Rachel and Lana had hardly been walking for five minutes before the scrap of Matt’s shirt they were using to track him began to vibrate. Rachel stopped, fascinated, as the slight tremor became a quake. Before Rachel could show Lana, a burst of heat engulfed the fabric, shooting flames across its threads and forcing Rachel to drop the little charm. She yelped and shook her hand in the air to dispel the heat as the only way they had of locating Matt burned to ash on the cobblestones at her feet.

  “Well,” Lana sighed. “That’s not a good sign, is it?”

  Rachel felt no need to respond. She turned on her heel, feeling a visceral need to at least go somewhere, but stopped just as quickly.

  “What do we do?” Lana wavered.

  Rachel cocked her head. “Other than going back to Tassel’s and ripping another sweaty piece off of Matt’s shirt?”

  Lana wrinkled her nose. “We both know that’s not going to work.”

  Rachel smirked. “Perceptive. Why do you think so?”

  She was mostly asking because she couldn’t bear to accept the reality on her own. It was an easy conclusion to draw. Dread seeped into her chest, and as she looked up to meet Lana’s eyes, she could tell that Lana had come to the same realization.

  “There’s another wizard,” Lana breathed, eyes wide.

  Rachel nodded. She supposed it could just be Tassel messing with them, but she knew somehow that there was more at play here. “Not just that. There would be no reason for another wizard to accost Matt unless he knew he had been in contact with Tassel. I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew who you and I were. That I’m a Beyonder. We haven’t been nearly as careful as we should have been.”

  Lana swallowed. “So what do we do?”

  “We can’t go looking for Matt, if that’s what you’re asking.” Rachel glanced around her, noting that nobody around her looked anything like Matt. The sun had started to dip towards the horizon, forcing an intrinsic hustle in the passersby around them as they rushed to complete their errands before the sun disappeared.

  “Of course not.” Lana took a step towards Rachel, not close enough to be invading Rachel’s space, but enough for Rachel to realize that the space she needed had shrunk slightly. “We’d never find him.”

  Rachel let out a disappointed sigh. “We can either go back to Tassel and hope against hope that he’s willing to risk a war to get Matt back, or run the hell away from this city and hope Tassel doesn’t think we’re worth the effort to track down a second time.”

  Lana frowned. “To risk a war?”

  Rachel shrugged. “Just a hunch.”

  “You don’t predict wars off of a hunch,” Lana protested. “We learned that in first-year journalism.”

  Rachel had to suppress a smile. She was done making fun of the people she wanted to call her friends. If she couldn’t speak to Lana as an equal, she would keep her mouth shut.

  “I’m predicting nothing,” Rachel shrugged. “Not really.”

  The gears in Lana’s head turned for a long moment before she realized what Rachel was talking about. At the realization, she gasped and lunged forward, gripping Rachel by the shoulders with a vicious fire in her eyes.

  “You’ve been to the future,” Lana hissed. “You know this is going to happen.”

  Rachel covered Lana’s hands with her own and slowly, carefully, guided them away from her body. “I don’t know. I have a hunch. All I know is that it does happen eventually.”

  “How do we find out?” Lana let her arms fall to her sides, but remained just barely too close for comfort.

  Rachel took a small step back. “We find out who the second wizard is, and hope to the great master of Edomic that his name isn’t Zokar.”

  ? ? ?

  Rachel had taken exactly four steps back towards Tassel’s apartment before she heard a bloodcurdling shriek from a cross-street behind her. She whirled and took off towards the sound, her blood pumping like ice through her chest. The street around her fell silent as she and Lana rounded the corner to see a group of people milling nervously outside of a newsstand, the violent buzz of fear crackling through the air.

  Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

  Nobody is in danger, Rachel thought with considerable relief. Not here, at least.

  It wasn’t until she picked up a newspaper of her own that she understood how wrong she was.

  “Great prongs of Dendalus,” she breathed, suddenly feeling very, very cold.

  “What’s-” Lana started, leaning over Rachel’s shoulder, then catching herself as she read the title. “Oh, no. No, no, no.”

  Rachel closed her eyes and let the horror wash over her like an ocean wave in the darkest depths of night. She had always known it would only be a matter of time. The fact that it was all happening so quickly, though…

  “Lies!” came an angry voice from the throng. “There is no power left in this world capable of such destruction!”

  Rachel almost objected. Thankfully, the news hawker had her back.

  “Read the article,” the hawker drawled. “We know better than to gawk at headlines.”

  Without thinking, Rachel shot a hand out to grip Lana’s wrist. Lana tensed, then relaxed, shuffling her hand back until their fingers interlaced, then gave Rachel’s hand a comforting squeeze.

  “It’s not here,” Lana said, evidently sensing Rachel’s horror. “We’re okay.”

