Preview

Dreams tangled with pain. A rose floated within a landscape of stars, each of its petals breaking away into a new galaxy.
 

Nightmares followed. Fae armies hiding in the trees. Witch chants driving daggers into her mind. Winged shadows blotting out a dusky horizon.
 

Then something in between. A space of indifference where her body felt erased, where every emotion seemed to slip away.
 

“Do not move.” The voice sang with command and weight, pressing down through Ember’s muscles. She froze. Fire spread where blood should have flowed, the pain of her shoulder wound sharpening until thought itself crumbled.
 

“Reyar!” A shout from outside Ember. An unknown name.
 

“What did you drag home?” The answer rumbled low and resonant, the sound vibrating through her bones.
 

“Almost there. Do not lose it now.” The first voice again, low and resonate. The sound offered no comfort, but it didn’t deepen her pain, either.
 

What were they doing? Were they captors, rescuers, or something in between? Ember’s mind scraped for sense, but fear rose faster, hot instead of cold. Heat bowed her spine, her power lashing awake. Razors of energy sliced through every vein without spilling a drop of blood.
 

“Your Song isn’t enough to stop this?” the deep voice asked, surprise edged in its tone.
 

“Not the time, Reyar! She is—”
 

The surge broke. From behind Ember’s ribs, a cyclone of power tore free, burning every nerve. A windless pressure caught it, twisting upward until it burst from her chest in a radiant stream.
 

Ember gasped as the tension released, opening her eyes to a starlit night. The aura of power slid like silk across the image, blurring pinpoint stars. Up and up it rose, catching a rainbow glow as crosswinds carried it higher, dispersing the energy into the world as if it had never meant any harm.
 

“She does not belong here.” The deep tones no longer stabbed, but Ember still flinched. Her pain-scattered memories were trickling back into focus with each constricted breath.
 

She’d helped Tristan. Had grown the tree and cracked the barrier. But he wanted to sacrifice her and she refused to die. Tearing herself from one power, she’d tried to escape, only to discover that crossing the Fae border was forbidden for reasons she never could have guessed.
 

Rather than landing into Fae territory within Trifecta, Ember had slipped through the Veil and into true Gypsum.
 

“And yet, here she lies.”
 

The husky voice. It belonged to a woman named Shade. A tall, powerful Fae with thick-soled boots and leather corseted armor. Smokey tattoos lined her left arm, while an inked snake wrapped around her right, the serpent’s life-like head resting on top of her wrist. She’d found Ember in this realm, offering shelter and protection against the impossible reality of dragons.
 

Then something must have happened, but Ember couldn’t remember. At first it was only a headache she blamed on stress. Then the burning began, and every other thought fled.
 

“How did she get here?” The deep voice had drawn closer and Ember pinched her lashes together. Her left cheek pressed against smooth and rigid leather. With that sensation, more entered Ember’s focus. An arm around her torso and another under her bent knees. She was being carried.
 

And her power had exploded.
 

Ember gasped, eyes opening to Shade’s face framed by the star-flecked sky.
 

“Fades.” Ember tried to speak, though her throat was raw. Shade looked down at her with amused, dark brown eyes, and a crooked smile.
 

“I am going to assume that is an appropriate slur. Are you ready to stand?”
 

“Yes?”
 

Shade lowered Ember’s legs first, waiting for them to steady before she removed the arm from around her back. The Fae’s movements were careful, if not quite caring. Not exactly the motions of someone whose intent was to kidnap.
 

“How did you get here?” The question snapped out from the newcomer Shade had called Reyar.
 

Ember turned toward him, her boots shifting in the fine, silken sand. The desert stretched behind them, white flats disappearing into the dark beneath a star-studded sky, but it was the ruins that held her attention. Broken-down structures loomed, their skeletal remains lost to time, worn smooth by the wind.
 

