A hundred thousand years of ash separated the burning sands of the past from the reality of the present. Mia pulled her cloak tighter against her throat as the early winter chill of Beh-REET bit into her skin, a cold that mirrored the Void itself.
She knew the stories of Ne-HE-miah —the treacherous, lush valleys where the trees grew thick enough to block out the sun. But more vividly than the geography, Mia remembered the terrifying flash of twin blades in the arena of the Kal-kal'nor. She remembered the pressure of surviving against a pair of Anai warriors who moved not as two women, but as a single, lethal predator. To ride into a nation of them without understanding their past was not bravery; it was suicide.
Mia descended deep into the belly of the mountain, into the sprawling, subterranean labyrinth known as the Grand Archives.
This was the domain of the Muted Priests. Swathed in heavy gray robes, with their heads shaved and eyes cast perpetually downward, they drifted through the towering shelves of crumbling parchment like ghosts. Their sacred purpose was to preserve the history of the Dragon Line, to guard the memory of the Shadows, and to record the triumphs of the kings.
Mia spent the better part of two hours sifting through the decaying texts, her eyes burning as she traced the flaking ink across centuries of records.
First, she found the slaughter at the Ash-Rock. The priest casualty lists documented the loss of hundreds of soldiers and a disorganized rout where men trampled each other to escape the slaughter. Yet, the official royal decree recorded the massacre as a "brilliant tactical repositioning designed to starve the enemy of a decisive engagement."
Then, she uncovered the destruction of the E'pochs—a fiercely proud tribe of massively strong men whose entire culture revolved around the honor of single combat. The official histories heralded their defeat as a clash of champions, praising the flawless valor of the Son of the First Dragon and the brilliant tactical mind of the war general who had raised him. But the buried supply manifests told a much darker story. The general hadn't allowed the son to meet the E'pochs in honorable combat at all. Recognizing the physical superiority of the enemy, the general had simply ordered the narrow canyons sealed and rained oil-tipped arrows down upon them.
But it was the records immediately following the death of the First Dragon that chilled her the most. Mia unrolled a brittle, ash-stained scroll detailing the immediate aftermath of the War of Darkness. Her eyes scanned the archaic script until she found a passage concerning the Anai.
According to the scroll, the fierce warrior women had recognized the supreme, divine right of the mountain and willingly "bent a knee, serving the Line in their rightful place as the Dragon Line's second." Mia scoffed quietly, the sound loud in the cavernous silence. More of the mountain's vanity, she thought. From what she had seen of the Anai's pride in the arena, they would never willingly kneel to be anyone's "second." It was imperial propaganda.
However, beneath the boastful lies, a single word stood out. It was written in a dialect older than the paper it was inked on, placed carefully in the margins as a title of supreme respect.
Tan-AH-ee.
Mia traced the harsh, phonetic syllables. "Tan-AH-ee," she whispered aloud, tasting the ancient word on her tongue.
Beside her, an elder priest organizing a stack of ledgers suddenly stopped. His frail shoulders hitched, and a visible, violent shudder wracked his thin frame at the sound of the word. He didn't look at her, but his hands trembled as he hurried away down the dark aisle.
"You give them far too much credit, Sand-girl."
Mia turned. Ny'all was leaning against a stone pillar near the entrance of the aisle, her arms crossed over her silk tunic. Even in the dusty gloom of the archives, an amused smirk played on her lips.
"You are looking for ghosts in the dust," Ny'all said. "I fought them in the Kal-kal'nor. They bleed. They make mistakes. They die. I even had to cut a path through their flawless formation just to save your life, remember?"
Mia stood up slowly, brushing the ancient dust from her hands. She looked at Ny'all, her eyes stripping away the playful banter to stare directly at the tactician beneath.
"Did you save me?" Mia asked, her voice calm and level. "Or did you decide to take out a possible threat before it became one you might be unable to handle?"
Ny'all's smirk faltered slightly.
"I remember that fight very clearly," Mia continued, stepping closer to her Sister-Wife. "The Anai were the most dangerous fighters in that arena. By breaking their pairing, you eliminated the only obstacle that could have stopped you from using the trial to secure your own place at his side. I see your logic clearly now, Ny'all. I understand you far better as your sister than I ever did as your opponent."
Mia's words hung in the stale, dust-heavy air.
Ny'all did not offer a quick retort. The amused curve of her lips slowly faded. For a moment, the only sound in the aisle was the distant, dry scratch of an elder priest's quill on parchment.
Ny'all stared across the few feet of stone that separated them. The teasing warmth vanished from her eyes, replaced entirely by the unblinking assessment of a general.
Her jaw ticked once. The casual lean against the pillar ended as she pushed herself upright, the sudden, sharp scrape of her boot heel and the rustle of her silk disrupting the quiet.
