, closer to Telos.

  He drew silently away from the cupboard. He never spoke it. But from that day forward, he was not the same. He could not look at his mother, nor his father. He saw through them, somehow. They had become translucent and unreal, like the actors upon the stage, performing a strange drama of family life that was falser even than the plays. He became hungry, in that moment, for another life. A life that was real and not merely a performance. By nineteen, Telos had left the bosom of the family, never to return.

  Ravens cawed in the canopies above. There were so many of them, hundreds even, making a racket as dire and shrill as canonfire. He had never seen so many. But then, he had never ventured this deep into any wood. He preferred the cities of the south coast to the rural parts of the world.

  Telos always liked ravens. They were natural thieves. Theologians associated them with Nereth, the Goddess of War and Wisdom, Strategy and Cunning. If Telos were ever to take an oath and blessing, to dedicate himself to one god alone, it would be to Nereth. But he would be the first to admit religion was far from his mind pretty much all the time.

  Except, he could not quite banish the image of Danyil from his mind. The man, burning in the fire, had been realer than real. Yet how was that possible? The Sumyrians were known as magicians, half-divine. But the nature of their magic was mysterious. Could they real traverse flame without burning? And what of him appearing and then vanishing. Could he teleport across great distances with merely a thought? That seemed a godlike power.

  If he has such power, why then does he need me to fetch him a weapon?

  The question was as mysterious as Danyil’s nature. Presumably, the Sumyrians did not know the location, and so for all their powers, they were unable to find it. If Telos had possessed any intention of locating the Weapon, he would have wondered how he was supposed to succeed where they could not. Danyil said he possessed skills as a thief—apparently he was being watched somehow—yet that did not necessarily make him a great detective.

  But there was a deeper question bothering Telos: Why do they need a weapon in the first place?

  If the Sumyrians possessed such magical powers, what use did they possibly have for a weapon? Was it purely for a religious and symbolic function that this artefact of legend needed to be returned, or did they intend to declare war on another nation? That was a terrifying thought. All the better you do not facilitate them.

  Despite this train of logic, Ylia’s words chased him, An emissary of the Gods directly tasked you with it. He did not believe in divine punishment, yet he could not quite shake the feeling that his actions were accruing negative energy of some kind.

  He was drawn from his thoughts by a sound. So beautiful was the sound that he froze in place—the squawking ravens were silenced instantly.

  The sound seemed to travel through him, to caress his inner ear, to stir that misty awareness within he might even define as a soul. His hairs rose. His tongue felt fuzzy in his mouth.

  It was a song, sung by a woman, though her voice was like nothing from this world. He had heard many, many women sing in the playhouses and operas, but nothing even approaching the spine-chilling beauty of this voice. He did not recognise the song, it was a rising and falling composition of deceptive simplicity, a kind of ocean whose surface swelled and subsided while its tides surged and sank with quite another melody beneath. Two stories, juxtaposed. He stood there, mesmerised, for several minutes before recovering. He shook himself.

  Who is out here, singing? He supposed it was not impossible that people had taken to living in the woods. He could see the appeal: being far from the eyes of the law and the Crown had to have its perks. But if the woman had lived in the city, and sung, she might have become world-famous.

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  I must remain on guard. After all, a woman could sing beautifully and still run him through with a sword. He had come close to such an end more than a few times, especially during his first few years away from the court.

  He tried to continue forging in what he hoped was a southerly direction—towards Gorgosa. But the canopy was thick, the sun difficult to see. Inexorably, the voice seemed to be leading him towards it despite his best efforts to resist.

  Everywhere he went, the song was. It had enveloped the whole forest, permeating the trees so that they vibrated and sang with it. The birds were silenced in awe. If there were bears or great cats, they had been put to sleep.

  Then Telos saw it: the pool. And beside the pool was a hulking thing of metal, all sleekness that defied the eye, a shape that had no name, at once aquiline but also strangely square, a curving mirror of metallurgical impossibility. His mouth dropped open. A… a sky-ship? That was the only thing it could be. He had seen picture-book drawings, read about the legends, yet never had he nor anyone he knew ever seen one with their waking eyes.

  And what’s more: the thing was not some rusted relic. It looked new. Maintained. Though he supposed the metals of the gods perhaps did not age.

  He hastened towards it and the song reached a volume that was almost painful. His sternum vibrated as his heart pounded.

  Then he stumbled, nearly fell. Just in time he threw himself flat behind an erupting gorse, for there was someone else here, in the clearing.

  A woman bathed in the pool.

  Telos had seen many naked women, and many of them beautiful—worthy of a poem, if he had been that way inclined. But this woman was different. Her limbs were so perfectly made that his mind rebelled. It was unpleasant to look at such beauty.

  Her hair was ringletted and black, falling down a spine as taut and curved as a bow. Water glistened on flesh paler than pearl. Her features bore something of the raven about them, a proud nose, thick black eyebrows, eyes like dark stars. The fullness and richness of her features would have been ugly on a human woman, but Telos was quite certain this was not a human woman. Though she possessed all the normal limbs and features—there was no tail, no wings, no overtly alien features—she did not seem of Erethian mould. Each individual part of her, and their sum, was more than a mortal totality.