Ahead, the city’s true heart rose in shadowed layers, still holding onto life where these outskirts had crumbled. The pale pink moon reflected off the sands, casting just enough light to catch the male stranger’s scrutiny.
 

A Wizard. There was no doubt. His eyes, fractured in shades of rainbow tourmaline, gleamed with the sharp facets of a fine-cut gem. A long bronze braid draped over his shoulder, the sides of his head shaved clean and without the deep red dye preferred by Trifecta’s coven. His pale linen robes, practical and suited to the desert heat, stood in quiet contrast to the vivid hues worn by the Witches and Wizards she’d known before.
 

He narrowed his gaze, waiting for her answer.
 

“An accident,” she offered to the best of her knowledge.
 

“The Veil has been impassable by people for hundreds of years, and you claim pure circumstance?” Reyar demanded.
 

“How do you know I came through the Veil?”
 

“You’re human.”
 

“She is something else.” Shade’s voice was soft in a way that set warning bells off in Ember’s head.
 

“Human enough,” he interceded, “as she cannot control whatever power she has. Fae Binding Ink marks her with a Witch-made pentacle. That makes her from Terra, most likely from that city trapped in the bubble that locked the Veil.”
 

Ember blinked up at the tall man, startled at his quick and correct assessment of her situation. She raised a hand to the back of her neck, wondering how he saw her tattoo, alarmed to find skin instead of hair. She flinched at the distant memory of raging Veil energy burning through the strands and dropped her arm, latching on to a need to defend herself.
 

“I’ve learned some control,” she countered, then instantly regretted her claim when both Shade and Reyar turned heavy frowns her way.
 

Ember had never felt so small, staring up at the incredible beings before her. Nicu was the tallest person she knew, and it hadn’t bothered her to stand toe to toe with him. This pair, however, carried more than height. Their bodies were built for battle, their wills just as strong. They were powerful strangers who had helped her, yes, but they also held the ability to abandon her in a world she barely understood.
 

“What is your name, little one?” Ember flinched as Shade’s question echoed her thoughts of being small.
 

“Ember,” she offered, swallowing the desire to fall silent, to watch and listen as these two spoke over her. That approach worked in Trifecta. Here, it was probably wiser to be polite.
 

“Well, Ember, do you plan on trying to catch fire again anytime soon?” The tick of Shade’s lips suggested a hint of teasing, yet Ember refused to let down her guard. Instead, she lifted her hands and flexed her fingers. A gentle pulse of power in her bones responded when she called forward her personal shield, watched as a soft blue light lit her skin, then shifted into invisibility as it settled around her.
 

“No. I don’t know why that happened. Maybe my human body had to get used to Gypsum energy?”
 

“Or it was this.” Shade pulled the two halves of a broken Fae arrow from her waistband. Ember’s left hand flew to her right shoulder. More pieces fell together. She’d worn a puffy red coat in Trifecta, but that was nowhere to be found. It had likely been abandoned along with the sleeves of the dark blue shirt she wore that were no longer there, leaving behind tiny threads clotted with dried blood.
 

“I was shot.” Ember’s lips trembled against the evidence gripped in Shade’s fist. An arrow sent by a Fae. Not Nicu, but the one who stood at his side.
 

Ember ripped her gaze from the projectile to study her shoulder, only to glance away after a brief impression of torn skin and a deep, red-stained wound. “Why doesn’t that hurt?”
 

“I am blocking your pain receptors and keeping the poison from spreading until we can get you properly healed,” Shade offered.
 

“Poisoned!” Ember exclaimed. Shade nodded as she handed the arrow to Reyar. He sneered at the fletching.
 

“Terra born and goddess-touched,” Reyar muttered, studying Ember. Then, with a grunt, he turned away from them and walked over dry, rocky ground toward the intact city. Ember followed him, taking in the wind-torn ruins around them. The space they tread was wide and empty, likely once a road. Small rocks littered the landscape, but beyond the three of them there were no signs of life. Not even scavengers moved among the crumbling stone of a long-faded time, worn down by ancient winds and stripped of identity, clinging to the memory of what used to be.
 

