Furyborn (The Empirium Trilogy Book 1)

“Whatever tomorrow may bring, the world will remember this as the day Astavar stood its ground against a great evil and fought for its fallen sister kingdoms until there was no more fight to give.”

—Speech from Tavik and Eri Amaruk, kings of Astavar, to their army

August 16, Year 1018 of the Third Age

Eliana jumped off the ship and into the lifeboat, landed hard on her knees, then used Tuora and Tempest to hack through the boat’s load lines.

Once they were free, she grabbed the oars and started rowing. Gunfire struck the water on either side of them. Adatrox crowded the ship’s railing, guns sparking with every shot.

Eliana ducked as a bullet shot past her ear and yanked Simon down by his collar. Cannon fire slammed into the water nearby, rocking the boat and splashing them with a frigid spray.

At Simon’s hissed curse, Eliana spared a glance for his bloodied torso. She had grabbed him a jacket and sword from one of the adatrox she’d slain while securing their boat, but a jacket and sword would do him no good if she couldn’t get him to a healer—and fast.

Once out of the adatroxes’ firing range, Eliana passed the oars to Simon. “Can you row? Just for a minute.”

“I’ll row for as long as you need me to,” he replied.

She hurried to the front of the boat, crouched beside Simon, and scanned the water ahead.

“Maybe five hundred more yards,” she said, “through these icebergs, and then I think I see a path to shore.”

“You see a path of what, exactly?”

“Ice. Some rocks too.”

“Ah. No problem at all, for a newly blinded man to skip across the water on such a path.”

She couldn’t help a smile. “I’ll help you. So will Zahra.”

“Eliana?” Zahra’s stricken voice made Eliana turn. “Something’s happening.”

“What?” Eliana squinted across the black water. The Empire fleet—thirty vessels, most of them massive warships—were moving into a long line along the thinning ice. “What are they doing?”

“Describe it to me,” Simon said.

“They’re gathering beside the ice in a line, one right after the other, their prows facing north.” Eliana couldn’t make sense of the maneuver. “It’s like they’re making a barrier between the ice and the open water. A blockade?”

“And they’ve stopped firing,” Zahra observed.

With a scraping thud, the lifeboat rammed into a low slab of ice. Eliana climbed out at once and held the boat fast, Zahra floating beside her.

“Climb out over here,” Eliana instructed.

Simon fumbled to find the stolen adatrox sword and obeyed, slowly feeling his way out of the boat. Eliana guided him across the ice, then over a narrow gap of dark water to another huge slab.

Simon looked out at the fleet with reddened eyes. “Why have they stopped firing?”

“I don’t know, but we should take advantage of it and hurry.”

But then, just as Zahra let out a sharp cry of despair, a low horn blasted across the water. As one, entire sections of the warships’ hulls fell open and slammed down onto the ice. A wave of darkness tumbled out and started galloping madly for shore. Discordant, shrill cries filled the air—howls, half-formed words, screams of fury.

Eliana’s blood ran colder than the ice now quaking under her feet. She knew those sounds, from her time in the Fidelia labs.

“What is that?” Simon tensed beside her. “Eliana, tell me what’s happening.”

“Crawlers!” Zahra shoved through Eliana’s shoulders. “We must go, my queen!”

But Eliana stood frozen. She watched the creatures barreling toward them across the ice. They moved so quickly, half running, half crawling, their limbs turning unnaturally with every stride.

“Fidelia,” Eliana whispered, taking two unsteady steps back. It was just as Zahra had said: Fidelia had turned the stolen women of Ventera into monsters.

Zahra stretched to her fullest, darkest height and roared, “Run!”

Eliana spun, slid and fell, hit her jaw on the ice. She scrambled back to her feet, found Simon, grabbed his hand.

“Can you see at all?” she cried over the approaching din. Alarm bells rang across the Astavari ships. Their cannon fire resumed, blasting a dozen new holes in the ice before the encroaching wave of crawlers.

“Just run,” Simon shouted at her. “And don’t look back!”

He tried to shake her off, but she held fast. “I’m not leaving you here!”

“I’ll keep up, now move!”

