The Stone patrol passed within ten feet of where Lyra crouched in the rubble.
She held her breath, pressing herself deeper into the shadow of the collapsed wall. Ash covered every inch of her exposed skin her face, her arms, even the backs of her hands. It had to. Even a glimpse of the faint green tint beneath would mean death.
Don't move. Don't breathe. Don't exist.
The mantras had kept her alive for twelve years. They would keep her alive today.
Three Stone warriors walked past, their footsteps heavy and confident. Their gray skin looked like weathered granite in the fading light, and their armor carved from a single piece of mountain rock barely showed a scratch despite years of war. One of them laughed at something Lyra couldn't hear, a sound like grinding boulders.
She watched them through a crack in the wall, her amber eyes tracking their movement with the predatory focus she'd learned to cultivate. The tallest one carried a spear with a wickedly sharp obsidian point. The kind of spear that had gone through her mother's chest while Lyra hid in the roots of a burning tree, twelve years old and frozen with terror.
Her fingers curled into fists. The ash on her knuckles cracked.
Not yet. You're not strong enough yet. Not ready.
The warriors passed. Their voices faded into the constant background noise of the Stone district hammers on metal, shouted orders, the grinding of stone on stone. Lyra finally allowed herself to breathe.
She waited another five minutes, counting her heartbeats the way her father had taught her. Always count to three hundred after they pass, he'd said, in another life, in another world. Patience is the difference between living and dying.
At three hundred, she moved.
The building she'd been hiding in was one of many that lined the border between Stone and Wind territories. It had been a marketplace once, back when the four civilizations traded instead of fought. Now it was just another ruin, its roof collapsed and its walls held together by stubbornness and old mortar.
Lyra climbed through the wreckage with practiced silence, her movements economical and precise. Twelve years of hiding had taught her to be a ghost. Twelve years of surviving among her people's murderers had taught her to become invisible.
She emerged into a narrow alley as the sun set behind the jagged mountains of the Stone homeland. The sky turned the color of blood and bruises fitting, she thought. Everything on Teravyn was blood and bruises now.
Her destination was three streets over: a condemned building that had once been a library. The Stone Civilization had no use for books. They valued strength, not knowledge. Which made it the perfect place to hide the things Lyra needed to find.
She moved through the streets like smoke, keeping to shadows and alcoves. Other figures moved through the district mostly Stone, but she spotted a few Water refugees with their blue-tinted skin, and even one Wind nomad with his characteristic tall, lean build. The war had displaced everyone. Even here, deep in Stone territory, the population was a mix of survivors and conquerors.
No one looked at her twice. She was just another war orphan, her face covered in the gray ash that everyone wore to protect against the dust storms that plagued the borderlands. Her ragged clothes and thin frame made her forgettable.
Good. Forgettable keeps you alive.
The library appeared ahead, its entrance barricaded with fallen stones. Lyra circled to the back, where she'd left a hidden entry point three days ago. The gap was still there, barely wide enough for her to squeeze through.
Inside, the library was dark and smelled of mold and decay. Shelves had collapsed like dominoes, spilling books that no one would ever read again across the floor. Some had been burned for fuel during the harsh winter. Others had simply rotted.
But in the basement, protected by layers of stone and earth, was what Lyra had been searching for: the restricted archives.
She lit a small oil lamp she'd stolen two weeks ago and made her way down the crumbling stairs. Her heart beat faster now, not from fear but from hope—that dangerous, treacherous emotion she kept trying to kill but couldn't quite manage.
The archives had survived because no one cared about them. Stone warriors didn't read. They certainly didn't preserve the historical records of a dead civilization.
But Lyra did.
She'd been searching for three months, ever since she'd heard a rumor from a dying Water scholar. The scholar had been in the plaza when Stone warriors had executed him for speaking against Commander Kragg. Lyra had been in the crowd, invisible as always. And as the scholar fell, bleeding out on the stone pavement, he'd whispered something that changed everything:
"The King came through a door between worlds. It opens with the full moon. The old texts... they say where..."
Then he'd died.
For three months, Lyra had hunted through every remaining archive, every forgotten library, every scrap of preserved history she could find. The King the human who had ruled Teravyn for twenty years, who had kept the peace between the civilizations, who had abandoned them and let everything fall apart he had come from somewhere. Another world. Through something the old texts called a "wormhole."
And if he could travel to Teravyn, then she could travel to wherever he came from.
She could find him.
She could bring him back.
She could save what was left of her people.
If any of them are even left.
Lyra pushed the thought away. She'd learned not to think about the other survivors—if there were any. Hope was dangerous enough without adding impossible dreams to it.
The archive room was small, its walls lined with stone shelves carved directly into the rock. Books and scrolls filled every available space, covered in decades of dust. Lyra set her lamp on a table and began to search.
She'd developed a system. Start with the oldest texts first the ones written before the King arrived. Look for anything about astronomy, about portals, about lights in the sky. The King hadn't appeared by magic. He'd arrived through science. Which meant there had to be a pattern. A way to predict when and where the wormhole would open.