  A god. An actual Nilldoranian!

  He looked upon a naked goddess. She sang as she bathed. Time vanished. There existed only wonder. The astonishment saturated his soul until he was drunk.

  And then, without warning, she turned and looked at him. Her features, so beautiful they were agony, contorted in a mask of rage.

  “You dare to watch?”

  He swallowed.

  “I… I only…”

  “Come hither!”

  His limbs obeyed despite the protestations of his mind. He could not run. He was bound by her words.

  He stepped out of hiding and approached the pool. She stood before him in dripping, sensual glory. Yet he felt no desire to touch her. He was sure he would be obliterated if he did, that the flesh was not like mortal flesh, but burning with some furious starfire for which he had no name.

  “I’m sorry,” he spluttered.

  Her brows knitted.

  “Spare me your protestations. You have the look of a pervert and a thief about you.”

  “Your song drew me!” he said, desperately. “I… I have never heard anything like it.”

  At this, she seemed to soften. She stepped out of the pool. Only then did Telos realise that she was eight foot tall. He was a short man even by mortal standards, but she would have towered over the great pugilists of the Gorgosan Arena, a giantess of feline elegance.

  A shimmering robe, coloured like pale hibiscus, lay on a nearby rock. She pulled on the robe in a single fluid notion—a magician’s sleight of hand. She turned to face him again.

  “What is your name, mortal?”

  “Telos. I meant no—”

  “And what, pray tell, are you doing skulking by this pool?”

  Telos felt a sudden shame.

  “Simply going for a stroll.”

  Her countenance darkened.

  “It is ill-advised to lie to me.”

  Maybe Ylia is half-goddess, then? The insane thought managed to find its way into his awareness before the fear strangled all other thoughts.

  “I’ll just be going...”

  She drew herself up, seeming to grow taller still. Ravens cawed and swooped and circled. Though she had no wings, she seemed clad in a black splendour as of corvidian feathers, shimmering with the secret hues of midnight as they caught the dregs of light. Could this be Nereth?

  “Soon, our planet will go on its voyage beyond your solar system, into the Great Dark…” she said. “These are the final days of an aeon. In the coming years, you shall see Nilldoran recede, until it is but a speck, and then it shall disappear entirely. Your oceans shall change. Many lifetimes of your kind shall pass before it returns and another aeon begins.”

  Telos’s mind reeled. The Divine Age had ended five-hundred years ago with The Departure, yet here before him was a god who had returned, and she spoke of an aeon ending now. The gods do not reckon time in the same way as mortals, he realised. And we are just guessing their movements and aims. He might have laughed to see the scholars so upstaged were he not so terrified.

  “Why tell me this?”

  “Because I wish to impress upon you the gravity of your mistake,” she said, and her voice was an onyx mace, colliding with his fragile skull. “You have spied upon a god, itself a sin. Now you try to conceal your true purpose from me. I can only assume you are a servant of the Old Enemy.”

  An Old Enemy, does she mean the Daimons? How could then possibly be relevant?

  “I’m not! I’m just a prisoner. I-I’m trying to escape!”

  A snarl came to her lips. Her teeth were lupine.

  “Then you profess to be a criminal already, one who has violated even your own mortal laws.” She raised her hand, and energy crackled there, potent as lightning but of a different element, more like liquid fire that danced in the palm of her hand. “In accordance with the Tablet of Law, I may not kill you for your crime. Therefore, I now pronounce your judgement of a different kind...”

  He fell to his knees. He had no choice in the matter. A dark gravity had come upon him.

  “As you have selfishly pursued your wants, and gazed upon that which is forbidden, I curse you to never obtain what you desire. In these vicissitudes you shall labour until either you are taken by the madness of your kind, you perish, or until you earn my forgiveness.” A cruel smile played across her lips. “But as I will soon be departing Erethia, to return only when Nilldoran has completed its three-thousand year circuit of the Great Dark, I doubt very much you shall live to earn that release.”

  With that, she turned and strode back towards her sky-ship. A gangplank lowered and she walked up it into an interior that seemed pure light. The ramp raised behind her, sealing the vehicle. A roar birthed in the heart of the machine, rising like a storm. Some colossal Engine, of scale and power unimagined by the mortal mind, began to charge, bellowing so that the whole forest rang with its fury.

  Telos felt the spell of gravity broken. He rose and began to flee. A wind like the zephyrs of the underworld suddenly came down, sweeping through the trees. He was almost blown off his feet, only remaining grounded by gripping a thick tree-trunk. The waters of the pool were reduced to foaming chaos as waves of power erupted from the vehicle; then the waters began to hiss as a heat burned, radiating from the sky-ship in pulses that scoured the flesh. Black fire! He smelled the flame of Daimonsblood. That is what powers their machines!

  With a sudden shriek the ship rose into the air. It soared faster than any eagle towards the sky, flames trailing behind it. A barrier of sound was ruptured with a crackle that would have deafened thunder itself, and then the ship disappeared from sight, leaving Telos ragged, panting, and afraid in the dust below.