"I will go to the lower city," Ny'all said briskly, her tone stripped of any sisterly warmth, shifting entirely to military pragmatism.
"I will secure the essentials for the journey west. I will ready two fast, unmarked horses." She paused, casting a critical eye over Mia's fine palace attire. "And I will find us clothing. If we are riding into Ne-HE-miah , we cannot wear the silk of the royal line."
Without waiting for a response, the Oath-Blade turned on her heel and disappeared into the gloom of the archives, leaving Mia alone with the dust and the echoed whisper of Tan-AH-ee.
Mia turned back to the brittle parchment, her fingers hovering over the faded ink. What did it actually mean? If the archive was built on lies, why preserve this? Mia froze in thought for a long moment, her eyes moving back and forth across the parchments as her mind searched for a thread. Was it because of the ancient conflict that Darius and King Va'lerius spoke of with such grim reverence?
The thought of the Shadows inevitably brought her mind back to Kael.
The memory surfaced, pulling her away from the stone of the capital and back to the blistering sands of her life before she was named the future queen of the Line. She thought of her old master at the Shattered Oasis. Kael the Hermit had not been a gentle teacher; his instruction was a brutal process of erosion. He had systematically stripped a grieving desert woman away until nothing but iron remained.
Mia could almost see him standing in the dust, his grip as dry as the parchment she now held. She remembered the pinpricks of cold that thrummed through his fingers whenever he placed a hand on her shoulder. He was a man defined by his milky, dead eyes—orbs that stared blindly into the campfire yet saw the terrifying truths of the world with agonizing clarity.
It was Kael, speaking in a voice like dry tinder rubbing together, who had first made the myth of the Shadows real to her. He had spoken of the Void, of standing at the precipice where the self dissolves into the dark. He had told her of the First Dragon, calling him a man, a warrior, and a fool who had tried to hold back the ocean with a bucket by becoming the cage for the dark.
Had the Anai witnessed that same impossible struggle? Had they seen the First Dragon reach into the infinite silence to save the world, and bent their knees not to a conqueror, but to a martyr?
Mia stared down at the word Tan-AH-ee. If Kael's ghost stories were true, then the Anai hadn't submitted to an empire of marble and arrogant kings. They had allied with a savior who had shared their bleeding. And if that was the truth, it meant King Va'lerius had entirely misunderstood the foundation of his own throne.
As Mia ran her thumb over the ash-stained parchment, the rough texture snagged against her skin. The scroll was unusually heavy. She held it up to the faint, flickering light of a nearby flame. There was a shadow beneath the text. A second layer of parchment had been adhered against the first, years of dried moisture acting like a glue, concealing whatever was written on the back of the document.
With care, Mia used the edge of her thumbnail to separate the ancient vellum. The dry paper cracked like twigs in the quiet aisle, but mostly held together. As she peeled the backing away, a faded script was revealed. But the page was in a state of ruin. A hundred thousand years in the dark had eaten away at the edges, and entire paragraphs had bled into illegible, smeared shadows. Whole sections were lost to time. Mia read what she could, her eyes straining in the dim light, piecing the fragmented words together.
The first clear translation was Tan-AH-ee. She traced her finger down the fragile page, skipping over massive gaps of rotted parchment, catching only terrifying, disjointed whispers of a history the mountain had tried to bury:
...the Tan-AH-ee...hero of the ash...traitor to the stone...
Mia frowned. Traitor? Why would the founder of the empire be recorded by his own secret historians as a traitor to the mountain? She moved her finger down, squinting at a cluster of runes that were barely more than faded scratches. The words were fragmented, but the implication was devastating. The First Dragon had an heir outside of the capital, hidden in the "western shade."
The western shade. The treacherous, lush valleys of Ne-HE-miah . The Anai didn't just follow the First Dragon; they carried his bloodline. The royal blood of the Beh-REET empire had been split from the very beginning.
Desperate for more, her eyes darted to the final legible cluster of text at the very bottom of the ruined page. The text here was incredibly dense, leaving her with a haunting, incomplete sentence:
...he became the cage... atonement for the...knife...cut...dark...
Mia stared at the words, her brow furrowed in deep confusion. The knife? The cut in the dark? She didn't understand. Kael had said the First Dragon became the cage to save the world from the Shadows. But this fragmented text painted a far more complex picture. It implied the Shadows hadn't just arrived as a natural plague. It implied they were let loose.
She let the scroll slip from her fingers, allowing it to roll up with a dry snap, and tucked it deep into the folds of her cloak.
Ny'all had said they needed to travel as shadows, not queens. But as Mia turned to walk out of the archives, the phantom heat of the desert burning fiercely in her chest, she knew the truth. When they rode into the western valleys to face the Anai, they weren't just proposing a military pact.
They were walking into a family reunion a hundred thousand years in the making.