Chapter 1 

Silas

Pain is the first anchor. It is a sharp, methodical reality that cuts through the disorienting fog of unconsciousness. My right arm is broken, the bone grating with a sickening finality.

Several of my ribs feel cracked, each breath a fresh agony. I force my eyes open, and the world swims into a blurry, mud-colored focus.

I am not on a clean, rocky shore. I am lying on a bed of jagged, black rock, my lungs burning with seawater, my body a tapestry of fresh cuts from the wreck.

My vision clears and I see a sight that does not compute. The gentle peaks of the mountains are gone. Instead, half-sunken ruins of a vast and ancient city rise from a misty, grey sea, their toppled spires jutting from the waves like the skeletal fingers of a drowned giant.

The memory of the storm crashes down on me: the impossible wave, the Devourer in the clouds, the faces of my brothers as we were scattered into the abyss.

The oath we swore—reunite in Rach, find the crystals—is a bitter, mocking echo in my mind.

“A living storm,” I rasp, the guilt a physical weight. “How could I not see it?”

I, the strategist, failed to account for such a thing. I have failed them all. The logical part of my mind, my shield and greatest weapon, begins its slow, painful inventory.

“Alive,” I mutter, spitting out saltwater. “That is the first, and perhaps only, positive assessment.”

I am on the shore of Nagaland, a land ruled by the isolationist and hostile naga. I am wounded, alone, and my failure is a heavier burden than any injury. My mission, my purpose, is in tatters.

Before I can succumb to the despair that threatens to drown me, my training takes over. “First, reconnoiter,” I order myself, the command a familiar anchor in the chaos.

I begin a methodical search of the shoreline, my eyes scanning the debris for any sign of my brothers. I find splintered timbers from the Minotaur ship and a torn Osirian banner, but no bodies. No other survivors.

“Completely alone,” I say to the empty shore. The thought brings a hollow ache of failure.

“Next, inventory.” My voice is a low growl, forcing routine over emotion. My ornate armor is gone, torn from me by the sea.

My Osirian longbow, my most trusted weapon, is lost to the depths. “Nothing. All gone.”

All I have left is a single, long-bladed dagger still sheathed at my hip, a small, sodden pouch of emergency supplies, and my own broken body. It is a grim accounting. The strategist in me calculates the odds of survival as dismally low.

I turn my gaze from the sea to the strange, drowned city before me. It is larger than any city I have ever seen on Osiris, a sprawling necropolis of black stone and impossible architecture.

It is a threat, a labyrinth of unknown dangers. But it may also be my only source of shelter. My mind, working out of pure, ingrained habit, begins to map the ruins, noting potential choke points, defensible positions, and escape routes.

As the twin moons of Protheka begin their ascent, the city takes on a more menacing quality. The light fails, and the strange, alien landscape feels even more dangerous. I find a defensible position within the hollowed-out base of a toppled spire, a place where I can watch the shoreline and rest. This is the logical choice.

“Stay here. Heal. Plan,” I tell myself, trying to ignore the gnawing ache of loneliness.

As I am about to settle in, I hear it. It is not the cry of a sea bird or the whisper of the wind through the ruins. It is a woman’s voice, singing a hauntingly beautiful and sorrowful melody that is carried over the water on the mist.

The sound is so pure, so full of a defiant strength, it is utterly out of place in this landscape of death and decay. It cuts through the oppressive silence, a single point of light in the overwhelming darkness.

My logical, cautious mind screams at me. “It's a trap,” I hiss. “A siren's call.”

It is a lure meant to draw fools to their doom in this drowned city of monsters. Every instinct for survival, every lesson I have ever learned, tells me to stay hidden, to ignore the sound, to stick to my plan.

But something deeper, an instinct I have always fought to suppress, a gut feeling I have never trusted, pulls me toward the song.

With a curse, I abandon my carefully chosen shelter. “Damn it all,” I snarl into the mist. “Damn my gut.”

I begin to move, not inland, but deeper into the heart of the treacherous, misty ruins, my every step guided by the beautiful, and almost certainly fatal, song.