Page 28 of The Sunlit Man

“Strange. That’s what they are.”

Normally he’d have expected those sorts of formations to come from prolonged weathering. But if that were the case, these would have smooth sides, not that craggy, cratered look, like…

Like molten stone, suddenly frozen,he realized,in the process of being ejected from the earth.A volcanic eruption, suddenly hit by cold rain and locked in place.That’swhat these felt like to him.

“Hey,” he said, switching to the local tongue. He waved to Rebeke, who was in the driver’s seat to his left. “Those rock formations. Those are made by the sunlight? Superheating the ground, making magma erupt?”

“Best we can guess,” she said, shouting over the rush of the wind. “The coming of the Sky Tyrant causes great distress to the land. Everything melts or breaks apart each day, and by the time we pass again, nothing is the same.”

“Wait,” he said. “Nothingis the same?”

“Nothing,” she called. “Though some generalities persist—there are highlands to the south—no individual features remain day to day. Those hills, they weren’t here last time. It’s all shaped anew. The Chorus tells of our old world. A land of quietude, where the landscape slumbered and didn’t transform daily. But that place was also Hell, so…”

“I’ve been there,” he called back. “Food’s good, but the ghosts are a huge pain. I’m not surprised your ancestors wanted out.”

She gave him a pointed look. “Don’t lie.”

“Lie?”

“You haven’t been to Hell,” she shouted.

He shrugged. He’d been through many varieties of hell, though only the planet Threnody was literally called by the term. But who cared if she believed him or not?

That magma thing. How’d you realize it was the case? the knight interjects.

“No erosion on the formations,” he explained in Alethi. “Makes sense that this landscape would be subject to extreme forces. It’s remarkable. Like a primordial planet, still forming.”

What would it be like to live in a place where you could makeno maps? A land with no familiar landmarks? Nothing permanent except what you carried with you? Under those circumstances, he’d be looking for a quiet cavern to settle into as well. But it also explained why there weren’t many of those.

If the surface got fried every day to the point it cracked and let molten rock come surging out…well, that wasn’t conducive to stable, habitable caverns. Again, he doubted that this Refugecouldbe any sort of cavern.

Beyond that, a part of him whispered that something didn’t add up here. That he was missing a piece of the puzzle. Superheated light might make stone flow on the surface, but eruptions? He was no expert, but he thought those were usually caused by theoppositeeffect. Heat below and coolness above—with a generous helping of tectonic activity to create new pathways for that heat to escape.

Highly Invested light would also make traveling in the system by starship nearly impossible. Yet he had evidence of Scadrians being here. So what was really going on with the mechanics of this planet?

“I assume,” he said to Rebeke, “the unstable landscape is why we have to search to find the doorway into the Refuge?”

“Yes,” she said, pointing at a nearby group of five ships with round, flat bases. They swept along the ground at a low hover, moving together in a deliberate pattern. “We use prospector ships, which can sense energy sources under the soil. Every now and then, during regular searches, the Cinder King would find the doorway. He became obsessed with it and the stories of the Refuge. That only intensified when he got the key. It came from a body one of his outriders found, a stranger who had died in a mudslide.”

Nomad nodded, thoughtful. Those prospectors were large machines for doing something as simple as sensing Investiture, but not everyone was lucky enough to have a Seeker on staff.

“You were his subjects, then?” he said to her over the wind. “The Cinder King? Before you broke away and hid in the darkness?”

“Essentially,” she said, slowing the cycle to drink from her canteen. Then she continued without having to shout. “He ‘keeps the law.’ Has influence over basically every habitable corridor and has incorporated any cities of significance or size into Union.

“With smaller towns like ours, he’d send a few officials to represent him. Along with some of those Charred of his, of course, ready to enforce their orders. We just lived with it. For years—ever since I can remember, actually—we lived under his thumb. Until he started to change his rhetoric, get more aggressive, claiming that his destiny was to unite all people into one city. So then—”

She glanced to the side as a ship flew past. They’d stowed Elegy, her sister, in there. A kind of improvised prison. Nomad found it wild they didn’t have an actual jail.

“Elegy,” Rebeke said, “always had such grand dreams. She could persuade anyone of anything, so long as she was passionate about it. I hoped so much that we could…do something for her. When I locked her away earlier, she shouted at me. It was her voice, but there’s nothing of her in the eyes. I…” She slumped in her seat, head bowed.

Storms, this girl needed sleep and time to mourn, not another mission. But the sun didn’t wait. They were constrained by its timetable. Maybe she’d be able to rest once they opened the doorway…

But of course she wouldn’t. Because the doorway wouldn’tlead to a refuge. He steeled himself. “The Cinder King,” he said. “He’ll be looking for you out here, right?”

“He’salwayslooking for us,” she replied. “However, Zeal replaced the key he stole with a fake. So with Adonalsium’s blessing, the Cinder King does not yet know what we have done. He will have patrols trying to spot us, but only the regular ones. And perchance we will find fortune today—in that he rarely patrols this region.”

“Why?”

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