BOOK 3

  PART 1

  The Promised Land

  Pushing through waist-high snow, blinking away the barrage of ice only to face a blinding whiteness that had not ceased for hours, he pressed on with his tattered, single layer of thin, plain clothes. Face stinging, his frozen hands continued to brush away the single obstacle separating him and a warmth that had burned so hot it lasted not two years before it was wrenched from his grasp by the loveless Earth Mother.

  North.

  It didn’t matter that he didn’t know where he was going or what he was going to find. Like everything else in his life, he had only veiled truths and empty promises, enough disappointments to carve a gaping hole where reason had been. Nothing to lose anymore, no more tears to shed—the only thing standing in his way now was fate, and She had died months ago.

  North, a pure white.

  Vision foggy, lashes stiff, and body heavy with layers of mistakes that had pelted him while he pushed through the indomitable blizzard, he let his eyelids give in to the abominations buried in his dark dreams for a single second before dragging his freezing limbs over his face to tear the coats of sleet off. Savoring the pain that lasted long enough for his eyes to flutter open for another long heartbeat in the all-consuming blizzard.

  Green.

  He blinked.

  A luscious, verdant green. In the distance, past the unrelenting coldness, was an enormous field of fresh grass with tiny, indistinguishable figures standing under a single tree so immense he felt like he could touch its woolly white bark, feel the fiery warmth of its soul if he reached out. If he continued to hold on to hope, if he didn’t give in despite the impossibility of his task. Despite the world fighting against him, he could reach her.

  Another blink, and the white was underneath his palm. But it had changed—there was no warmth to be offered by the wispy white threads. He wasn’t up north, near the promised land. He was in Hythe.

  He turned his head to the side and saw her. Engulfed in flames, just like everything else around him. The charred, blood-red sand, the trees that wept jet-black ink, the curling, crimson leaves that plummeted to the ground so violently it opened up a chasm underneath them, swallowing him whole.

  North. Red, mottled skies. Near-whiteout.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Theo dug his nails into his head, only succeeding to further intensify his throbbing headache as he let himself be pulled up by his classmate. “Y-yes. Let’s…let’s keep going.”

  But Faris remained stationary in his spot behind the shallow cliff they had temporarily sought refuge under, already brushing away the pile of snow that had accumulated on his thick winter hood. “Didn’t you just pass out? This is the last resting point for a while.”

  “Yeah.”

  Stepping back into the blizzard, thankful that it wasn’t nearly as overwhelming as the lingering dream, Theo knew that fact better than anyone else. He had studied several maps—especially Askandr’s—extensively over the past several weeks, and while they had successfully made it past Ethy and somehow also into the Hythian Wind Stream, they had just arrived at the second set of mountains leading up north with neither landmarks nor end in sight. None of the territory past their current location had ever been officially mapped.

  Or, if he accepted Askandr’s hundreds-of-years old, incomplete sketches, and it truly was only snow and deep, perilous trenches beyond, there would be no more walking. He should turn back where he stood, stop wasting the minute amount of magic that was left in this world trying to reclaim a glimmer of truth buried in the last words of yet another person who was now gone.

  “With all this ‘Eternal Fall’ nonsense…you’d think that—” Faris began before slipping and cursing, reapplying a Non-slick spell on both of them while Theo continued for him.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “—it’d warm up, right?” breathed Theo before inhaling frosty, biting air and coughing into the coarse, water-resistant fabric shielding Ty’s class coat from the elements. “Everywhere must have got colder, even here.”

  “Big help meteorological maps are nowadays when the world sped past spring and summer only to stop entirely.”

  Occupied with maintaining his balance and stabbing through the snow in front of them to make sure they didn’t fall into a valley, Theo offered meek, lukewarm words. “Everything’s happening as Nate predicted, like with the Sepica Strait stopping.”

  “He didn’t predict everything.”

  “Maybe he just didn’t tell us.”

  “Why, cause we’d freak out?”

  Theo stopped and let out a long puff of air before looking up, his heart dull among the swirling snowflakes. “Blood-red skies don’t terrify you?”

  The frigid, unaffected caster continued walking, moving past the impenetrable monolith that the tactician had become after returning to the Academy. “I’ve got no reason to be afraid of something that doesn’t even faze you.”

