The ink refused to dry. That was the first sign that the immutable laws of Veridia were beginning to fray.
Ren sat hunched over his high, sloping desk in the Spire of Scribes, the air in the room thick enough to taste. It smelled of sulfur, ancient dust, and the copper tang of terror. His quill trembled in a hand that felt entirely alien to him. The black ink on the vellum page—a transcription of The Lineage of the Glass Kings—was bubbling. It hissed faintly, popping in microscopic bursts, as if the parchment itself were feverish.
But the heat wasn't coming from the paper. It was radiating from Ren's fingertips.
He stared at the words he had been struggling to copy for the last hour. The calligraphy, usually his pride and joy, was warped. The letters seemed to swim across the page, twisting into shapes that looked less like the Common Tongue and more like the jagged, runic warnings carved into the forbidden crypts below the city.
Just a fever, he told himself, the mantra repeating in his head in time with the thumping pulse behind his eyes. Just the summer flu. Stay high up. Stay quiet. The Mages will fix the Prism. They always fix it.
But deep down, in the marrow of his aching bones, Ren knew the Mages weren't fixing anything.
Three days ago, a sound like the sky cracking open had echoed from the Royal Sanctum. It was a sound that had shattered windows across the capital and stopped the hearts of the elderly. Rumors flew through the Spire faster than the messenger drakes: The Great Prism had fractured. The metaphysical seal that had separated Man from Beast for a thousand years had failed. The Primal Aether—raw, chaotic magic from the dawn of time—was flooding the ley lines, wild and unchecked.
Ren dropped the quill. It clattered against the wood, leaving a smear of black blood across the page. He couldn't hold it anymore. His joints felt loose, watery, as if the tough ligaments holding his knees and elbows together were dissolving into jelly.
The heat inside him surged. It wasn't the sweat of a sickness; it was a blinding, internal radiance. It felt as though someone had replaced his blood with molten gold. He gripped the edge of the desk, his knuckles turning white, fighting the urge to scream. The scream was there, lodged in his throat, but it didn't feel like a human scream. It felt… wet. Guttural.
He pushed his chair back, the heavy oak scraping loudly against the stone floor, and dragged himself toward the arched balcony. He needed air. He needed the wind to cool the fire beneath his skin.
The Spire of Scribes was the highest point in the white-stone capital of Veridia, a needle of marble piercing the clouds. Usually, this height offered a silence so profound you could hear the wind whistling through the teeth of the stone gargoyles. It was a place of solitude, of history.
But today, history was ending.
Ren gripped the cold marble railing, gasping for air that choked him with the stench of burning horsehair and alchemical fire. Below him, the capital was laid out like a map of the apocalypse.
The Merchant's Plaza, usually a kaleidoscope of silk stalls, spice merchants, and orderly commerce, had become a slaughterhouse. From four hundred feet up, the people looked like panicked ants, a swarming mass of color colliding with itself.
A carriage had overturned near the central fountain, its wheels spinning lazily in the air. The horses, usually docile draft breeds, had bolted, trampling the crowd in a frenzy. But the crowd wasn't running from the horses. They were running from something else.
Ren narrowed his eyes, fighting the blur in his vision. He focused on a figure in the center of the square.
It was Master Thallows. Ren recognized him by the ridiculous purple velvet doublet he always wore. Thallows was a portly man, a merchant of fine textiles who always gave the scribes a discount on binding cloth. He was a soft man, made of wine and cheese and polite conversation.
Now, Thallows was on his knees in the center of a widening circle of emptiness. A squad of the City Guard, clad in gleaming steel breastplates, had formed a semi-circle around him, their pikes leveled.
Even from this height, Ren could hear the sound. It defied the distance. It was a wet, sickening tearing noise, like a ship's sail ripping in a gale-force wind.
Thallows screamed. It was a sound that started human—high and pitiful—and dropped an octave into a vibrating, bass-heavy roar that shook the pigeons from the eaves of the library tower.
The transformation was a horror of biological rebellion. Thallows' fine velvet tunic shredded at the seams, exploding outward. His spine arched, cracking with the volume of a whip crack, lengthening and thickening. Ren watched, paralyzed by a mixture of revulsion and a magnetic, throbbing heat in his own blood.
Mounds of dense, corded muscle swelled beneath the merchant's skin, snapping his human ribs and reforming them instantly into a barrel chest the size of a wine tun. The pink, soft skin of the merchant blackened, hardening like leather, before dark, iron-colored fur erupted from his pores.
The screaming stopped. Thallows' jaw unhinged, the bone pushing forward, dissolving the weak human chin into a heavy, fanged muzzle designed to crush bone.
The man was gone. The soul was gone. In his place crouched a Silverback—a beast of the southern jungles, but larger, ancient, infused with the glowing blue veins of the Aether.
"Hold the line!" a Guard Captain screamed, his voice thin and tinny, carried on the wind. "Suppress the Wilding! Pikes up!"
The beast didn't even roar. It simply moved.
It was a blur of primal violence that the human eye struggled to track. The Silverback lunged, closing the twenty-foot gap with terrifying speed. It didn't bite; it slapped.
It backhanded the Captain.
The sound echoed up the tower walls—a crisp CRACK of steel crumpling against bone. The armored knight, a man who had trained for war his entire life, was launched into the air like a ragdoll. He crashed into the stone fountain with enough force to crack the granite basin. The water turned pink instantly.
The defensive line broke. The Guards turned to run, abandoning their discipline, but the beast was among them now. It was a hurricane of fur and muscle, tearing through plate armor as if it were parchment.
Ren gripped the railing, his breath coming in short, panicked rasps. The terror in his chest spiked, and with it, the fever.