She turned and ran, Simon on her heels. Zahra flew ahead of them across the ice, seeking the safest path.

“Left!” she cried, directing them around a thin patch of ice. “Jump!”

Eliana threw herself off a ridge of ice and onto another slab a few feet away.

“Simon, here!” she cried over her shoulder. “Follow my voice!”

He jumped onto the ice beside her. It rocked violently, sent them both sliding. Eliana stabbed Arabeth into the ice and grabbed Simon’s shirt with her other hand. His weight yanked hard on her muscles. She cried out in pain, clung to her dagger with every ounce of strength she possessed.

Simon scrabbled up the ice beside her, tipping the ice level once more.

A dark shape flew over their heads, landing hard a few feet away.

Eliana looked up in horror as a stream of crawlers raced by. Their heads were human enough—but misshapen and approaching bestial—with sharpened teeth spilling out of broken jaws. Faded scraps of clothing clung to their bodies, and the patches of skin Eliana could see were spotted with scales, patches of scraggly dark fur. They sniffed the air like hounds. Thick, pointed fingernails stabbed the ice.

All those women, snatched while they slept, taken from their beds and their homes and their loved ones, and made into this.

It was an unthinkable fate—and the one awaiting her mother if she couldn’t find her in time.

Two crawlers slammed into the ice, then spun around and raced right for Eliana.

Zahra cried out, her form flickering out of sight. “This way!”

Eliana turned and ran. On all sides, a sea of howling crawlers raced for the shore. Cannon fire hit the ice. The impact blew the pursuing crawlers behind them into pieces.

Ears ringing, Eliana turned. Simon? Still there, his sword out and ready, his hair frosted with ice. Eliana followed Zahra’s shimmering path over a shifting, dark gap between icebergs, along a ridge of icy rocks, across a long, flat stretch of frozen white.

Then, Zahra’s form shuddered and disappeared.

Eliana stumbled, her ears ringing with panic.

“Keep running!” Simon shouted.

“Zahra?” Eliana cried. “Where are you?”

The wraith swooped alongside her, a faint distortion in the air. “I’m sorry, my queen. I can barely hold myself together!”

“Go to the fleet, tell them we’re out here!” Another blast exploded just ahead of them. Eliana skidded to a halt, shoved Simon to the ground. Shards of ice and bodies went flying. Fiery sparks rained down upon them. “And for God’s sake, tell them to stop firing at us!”

Zahra fled.

Eliana looked back over Simon’s head to see a group of four crawlers crouching on an icy ridge a few feet away.

One of them, hair a dark matted mess, pawed the ice with a bulbous hand.

“Simon,” Eliana muttered, “get to your feet, slowly.”

He obeyed. Together they took a few slow steps back.

Then the lead crawler let out a baying howl. The four of them leapt across the water, teeth bared. They moved like roaches—fast, erratic. Simon brought his sword down hard on the neck of one; its head flew off into the water. Another slammed into him, knocking him flat.

A third reared up, nails bared. Eliana ducked the blow, then stabbed it in the stomach. As it fell, she yanked Arabeth free and whirled, flung the dagger between the shoulder blades of the creature hissing on Simon’s chest. It roared in pain and fell to the ground.

Eliana turned, reached for Whistler. But the fourth crawler with the tangled dark hair was nowhere to be found.

Eliana raced over to Simon, yanked Arabeth from the crawler’s twitching body, and kept running.

“This way!” she called, but Simon was already behind her, his breath labored in the air. “Are you all right?”

“Splendid,” came his strained reply.

Crawlers scrambled across the ice on all sides. Hundreds, Eliana thought. Maybe thousands.

Gunfire split the air in two, followed by terrified human cries. She looked to the west. Some of the creatures had made it ashore. They slithered onto the beach from the water like sea monsters come to ground. The Astavari army engaged them with revolvers and swords, but the crawlers kept coming.

A shadow fell over her as they ran. She looked up. They’d reached the Astavari fleet—small, elegant ships, each mast a hundred feet in the air. Crawlers swarmed the nearest one, tearing sails from their masts and tackling Astavari soldiers to the decks.

“Almost there,” she shouted over the sounds of death and gunfire, howls and snapping wood. “Stay with me, Simon!”