  Lacking the energy to sigh, Theo rubbed his eyes and continued forward against the wind they had been fighting since they began their journey hours ago. Little surprised him anymore—not the perpetually overcast skies, not the accompanying tint of red during the daytime that intensified into a bloody scarlet in the evenings, not the deep and foreboding, near-pitch rust permeating throughout all the land at night. The same red he had witnessed when the last vestige of hope in the world expelled the Earth Mother from the land and into the skies for him to cleanse, along with the chasms that now leaked the same red, hazy death.

  When Hope left the world up to Love.

  Treading slowly and carefully, applying the specialized magic they had pilfered from the remnants of the Academy after Halle’s revenge, the two students of what would have been class 3-A silently continued their journey north.

  * * *

  “Hey…what are…our…coord—”

  Stopping for the umpteenth time in the past hour, Theo’s knees finally buckled underneath him as the soft snow cushioned his fall, and Faris, nearly at his tipping point as well, turned around to give him the answer he already knew.

  “I can’t—tell—” Voice raspy, he struggled to clear his throat and instead succumbed to a coughing fit before continuing weakly. “It feels…the same—this is probably—what the priestesses mentioned.”

  “Can’t…make it past,” breathed Theo, feeling the sobering reality sink in as the wind blew his hood away from where he sat and he rubbed his aching, bloodshot eyes again. Fuzzy. Nothing but the familiar, encroaching darkness. The bitter cold enveloping him.

  “Should we—”

  “No.”

  Faris lowered his gaze and turned back to the tempest, his thick coat matted and weighed down with frost. Neither of them wanted to hear it, but they knew that making it out of Ethy with no answers, with only their resources and spirits drained, was the most likely outcome.

  That, and near-certain death.

  Allowing the snow and ice to pelt him, Theo only twisted his head when he felt warmth suddenly appear beside him, impassively meeting his classmate’s one remaining eye—murky, pale violet in the unending gray—as he took a seat beside him.

  They stayed that way for a few seconds before Theo finally spoke up. “Don’t sit.”

  “Why don’t I get to rest?”

  He swallowed the memories. The hurt. The words that always opened the wound that never lay untouched long enough to heal. “I can’t let you die.”

  Like Theo, Faris leaned back, letting the wind blow away his hood and scatter his long, pitch-black hair. “And why’s that?”

  “She’d never forgive us.”

  The reply was immediate and cold, but not empty. “So why are we sitting down?”

  “F-fine,” muttered the impenetrable monolith, pulling the snow-filled hood back over his head and struggling to stand up on his shaky legs, dispersing the darkness in the edges of his vision only to watch it explode into brilliant stars, like those heavenly bodies they could no longer see after the world had ended.

  It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see as long as he kept moving forward. As long as he was heading somewhere.

  “Just accept it. There’s nothing up here.”

  As long as he wasn’t sitting still. In stagnation, waiting to die like the rest of the world.

  “There has to be,” Theo choked, swallowing the wind while wading through the snow, moving by feeling alone, his senses far too impaired to be making rational decisions. “I’ve got to…I’ve got to reach…”

  Coming to an abrupt halt again, he barely lifted his hands high enough to touch his face, let alone rub his eyes. He was seeing things again. This was a dream; it was most assuredly a dream. He was still back in his dorm room, dreaming of Ethy again, dreaming of going up north to find the final sanctuary of the Earth Mother—Life—where all the sinless, innocent Ancients had been funneled to. Somehow, someway, because they must have gone somewhere if Ty didn’t kill them. And if anyone could do it, it would be…

  “…her…”

  But it was impossible for a figure from afar to be approaching them. He was seeing things. His head and heart were pounding faster than the snow fell, and he could no longer speak, but this he knew without any doubt.

  “Is…is that—” said Faris, feeling far away even though Theo barely felt the snow displace around him, barely saw a shadow rush past, barely heard them calling out to them.

  Falling. He was falling again, but this time he could feel a plush pillow of snow on his face. The snow forming a blanket around him. He was in bed, and this was a nightmare he’d wake up from. They couldn’t be in Ethy. No one would be stupid enough to traverse its deadly snowfields.

  And then someone turned him around, and he was no longer facing his pillow but the blood-silver sky. Finally, someone had woken him up.

  Someone small. Warm, tan skin. Long, jet-black hair.

  Ty?

  No, he was still dreaming—it was an Ancient.