Hours passed. Lyra's eyes burned from reading by lamplight. Her back ached from hunching over ancient texts written in the flowing script of the old Plant scholars her people's script, the one she'd had to teach herself because there was no one left to teach her.
Then she found it.
It was a journal, tucked between two larger volumes, its leather cover cracked with age. The author's name was written on the first page in elegant handwriting: Keeper Silvan Verdell, Astronomer of the Green Court.
Lyra's breath caught. Verdell. Her family name. This was one of her ancestors.
Her hands trembled as she turned the pages. Silvan had been alive when the King arrived. He'd documented it:
Fifteenth day of the Harvest Moon, Year 823:
A light appeared in the northern sky tonight. Not a star something else. A tear in the fabric of the world itself. We watched it for three hours before something emerged: a man, falling through the air, screaming.
He would have died, but the Wind caught him. They brought him to the Green Court, confused and terrified. He spoke in a language none of us understood.
But he learned quickly. Within a month, he could speak our tongue. Within a year, he'd begun to change everything.
He called the tear in the sky a "wormhole." He said it connected our world to his. He called his world "Earth."
Lyra's heart pounded. She flipped through more pages, scanning desperately for anything about the wormhole's pattern.
And then, buried in an entry from three years after the King's arrival:
The King believes the wormhole follows a pattern. He's spent three years studying our moons, our magnetic fields, our atmospheric conditions. He believes it opens during the full moon of the Harvest season, but only when certain magnetic anomalies align.
He's built a device to detect these anomalies. He calls it a "detector." He says one day, he'll use it to return home.
But he hasn't left yet. I wonder if he ever will. He's found something here that his Earth could never give him: purpose. Power. A chance to build something that matters.
Or perhaps he's simply fallen in love with Teravyn the way we have all fallen in love with him.
The entry ended there. Lyra flipped forward, but the next several pages had been torn out. She cursed under her breath.
But it was enough. The full moon of Harvest season. Magnetic anomalies.
She pulled out a small, battered notebook from her jacket the one where she'd been tracking moon phases and her own observations of the strange lights that occasionally appeared in the northern sky. Lights that most people ignored but that Lyra had been cataloging obsessively.
The pattern was there. Faint, but there.
The full moon was in three days.
And if her calculations were correct, the magnetic anomalies would peak in the northern borderlands, near the ruins of the old Wind observatory.
Three days. She had three days to get there, to be ready, to
A sound echoed through the library above her. Footsteps. Heavy. Multiple people.
Lyra's blood turned to ice.
She killed the lamp instantly, plunging the room into darkness. Her other senses sharpened in compensation. She could hear them now at least four, maybe five. Stone warriors, from the weight of their steps.
How did they find me?
It didn't matter. She grabbed the journal, shoved it into her jacket, and looked for an exit.
The archives had only one entrance. She was trapped.
The footsteps grew louder, descending the stairs. A harsh voice echoed through the darkness: "Someone's been here recently. Search everything."
Lyra's mind raced. The walls were solid stone no way through. The ceiling was reinforced rock. The only way out was through the door they were currently blocking.
She felt along the wall, searching desperately for anything a crack, a weak point, anything—
Her fingers brushed against something strange. A seam in the stone, almost invisible. An old ventilation shaft, maybe, or a drainage tunnel.
It was barely wide enough for her to fit through. And it would be loud the stone would scrape, would alert them
Light flooded the archives as the warriors entered with torches.
Lyra didn't hesitate. She drove her fist into the weakest part of the seam, letting her suppressed power surge through her for just a moment. Thorns erupted from her knuckles sharp, green, deadly. They cracked the ancient stone.
She ripped the opening wider and dove through as shouts erupted behind her.
"There! Plant!"
The word was a death sentence. After twelve years of hiding, of being invisible, of being no one
They knew.
Lyra scrambled through the narrow tunnel, her shoulders scraping against rough stone. Behind her, she heard the warriors trying to follow, cursing as they realized they were too large to fit.
"Collapse it!" one shouted. "Bring the whole thing down!"
The ground shook. Stone began to fall.
Lyra ran.
The tunnel sloped upward she was heading for the surface. Her lungs burned. Her hands were bleeding where the thorns had emerged, the green of her true skin visible beneath the blood and ash.
Ahead, she saw moonlight.
She burst out of the tunnel into the street just as the library collapsed behind her in a roar of falling stone. Dust billowed out, covering everything.
Lyra ran through the chaos, her mind focused on one thing: Three days. Northern borderlands. The wormhole.
She had to survive three more days.
Then she would find the King.
Then she would save her people.
Then everything would finally, finally be right again.
She disappeared into the streets of the Stone district, just another refugee running from falling buildings, just another survivor in a world of survivors.
But beneath the ash and blood, beneath twelve years of hiding and fear, Lyra Verdell the last daughter of the Plant Civilization smiled.
She'd found it. She'd found the way.
And in three days, she would walk through a door between worlds.