Awaking the Sun

Prologue

Saevra Nerathiel was already running with desperate abandon by the time the first explosion split through the purpled sky.

The sound struck Aetheris like the crack of a world being torn apart, so enormous that for one disorienting second she couldn't tell whether she'd heard it with her own ears or if it had come from inside the vision crawling through her skull. The marble beneath her boots shuddered and groaned. Somewhere behind her, glass screamed from its frames, shattering across the avenue in glittering sheets. People scattered beneath the violet evening sky, some stopping only long enough to stare upward before survival finally dragged them forward again. A mother clutched two children against her chest. A soldier shouted directions no one seemed able to hear. An elderly man stood perfectly still in the middle of the avenue, watching the smoke gather above the eastern district as though his body had simply forgotten how to move.

Saevra didn't look at them for long. She couldn't.

She knew what was coming.

She had been seeing it for the last eleven minutes, the vision overlapping her living world until the present became nothing more than a translucent skin stretched over everything that hadn't yet happened.

A child was burning.

Not dying. No.

Burning.

Golden light poured from the small body Saevra couldn't place, sunlight illuminating from beneath pale skin as blue flames twisted with chaos around tiny fingers. Then the child aged. Platinum hair whipped across a bloodied, broken face. Strange glass buildings towered around her beneath a startling sky filled with unfamiliar stars, constellations that folded into one another in ways Saevra couldn't understand. Beings that looked almost like Aetherians screamed in streets too crude and crowded to belong anywhere on Aetheris. Creatures made of bone and darkness tore through them, dragging shadows and black fluid behind skeletal bodies.

The vision shifted before Saevra could understand where she was seeing.

The same girl stood beneath a blackened sun.

Then she was kneeling in ash.

Then laughing beside people whose faces blurred whenever Saevra tried to hold them still. Pale eyes. Green ones. A red-haired creature who resembled the beings beneath that strange foreign sky. A man swallowed in shadow. A golden-haired woman staring at the child with hatred sharp enough to feel through the vision. Then something older than all of them moved behind the girl's eyes—an ancient presence pressing against the inside of her mind like a beast testing the bars of a cage.

The future fractured again.

The girl screamed.

The girl healed.

The girl killed.

The girl burned.

Cities rose around her.

Cities collapsed because of her.

Or perhaps around her.

Saevra could no longer tell.

Too many futures. Too many deaths.

Another blast struck somewhere to the east. Heat rolled between the towers, hot enough to whip Saevra's ceremonial robes against her legs and sting the exposed skin of her face. The vision had not yet released her. Nerathiel sight never cared whether the body carrying it could survive what it was shown. Possibilities poured through her in violent fragments—the girl dying young, the girl standing over a corpse, the girl consumed by fire, the girl tearing something ancient out of herself, the girl destroying worlds, the girl saving them, the girl being worshipped, the girl being hunted.