Page 261 of Mother of Death and Dawn

“Maxantarius!”

The figure came out of nowhere. My sword was already inches from his throat when a high voice shrieked, “Wait!”

Max conjured flames and Vardir’s terrified face flickered into the light, lips trembling, knobby hands raised.

“I came to help! I came to help!”

“And how is that?” Max demanded.

“I— I— I—” He swallowed hard. “I was wrong. I miscalculated. I didn’t understand. Not until now! Not until now, I didn’t understand, I didn’t—”

“Vardir!” Max snapped. “Tell us what you have to say,fast, before we decide to stop being so patient.”

“That! And— andthat! It is bad, very, very bad.”

I followed his pointing finger—to the red smoke rising from the Towers’ ruin, and then to the gold smoke emanating where the shore met the surf, near the naval base.

“You know what that is?” I said.

“I didn’t, I didn’t realize for the longest time, but it’s so obvious, actually—” He laughed, high and frantic. “It’sbleeding.”

“Bleeding?” I pressed.

“We’ve disrupted the natural order,” Vardir said. “We pinched and pressed and stabbed and dug—”

“Get to the point, Vardir,” Max growled. He had to pause to stab an incoming corpse soldier. Encroaching violence grew louder from behind the barrier. Any second now, we would be overrun. We couldn’t just stand here.

“Yes, bleeding! Bleeding! Like flesh!” Vardir pinched his own sagging skin, as if for emphasis. “Magic is made up of layers, you know, more powerful and volatile the deeper you go. But what happens when you puncture so many holes in the flesh of magic? What happens if you tear out what makes it whole? That is what we have been doing, most of all with the Lejaras. We have been tearing and tearing the barrier between the layers of magic, and today, we have pushed it over the edge.”

I barely had time to cut down a corpse before it wrapped its hands around Vardir, who was so absorbed in what he was telling us that he didn’t so much as flinch.

My head swam. The buzzing beneath my skin, coupled with the chaos, made it difficult to understand what Vardir was saying.

“The underlying structure iscompromised,” Vardir said again, more pressingly. “The structure of magic itself.”

“Which means… a collapse?” I said.

Vardir nodded, a grin spreading over his face. “It is fascinating. I didn’t know such a thing was possible!” The grin soured. “Terrible, of course. Terrible. It would mean the end of— well, everything, mostly. Unless the wounds are closed.”

“Closed?” Max now had to raise his voice. Fighting surrounded us again like a rising tide of blood.

“It is about balance, you see. One would have to wield all three Lejaras at once. Creation, change, death. Balance them to each other again. And then, close the gaps. Cut off the flow of magic between layers—all of it. And in doing so, destroy them. Simple.”

Simple, he said. That made me want to laugh.

I thought of how it had felt to Wield just the change magic—how utterly all-consuming it was. The thought of Wielding all threeat the same time, and using them to do something so… sointangible…

Max kicked another body off his spear. “Vardir,” he said, between heaving breaths, “that sounds fucking ridiculous.”

“Oh, no, it isn’t,” Vardir said, brightly. “It might kill you, but I assure you, it is very possible. Though…” His brow knitted. “You probably couldn’t do it just anywhere. Few locations could withstand and channel the use of all those magics at once.”

Max and I exchanged a hopeless look, interrupted when a blade nicked my shoulder from behind and Max, without hesitation, reached past me to skewer the Fey soldier responsible.

Then he said to Vardir, “Why are you telling us this instead of your queen?”

“I did try to tell her. But sadly, I think she is beyond listening.”

“So you came to us? Why?”

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