Tempris

Acolyte: Chapter 1

An excerpt from the personal notes of Azura Raine, High Lady of Time

The world ended today. By my own hand.

I shut down the gates.

I take full responsibility for every death, every lost colony, every life inexorably altered.

I say a silent prayer for my friends who will have to live in the world that comes after, and now go freely into my exile.

---

Talya Caro stared out the window of the luxurious tower apartment and immediately began planning her escape.

She'd woken up only moments before in what had to be the most exquisite set of rooms she'd ever seen, tucked in with care in a massive bed piled with pillows and quilts. She was clean, her hair washed and braided, and the injuries she'd sustained during her escape from the Vale relay had all been carefully wrapped, if not healed completely.

There was only one problem.

She didn't know where she was. Or how she had gotten here. She didn't know who had tended to her while she slept. The last thing she remembered clearly was meeting a woman claiming to be the Time Queen, and then... nothing. Just darkness.

Beyond the window, rolling green hills rose in the distance, and the gardens surrounding the palace were in full bloom, speckled with bright bursts of color. It was summer, warm and sunny and lovely in that way that all Tempris summers were undeniably lovely.

That was also a problem.

It had been spring when she'd left Ebondrift. Still cold and raining when she'd been dragged into that swirling portal, taken from a place that had been left to ruin and deposited at the gates of a palace that was too shining and new to exist anywhere on the ramshackle island she called home.

This place was impossible. That woman was... impossible. It was as if Taly had been plucked from one place, one time, and sent to another, and that was... a problem.

Okay, so maybe there were quite a few problems. Definitely more than one.

"Breathe," Taly murmured, squeezing her eyes shut. She wasn't dead (yet), and she hadn't been recruited into some unknown, undead army (yet).

On the other hand, she was at the Time Queen's palace, a guest of the most vilified woman in all fey history. A woman that had committed wide-scale genocide of every known species in the Fey Imperium; whose actions had precipitated a centuries-long hunt for anyone unlucky enough to be born a time mage.

Which Taly was now. A time mage. Fey.

She clenched and unclenched her fists, looking down at the smooth, unmarked skin. The few runes that had still marked her wrist and arm after she broke through her mother's enchantments had been wiped away, the crystal in her palm removed while she slept. For fifteen years, her mother's magic had suppressed her aether, allowed her to walk among the fey as a human, and now that those spells were gone, she wasn't sure what she was going to do, how she was supposed to hide.

Taly sighed. Great. Yet another problem. At least that was one that could wait until later—assuming she made it back home.

No, right now—right now, she needed a plan.

Turning away from the window, she let her eyes drift over the room. From what she could tell, she had been put in a tower, though it was far from the kind she had always read about in human fairy stories. There was a bedroom, a music room, even a small library with an attached study—all decorated in shades of blue with flourishes of gold and white marble. It was exquisite, so grand and spacious that Taly might've been inclined to believe her safety wasn't in question if it weren't for one small detail: there was no way out.