  “You don’t believe that,” Rachel mumbled. “You know what this means as well as I do.”

  Lana shifted towards Rachel, letting their shoulders brush. “I know. It’s not comforting that you of all people are so afraid right now. I just… don’t know what else to do.”

  “Run,” Rachel said honestly. “Go back to Kadara. Live.”

  “I can’t,” Lana protested. “My whole life is here. My research, my-”

  “Then come with me,” Rachel growled. “I can’t run from this. Tassel will find me. If he has any sense, he’ll track you down, too.”

  “Stick together,” Lana agreed. “I wouldn’t make it if I ran.”

  Rachel nodded, picked up a newspaper in the chaos, then led Lana by the hand out of the crowd and into the twilight streets. They passed more newsstands as they ran, two of which were empty, many more of which were thronged. They broke off from the main road as a crowd erupted into violence ahead, darting through sleepy side streets and past tiny courtyards. Only when they had crossed into the wealthier district in which Tassel lived did Rachel let them slow to a halt.

  “Prongs,” Lana cursed, panting. “Don’t ever make me do that again.”

  “Get used to it.” Rachel sat down on a low retaining wall and unfolded the newspaper she had nabbed. “Association with me generally involves much fleeing.”

  Lana sighed. “Okay. We should read. Why not at Tassel’s?”

  “I like to read in peace and quiet,” Rachel chuckled.

  Lana nodded, then pinched a corner of the paper between two fingers. “Is it real?”

  Rachel nodded, dread once again seeping into her as the adrenaline left her veins. Finally, though she wished she didn’t have to, she once again looked down at the headline she should have seen coming ever since she arrived in Trensicourt.

  DARVIS KUR DROWNED IN WIZARD COUP

  Rachel only skimmed the article. Thankfully, it was more or less similar to the text from the Repository of Learning, though the abridged history had omitted the politics of Darvis Kur’s wizarding elite.

  The Custodians of the Mended Chain and the Twenty Magi had followed two different deities during the Theic Age, and their decades-long scientific cold war had led to Darvis Kur isolating itself culturally and militarily from the rest of Lyrian. Unlike the rest of the world, they did not rise up against their gods - in fact, their gods walked among them as democratically elected leaders of both orders.

  Until both gods were assassinated in a single night.

  Both groups blamed each other, and the cold war erupted. Citizens cowered or took up arms. The Twenty Magi gained a significant advantage in the early stages of the war, but the Custodians turned the tide with the recruitment of Pothan the Slow, a hermit wizard from the northeastern foothills. The night after the alliance was made, the Twenty Magi, as well as legions of their supporters, were swallowed by the earth, never to be seen again.

  The details in the newspaper from that point forward were messy and obviously editorialized, but from Rachel’s trip to the Repository with Jason, she knew what had happened. The Custodians, terrified of Pothan’s power, invited the wizard to a feast with their order, then attempted to poison him. They succeeded in poisoning him, but not in killing him quickly enough to escape his dying wrath. Pothan, with the might of his Edomic alone, sunk the very earth below Darvis Kur and its outlying communities, destroying the city and causing the great waters of the Rivers Havel, Anatola and Tern to flood into the sudden void.

  Hundreds of thousands were killed, including all five hundred and seventy-six known Edomic users.

  “It’s beginning,” Rachel breathed. She took Lana’s hand and set off towards Tassel’s apartment, a great darkness filling her stomach.

  Lana skipped a step to catch up. “What, exactly, is it?”

  “You study the end… of the Theic Age,” Rachel said, finding that she needed to pause to satisfy her body’s panicked need for air.

  Lana’s eyes narrowed. “You’re saying it’s not over.”

  Rachel shook her head. “In the future, we call it the Age of Wizards. There’s a bigger picture here than the worship of Edomic power.”

  “Great.” Lana wrinkled her nose as they swung into Tassel’s alleyway. “So the worst is yet to come.”

  Rachel closed her eyes as she pushed through the door that led to Tassel’s staircase. “Nobody falls further than he who claims to see the bottom.”

  Lana raised her eyebrows. “You just pulled that line out of thin air?”

  “Nope,” Rachel admitted, remembering a certain conversation with a guide at the Celestine Library. “Not even my line.”

  “Okay, good,” Lana said, obviously feigning relief. “For a moment I was worried you were smarter than me.”

  Rachel nodded, turning back towards Lana as she reached the top of the staircase. “Keep it up.”

  Lana shook her head. “Not now. Let’s go get Tassel to tell us how truly screwed we are.”

  “On it,” Rachel affirmed. She pushed through the door, fighting to hide her reluctance. Even in the sudden void of Matt’s absence, there was still light. There was still a friend, someone to talk to, someone to hold on to.

  And Rachel refused to let it go.