They slid down the sharp incline of an iceberg and ran out onto a long, flat slab, now past the Astavari fleet and only a few hundreds yards from the shore. Simon’s knees buckled. He cried out in pain.

A brutal weight slammed into them from behind, knocking them both far across the ice.

Eliana’s vision faded, then flared back to life. She looked up, woozy.

A crawler had Simon pinned to the ice. It was the crawler from before, with those piles of matted dark hair. Its teeth—her teeth—gnashed just above his throat. He twisted away from her, punched her square in the jaw. She cried out, a garbled, familiar word that Eliana recognized as a Venteran curse.

Eliana jumped onto the crawler. She knocked her aside with one monstrous arm. Eliana sprang back to her feet just as Simon rolled away and sliced his sword across the crawler’s side.

The crawler screamed in agony, clutching her wound. Her hand was bulbous, malformed, and covered in oozing sores. Eliana saw the same markings that now stained Navi’s body and felt a rush of pity.

As she hesitated, the crawler looked up—and Eliana at last saw her bruised face in full view.

A thousand memories flew at Eliana in the span of a few seconds:

Sitting beside Rozen at home, Remy in her lap. Rozen holding open a book of children’s stories so that Eliana could read them aloud to her baby brother—stories of the seven saints and the animals that carried them into battle against the angels.

Rozen, finding Eliana sobbing in her bed in the middle of the night. The invasion had taken their kingdom, and her father had not come home.

Rozen teaching Eliana how to fight, how to lie, how to kill.

Now, standing half alive on the ice, Eliana looked for Rozen Ferracora in the crawler’s disfigured face, the angry world howling around her.

“Mother?” She placed the hand gripping Arabeth against her chest. A dull roar filled her ears, pulsing with the beat of her heart. “It’s me. It’s…Eliana.”

The crawler blinked, croaked something unintelligible. Then she snarled and lunged for Eliana.

Simon crashed into the creature, wrestled her to the ground, raised his sword.

“Wait!” Eliana cried. “Don’t hurt her!”

But then the crawler twisted out of Simon’s grip, struck him across the face.

Simon fell, his sword flying across the ice and into the water. The crawler pounced with bared teeth. Her fist, run through with metal spikes rimmed in infected flesh, punched the ground beside Simon’s face.

“Eliana!” Simon roared, dodging her. “Get out of here!”

But Eliana was already moving.

She ran, tears muddling her vision, and just when the crawler reared back to strike Simon with a killing blow, Eliana plunged Arabeth into her stomach.

Blood gushed out over her hand. The crawler jerked, choked, slid off Simon and onto the ice.

Eliana sank to her knees at the crawler’s side and watched as her last breaths seized her. With each harsh inhale, intelligence returned to her darkening eyes.

“I know that knife,” she gasped, her words broken, rattling, hardly comprehensible. But Eliana heard the threads of a familiar voice buried inside and was no longer afraid. “I know that face.”

Rozen brought a shaking hand to Eliana’s cheek, her own skin rough with scaly sores.

“Finish it,” Rozen pleaded, a wet cough seizing her. “Please…sweet girl.”

Eliana brushed a kiss across her swollen, fevered forehead and whispered through her tears, “I love you.”

Then she sank Arabeth into the side of Rozen’s throat and watched the light leave her bloodshot eyes.

• • •

Eliana’s head buzzed. Her breath came fast and thin. The world rolled away from her, then surged back and clawed away her air.

An immense rage was building inside her—hotter and blacker than any vicious urge that had ever sent her flying into a fight.

The battlefield roared around her, a symphony of explosions and agonized cries. Fire arced overhead—bombardiers, ignited and ready to explode, soaring for the beach. Crawlers surged out of the water, dragging Astavari soldiers under.

“Eliana,” Simon said, very near, “we have to move.”

His voice, firm but exceedingly gentle, was the thing that broke her.

She screamed.

The world screamed with her.

• • •

For a moment—brief but wild and impossible to understand—Eliana saw everything:

The ice, sky, and water flared to life, and she saw it all for what it was: a veil, nothing more. A covering hiding something incredible and divine.

