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Mama’s face was red as she sobbed, my father’s much more controlled but still forlorn.
“Okay, if you get the shadows, then we’ll wait,” Dad agreed, Mama nodding from where she sat on his lap. Celeste squeezed me tighter from my side, all of us wallowing in the impending doom.
Chapter Three
Nova
“Dad says that the stars need us more than we need them. That they would be terribly bored without us. Once he even said that things like magic and wealth only corrupt people. Sometimes when he tells us stories of the dark times before the stars came to us with magic, I wonder if he’s right.”
-From the journal of Nova Tershetta, 9239 AS
Long after everyone had fallen asleep, Celeste’s snores loud from across our room, I snuck out of my bed. My socks silenced my steps as I made my way down the hallway, passing my parents’ open doorway.
This house had once been almost beautiful by eadi standards, but things had slowly changed as the years passed. The textured walls had long since gone out of fashion, the wood faded from its glowing cherry sheen. I didn’t remember what it was like in its glory, but I also didn’t much care for extravagance.
Wealth ruined people.
Celeste might have disagreed, but that was just the artist in her. She had an eye for beauty, an extraordinary ability to make anything immaculate. Her art graced the walls, starting from when she was a child and could barely draw straight lines, to her most recent work, which looked more like reality than art. Mama hated that Celeste and I were forced to help at her apothecary,but more than anything, she refused to steal all of Celeste’s time. She didn’t want to see another one of her daughters have their dreams taken from them. Little did she know that I was more than happy to be a soldier—if only I could also have them.
With that thought ringing in my mind, I placed my palm upon the undecorated section of wall where the hallway met the kitchen just past our bathroom. Closing my eyes, I willed the door into existence, thinking of the grainy wood and the oval doorknob. Just like that, I felt the texture beneath my hand change.
A smile stretched across my face as I opened my eyes and caught sight of the entrance to my lab. I had studied and practiced magic for so long, but it still surprised me when I was capable of doing such miraculous things. Cloaking wasn’t easy. Even shaytan with hundreds of years under their belt couldn’t master it. They, unlike me, lacked a desperation for knowledge—for understanding. It was what fueled me before I had realized that I would outlive my family by a millennium.
Opening the door, I quickly made my way down the rickety steps, my heart racing as I thought of what I had finally decided to do. Now more than ever I knew that my options were limited. Rules needed to be broken for the sake of my parents. Of everything that mattered to me.
The basement had once been used for storage, but I had procured it fifteen years ago when I realized that haya was not a long-term solution. That was when I began studying forbidden magic.
Rocks, gems, crystals, and even bones lay scattered upon the three tables that lined the far brick wall, all of them once hoped to be conduits. I had thought that creating new magic would be simple when I first started, but that was not true at all. In fact, it was impossible. Every stolen text or book that I had found suggested that there were ways to get magic that didn’t involvethe stars, but of course, there was no proof, no exact recipe. Plus, nearly all knowledge of life before magic was buried, burned, or banned, so anything I found was luck that had to be kept secret. No one could help me, no one could even know.
When I first started, I was using a rather tame manual. One that suggested charging crystals beneath the light of the moons would allow someone to retain their essence and use it for themselves. From there, I escalated to rocks, fire, anything I could use that would create enough energy to harness. After it all failed, I started using the bones of the dead.
It was far from moral to rob graves. I knew that. Of course I did. Still, I neededsomething.Only one tome I found referenced this sort of forbidden magic. It involved runes, which was something I had no previous knowledge of. Studying them was exhausting, and it would be three years before I felt as if I had mastered them enough to begin trying the rituals.
The sentiment behind forbidden magic was that there was dormant force within everything. From the ground to our very bones. I started small, using the bones from our neighbor’s dog that died a few years before. I sent off a prayer to the stars that the poor thing’s soul was within the skies, then I got to work, shoving the nausea and guilt to the side.
I spent months cutting myself open and using the blood to draw the runes upon the bones, but nothing worked. I slowly moved to using human bones, starting with eadi before caving and searching for shaytan remains. Once I even got my hands on the cousin of a core family, though their relationship was so distant that the only reason I was able to get her bones was because she hadn’t even been buried on the family grounds in the Naqi District.
My feet took me across the room, my eyes scanning the surroundings as my brain worked to remember where I had last had the one piece of text that would help me. Books lay scatteredall across the floor and chairs, though they were mostly in the mismatched and leaning bookshelves I had found at Artie’s. Many of them contained my hurried scribbles and dog-eared pages, the books well-loved and treasured despite it all. Among a stack of them, flipped upside down, was the book I needed.
Dashing to it, I snagged it and held it to my chest. As I stood there contemplating the inevitable next step, I thought back to how eager and optimistic I had been on my twenty-fifth birthday, almost twenty-five years ago to the day.
We lived in the Sham District, which meant we were far luckier than most eadi resource wise. The closer the district was to the Star District, the more wealth they possessed. We had access to more medical care than others, were afforded far more opportunities, and experienced a sort of privileged trickle. But most of all, we were close enough to the Ether Cathedral. Because of that, I was able to do my magic ritual.
Everyone was born an eadi, even core family—the twenty dynasties that made up our magical council and led our military—children. It wasn’t until a person’s twenty-fifth birthday that they had the chance to become a shaytan. For one day only, eadi were awarded the privilege of entering the cathedral, its towering crystal towers and its walls etched with constellations a thing of dreams. But the most incredible part of it was the well of essence, which was at the center of the back worship space and the size of our house. The liquid was as thick as syrup and the silver of the stars themselves. Even more extraordinary? It was made of the stars’ very essence.
I recalled being terrified that nothing would happen as I took the knife, cut my palm, and let my blood fall into the pool. Before the first drop hit the water, I had begun the prayer.
“Darkness reigns from above, and I worship from below. Today I pray for the stars’ favor, for a chance to serve and entertain. I ask not for my sake, but for that of the ethersthemselves. Gift me magic, make me more, and I vow to prove how loyal I will remain.”
The chant once again slipped from my lips as I flipped open the book on alchemy, the memory of magic flooding through my veins fading.
I was at a disadvantage in some ways, as I hadn’t been able to find anyone to apprentice under. No one wanted an of eadi around.
But I had been desperate and determined, so I learned on my own—most of my knowledge coming from my habit of stealing. It wasn’t honorable, but then again, nothing ever was on Dajahim. The only reason we even had magic was because we were constantly at war and the stars found us exciting.
During the last world war before the introduction of magic almost ten thousand years ago, the stars had realized how close to extinction we were. In their panic, it was said that they picked their favorite side, the one more worthy of their gift, and rained magic down upon them. Within weeks the future shaytan had decimated all but their own continent, leaving this the sole place in which life inhabited.
If we were praising mass destruction, then a little stealing couldn’t be judged. At least, that’s what I told myself.