The sickness crested. It wasn't just heat anymore; it was an unraveling. Ren felt his own DNA unspooling, the double helix fraying under the pressure of the Aether. It was searching for a purchase. It was searching for a shape.
The world tilted gray. The white stone of the tower, the black smoke rising from the lower districts, the blinding blue sky—it all smeared into a single, spinning vertex.
Not me, Ren thought, panic clawing at his throat. Please, not me. I am a scribe. I am not a beast. I have no totem.
He leaned forward over the rail, retching, trying to purge the magic from his gut. He was dizzy, his equilibrium shattered by the rewriting of his inner ear.
He leaned too far.
His sweaty palms slipped on the smooth, rain-slicked marble of the balustrade. His knees, weakened by the Aether sickness, buckled under his own weight.
Ren didn't scream as he tipped over the edge. There was no air left in his lungs to make a sound.
He fell.
Gravity took him with a violent yank. The wind roared in his ears, a deafening rush that drowned out the screams from the plaza. He saw the world rushing past in a blur of gray and blue—stained glass windows depicting saints who could no longer save them, fluttering banners of the King who was likely already dead, the terrified stone faces of gargoyles carving through the wind.
Time didn't slow down. That was a lie the poets told. Time accelerated.
I am going to die, he thought, with a strange, detached clarity. I am dying a scribe, with ink on my fingers and a debt to the tavern keeper.
He hit a stone buttress halfway down.
The impact was catastrophic.
He felt his left arm shatter, the bone snapping like a dry twig against the unforgiving masonry. The force spun him around, ragdolling his body off the stone. He continued his descent, a broken thing tumbling through the air, flailing helplessly.
He slammed into the cobblestones of the lower courtyard.
Everything went black.
There was pain—a white-hot flash that encompassed his entire universe, erasing memory, erasing self. It was a pain so absolute it transcended nerve endings and struck directly at the soul.
And then, silence.
He lay broken in the shadow of the tower. His body was a ruin. His ribs were stove in, a cage of bone collapsed inward, piercing organs. A punctured lung wheezed, a wet, bubbling sound, failing to draw air. His skull throbbed in rhythm with his fading heart. The taste of copper and ash filled his mouth, choking him.
He was a dead boy in a dying city. The darkness closed in from the edges of his vision, a comforting, velvet curtain. He welcomed it. It was better than the fire.
But the darkness didn't last.
A sensation crept into the void. It wasn't the burning heat of the Aether that had plagued him for days. It was cold. Wet. Viscous. It felt like stepping into a mountain spring on a scorching midsummer day, or sinking into cool mud.
It was a presence. Ancient. Simple. Indestructible.
The sensation started in his shattered arm. A violent, intense itching, like a thousand ants marching beneath his skin, or the tingling of a limb that had fallen asleep waking up all at once. It wasn't painful. It was frantic.
Snap.
Ren's eyes flew open.
He gasped—a ragged, wet inhale that suddenly, miraculously, cleared.
The agonizing pressure in his chest vanished. The wet wheeze of his punctured lung ceased, replaced by the cool, greedy intake of oxygen. The blood that had been filling his throat dissipated, absorbed back into tissue that was reweaving itself with impossible speed.
Ren lay on his back, staring up at the smoke-choked sky where dragons now circled like vultures. He blinked. The sky was sharper now. The colors were more vivid, shifting into spectrums he shouldn't be able to see.
He tried to move his left arm. He expected agony. He expected it to be a useless ruin of gristle and splintered bone.
Instead, he watched in morbid fascination.
His sleeve was torn away, revealing the skin beneath. A soft blue light, faint and watery, pulsed beneath his epidermis, moving in rhythmic waves like the tide. The forearm, which had been bent at a sickening ninety-degree angle, snapped straight with a wet pop that made his stomach turn.
It was grotesque. It was beautiful.
The massive purple bruising faded, turning green, then yellow, then vanishing entirely in the span of three heartbeats. The skin looked new, raw, and terrifyingly pristine. It had a slight sheen to it, slightly damp, like the skin of a salamander.
He flexed his fingers. They worked perfectly.
Ren sat up. The movement was fluid, too fluid. He touched his chest. His tunic was soaked in blood—his own blood—a crimson stain that covered his entire torso. But when he pushed his fingers through the tear in the fabric, expecting to feel jagged bone and torn flesh, he felt only smooth, pale skin.
There was no scar. There was no sign he had ever fallen.
He looked at his hands. They were trembling, but the weakness was gone. The fever was gone. The burning gold in his veins had cooled into something fluid, something dormant but aware. He could feel it in the back of his mind—a silent, reptilian consciousness that didn't know fear, only survival.
He stood up, his legs steady on the blood-slicked stones of the courtyard.
Around him, the city continued to burn. The Silverback roared in the distance, tearing through the market, unchecked. The bells of the clocktower had finally stopped, their tolling replaced by the screams of the dying and the crackle of uncontrolled fires.
But Ren felt a strange, terrifying calm wash over him.
He had fallen from the heavens, and the earth had rejected him. Death had looked at him, touched him, and then recoiled.
Ren looked at his reflection in a puddle of rainwater mixed with blood near his boots. The reflection rippled as the ground shook from the beast's rampage.
His face was the same—the sharp jaw, the messy dark hair, the worry lines of a boy who read too much. But his eyes had changed.
Once a dull, scribe's brown, they were now wide, black, and endless. There was no white sclera, only a deep, abyssal void ringed with a faint, bioluminescent gold. They were the eyes of something that lived in the dark. Something that lived in the water.
He wiped the blood from his mouth.
The scribe was dead. The boy who feared the fever was dead. Something else had crawled out of the wreckage of his body. Something that could heal faster than the world could break it.
Ren took a step, and for the first time in his life, he didn't feel small. He felt inevitable.
He turned away from the tower and walked into the burning city.