Emmet opened his eyes to fire. Wild tongues of orange flame licked at a sky drowned in black smoke. The air trembled with unfamiliar noise—clashing metal, roars of defiance, and cries of pain. Cool mud pressed against his back. His palms had sunk into soft earth. Only moments earlier, he had been lying on smooth spirit-matter, examiners encircling him beneath the steady, watchful light of the Orr.
Now, there was chaos.
He blinked, hoping the world would reset, but nothing changed. Dismayed, he pushed himself upright, swaying as the scene lurched into focus. He stood in a field gouged by trenches and torn earth, the ground churned into a dark mixture of mud and ash. The skeletal remains of Old World structures leaned at crooked angles, their splintered beams feeding the blaze.
Figures ran through the smoke. Some wore armor blackened by soot; others wore plain cloth, torn and soaked with a red liquid he recognized from his readings—blood. Many carried Old World weapons, light reflecting along blades and spearheads as they struck, each flash followed by a cry that twisted into a scream. Everywhere he looked, people fell.
“What kind of trial is this?” Emmet muttered, frowning in confusion as he watched. A man stumbled nearby, clutching his chest. He dropped to his knees, then toppled onto his side, eyes fixed and unblinking. The light of life did not embrace his still form.
Emmet stared, too scared to accept the truth rising in the back of his mind.
He waited, half expecting the man to groan, to rise with an embarrassed shake of the head, to laugh at his own clumsiness, but the man did not move.
A second figure crashed to the ground nearby. She sprawled face-down, an arrow protruding from her back. Her hand twitched once, then stilled. Like the man, no gentle light wrapped her body. The two of them lay there as if in some senseless sleep.
Emmet walked slowly to her side.
“Do you need help?” he asked, the words hollow in his mouth. She gave no answer. He stared at the arrow embedded in her back, refusing to accept what he was seeing, and with a quick, instinctive motion—as if removing it might wake her—pulled it free. He regretted it instantly.
Dark red welled from the wound, pooling in the mud. The sight was so absurd, so fundamentally wrong, that he found himself staring, stunned. Flesh was not meant to open. Not anymore.
He was immortal, yet he knew the stories, how death had ruled the world nearly a millennium ago, before the Orr cast it out. A chill crept along his spine as the truth pressed past his denial.
He was in the Old World, and death still reigned here.
His mind whirled, trying to comprehend the idea of a life coming to an end. He widened his gaze and saw that the man and woman were only two among hundreds of lightless, motionless forms scattered across the field.
A strange sensation gripped his chest, a foreign sadness, and tears blurred his vision as understanding pressed in. He had seen re-creations in the teaching halls of the High Sanctum, carefully curated memories of the Old World projected as harmless light. Those had been distant, contained, softened by a lecturer’s calm explanation.
This was nothing like those. This was worse. This was the concept made real. His instructors had told him he would face something shaped from memory, something meant to judge his readiness to ascend, to wield the Orr’s power.
But this?
“This is the trial?” he shouted toward the smoky sky, anger warring with grief. He searched for the Orr’s steady radiance, but no light greeted him. Of course it didn’t. He was in a trial. Only fire lit the horrific scene around him, casting a dimness he had never known.
A sudden clatter of footsteps and clinking metal snapped his attention aside. A man, taller than Emmet and clad in filthy armor beneath a dented helm, charged at him with a raised sword.
“What are you doing?” Emmet asked, bewildered. The man answered only with a savage cry. The sword swung through the air, but Emmet made no effort to flee. The blade struck his side and bounced off with a dull reverberation, knocking him off balance and leaving a gash only in his robes.
“You don’t have to do this!” Emmet demanded, motioning sharply to the carnage around them. “Don’t you know life is sacred?”
The man gave Emmet a wild, albeit confused, look, then plunged the tip of his sword at Emmet’s chest. Again, it bounced off, sending Emmet stumbling back a few steps.
“You must stop!” Emmet screamed, motioning at the field, ignoring the new cuts in his robes. The man’s eyes widened in shock, as if he wasn’t sure what Emmet was, and then he turned and fled, rushing back toward a cluster of fighting men in the haze.
A scream snapped his head to the right. A boy lay in the mud, younger than Emmet by a handful of years, chest heaving, one leg bent at a sickening angle. He clawed at the ground, fingers slipping through wet earth, eyes wild with fear.