“What happened here?” Ember asked.
 

“Time,” Shade answered. “And greed. Gypsum is a broken land. After the Fae reached an accord with the humans and Fate Magic was banned, they acted as though starved. They ransacked their own land’s resources for decades, searching for that addictive rush of universal magics. They never found it and the realm suffered. The cultures that survive her do so with the luxury of primal magic and pure grit.”
 

The way Shade said ‘primal magic’ sent a shudder down Ember’s back and she remembered the long shadow of the dragon she’d seen soon after her arrival. She tried to picture the Trifectan Fae in this environment, but the two images clashed, even within her mind. A sense of discomfort settled behind her ribs, though she couldn’t decide if it was for her sake or the Fae’s and shrugged it away, refusing to think about it.
 

“And you’ve lived like this your whole life?” Ember asked.
 

“Only the last century or so. I can still remember how green this place used to be.” Shade’s answer was quiet and matter of fact. Ember’s breath snagged on the impossibility of it.
 

Fae existed for centuries? She’d really only known Nicu, Branna, and Edan. They’d grown up with her. So they were mere children in Fae years? How had they come to be her guardians? Maybe she wasn’t as dangerous to them as she’d been taught to believe. The thought lifted a weight off her heart, then resettled it on her shoulders.
 

It shouldn’t be a surprise they’d misled her. Yet…
 

Ember couldn’t believe it had been a total lie. Though Shade and Reyar seemed to have brushed off her near explosion, she noted the female Fae remained close and that the Wizard kept glancing back at her often enough to show she had his complete attention.
 

So there was more to learn. Perhaps these two were more forthcoming than the Trifectan Fae. Or they could be worse.
 

Ember rolled her shoulders against an involuntary shiver. No matter what this pair thought, Ember was a survivor. She’d gotten away from Brandt. She had fought against the Witch Queen. She had escaped the soul-eating tree. She could figure this out, one way or another.
 

“Come on,” Shade offered. “Let us find you a bed and you can get some sleep. We will figure out the rest later.”
 

“Like getting me home?”
 

Shade’s lips thinned and she shook her head.
 

“I have only been able to pass inanimate objects through the Veil.”
 

My power can open it.
 

Ember swallowed that truth with ease. She’d kept it from people she knew for years. Keeping it from a stranger was easy. But should she?
 

She didn’t know enough yet. Until she had a better handle on things, it was a secret worth protecting.
 

Shade lengthened her stride to catch up with Reyar. Ember dropped her gaze as she passed, hoping to hide any secrets that might be shining through her eyes. But after only a few more steps, Ember faltered. Her breath snagged.
 

Her feet moved, but only shifted deeper into the sand. There was no sense of the Veil here, no shimmer of blue reflecting her own power. Yet there was no doubt that she could not move beyond this point.
 

She lifted a hand. Pressed it forward. Resistance met her palm like glass. She leaned harder, weight driving forward as her muscles strained. Blue ripples spread across her skin as if she summoned power, but nothing gave.
This was not the Veil. It was its echo. A reflection rooted in Trifecta, now mirrored here. An imitation Shade and Reyar passed through, but one that held Ember firm. Dark thoughts nipped at the edges of her focus as she fought to keep them at bay.
 

You’ll never escape.
 

Trapped forever.
 

You should have let the tree eat you. Then you’d be free.
 

Boots whispered across the soft sand. Shade stopped beside her and, curious, raised her palm to meet Ember’s. They should have touched. Instead, their hands hovered, divided by the invisible wall. Shade’s eyes widened.
 

“Reyar. Come see this.”
 

It took only a few seconds for Reyar’s long legs to return him to their space. He studied Shade’s hand, then Ember’s, and finally focused his gaze on the narrow space between their palms. The corner of his mouth curved.
 

“Interesting.”