Time slowed.

She saw herself, and Simon, both of them shivering and bloodied. She saw the beach being swarmed by monsters and the prows of the Empire fleet carving through the ice. She heard the Astavari soldiers’ cries for help, and she thought she heard Prince Malik Amaruk shouting orders for those fighting on the beach. She thought she heard Remy, hidden in Navi’s castle, whisper, “Eliana, please be all right.”

And she thought she heard a voice drift across the ocean to tell her, I felt that, Eliana. You can’t hide from me now.

Unseeing and all-seeing, Eliana stared at the exploding, frigid world around her.

Icy fingers of grief closed around her throat.

It will consume you. Her mother’s voice. A memory now and nothing more.

She dropped to her knees. Shoved Simon’s hands away, uttered a wordless protest.

I will not be consumed.

Then she slammed her fists hard against the ice and buckled over, struggling to breathe.

The noises of the battle around her fell away. She existed in a cocoon—the water lapping at the ice, the ice hot with her mother’s blood, the blood slick on her clenched palms.

The water rumbled, shifting. The ice cracked open. Rozen’s body slid into the water and disappeared. A dim percussive noise struck the air. Bright lights flashed—angry and too many.

A muffled shout pulled her out of whatever place she’d gone.

She blinked. Blinked again.

Simon pulled her to her feet. “You’re burning up. Come on, let’s move. God, Eliana, what did you do?”

She didn’t answer, didn’t know the answer. A charged feeling tugged at her hands, nipped across her skin.

They plunged into frigid, knee-high water. She watched her feet wade through a black ocean thick with chunks of ice, felt her boots slide through mud.

“Eliana, stop!”

She stood on shifting sand, water lapping at her toes. The shore.

“Look at me!” Simon was shouting at her, but the field of light beyond her eyes was too bright, too terrible. She squinted her eyes shut and turned into him. Her body could no longer hold itself up. She sagged to the ground, and Simon went with her, holding her in his arms. The wind howled around them, whipping ice and sand against her skin.

“What’s happening?” she murmured. A brutal coughing fit seized her. Every bone in her body ached, every muscle burned.

A cold hand smoothed the hair back from her forehead. “Look at what you’re doing, Eliana. I need you to open your eyes for me, come on.”

She forced open her eyes and looked out to sea.

Lightning flashed, three new strikes every second, painting the battlefield a fevered silver. They blasted apart the crawlers still swimming to shore; icebergs erupted into flame. Roiling dark waves crashed against the Empire fleet. A savage wind whipped sails from their masts, stirred the sea into whirlpools that sucked the warships underwater and snapped them in two.

“You have to stop it,” Simon shouted over the wind.

“Am I doing this?” she murmured, then realized she wasn’t breathing, that the storm had sucked all the air from her lungs. Her gasp hurt, cleaved her chest in two.

Simon’s hands cupped her face, steadying her. “Please, Eliana, look at me, look into my eyes.”

She did, sobs she didn’t intend to release tearing out of her throat. “I killed her. I couldn’t save her!”

“I know.” He wiped the grit from her face. “And I’m sorry. But you have to stop this now, or you’ll kill us all.”

She shook her head, realizing through the frantic roar of her despair that somehow she was doing this, that the world was echoing her own rage. Zahra was right, and so was Simon. There was an impossible thing living inside her. She had always thought it a monster of her own creation, forged by the violence she had done to survive.

But the truth was this: It was a monster given to her by her mother. The Blood Queen. The Kingsbane. A traitor and a liar.

And Eliana decided, in that moment, to hate her.

“I don’t know how to stop it,” she cried. Her fingers blazed along with the storm; the feeling revolted her. She watched ships being torn apart, soldiers swimming for their lives. Black waves surged toward the shore.

“Just hold on to me,” Simon whispered, cradling her against his chest. “Hold on to me and think of Remy. Think of Navi.” He pressed his cold cheek to her forehead. “Think of home.”

Home. And what was home to her now? Orline? Or Celdaria?

With the storm raging, she could remember neither place.

Instead she listened to Simon’s wild heartbeat, imagined Remy’s voice reading her a story before sleep, and breathed.