An arrow struck the ground by the boy’s feet, and Emmet’s body moved before his mind caught up.
He ran, as projectiles continued to fall from the sky, his only thought of shielding the boy. The sound of the boy’s screams was unlike anything Emmet had ever heard. Physical pain itself was a foreign thing to him, yet he knew, instinctively, that he needed to help.
He slid to his knees beside him.
“Hey,” Emmet said softly. “I’m here.”
The boy’s gaze snapped toward him, unfocused. His lips worked around sound, but no words came. A dark line of red crossed his ribs where something had torn through cloth and skin. The color was wrong. It was too deep, too heavy, a shade meant to remain hidden inside the body.
Emmet pressed his hands to the wound, unsure if it was the right thing to do. An arrow bounced harmlessly off his back. He barely felt it.
“You’re going to be—” The words failed him. There was no glow rising around the boy as he writhed and groaned. He was all too mortal.I have to do something.
He summoned the light within him. His palms glowed with gentle radiance, illuminating the boy’s trembling form. Emmet tried to guide that light into him, to share what every immortal carried.
Nothing happened.
The glow flickered, then faded back to the dull aura around Emmet’s own body just as the boy’s breath hitched. A ragged sound escaped him—half gasp, half pleading. Tears carved clean tracks through the grime on his cheeks.
“Don’t worry,” Emmet whispered again, not knowing what else to say. “I’ll get help.”
Another arrow struck his shoulder, bouncing off harmlessly. The boy didn’t notice. Emmet took courage from that, for he was helping, though he feared his presence was prolonging the pain, not curing. Emmet gritted his teeth in frustration. He’d thought the trial would test his knowledge. His control. His ability to shape light, to reason, to perceive. But this? He was woefully unprepared for this.
He shifted through his knowledge of anatomy, of biology, of how the body worked—he knew it all, knew how everything ought to work—but he had not yet ascended, and he lacked the power to restore. A panicked breath escaped him, realizing that even with all his knowledge, he did not know the first thing about healing a mortal wound.
“Help!” Emmet cried, his voice weak from emotion that threatened to overwhelm.
He cast his gaze around, looking for anyone who could help the boy. A man fell ten paces away, struck in the back by an arrow, and lay still. Emmet looked from the man to the boy and to the countless bodies scattered like discarded garments across the ruined village and field.
They’re not getting up, he thought in horror, the reality of the situation settling over his mind like a veil of darkness over light. He felt his breath quicken as he realized the impossible truth.
Death was spoken of in hushed tones by Feivel and the other Ancients as a concept framed as before—before the Orr, before immortality. But he had never seen it. At least, not like this.
The boy’s breath faltered. His hand fumbled for Emmet’s wrist, grip weak and trembling, smearing red across Emmet’s skin.
“Don’t—” the boy gasped. “Don’t let me—”
His chest seized. His eyes widened… and then emptied, as if something had left him. Emmet felt it. One heartbeat it was there; the next, it was gone, leaving the space between them hollow, as if a note had vanished from the world’s music.
“No.” Emmet clutched the boy’s hand as it went slack. “No, stay. You can’t just—”
His throat tightened. Heat surged behind his eyes.
The boy was gone.
Never in his three decades of life beneath the Orr had Emmet known a person to cease existing. It wasn’t possible. Immortals were constantly renewed by spirit. They would never meet their end, never slide into stillness.
Not like this boy had.
The field around him wavered as though heat distorted the very air. Emmet bowed his head, shoulders trembling from the simple, unbearable truth that something precious had slipped beyond reach.
Sadness moved through him with startling clarity, an ache for the boy whose name he did not know, for the man who had collapsed with his hand pressed uselessly over a mortal wound, for the woman who would never rise again. He understood nothing of the cause of this battle, nothing of who fought whom or why; he understood only that life was being taken, and the loss of it pressed on the air like a storm about to break.
“That’s enough,” a voice said.
Emmet lifted his head at once. No figure stood above him. The battle continued as though no sound had been uttered. Yet the air itself seemed to tighten around the words, carrying a clean resonance that didn’t belong to this place. After a moment, he recognized the voice as Matra’s, one of his examiners.
“Then stop this,” Emmet said, his voice uneven as he looked upward, searching the smoke-choked sky. For a brief moment, he glimpsed the Orr shining through the illusion with a distant, unwavering brilliance, as though its light threaded through seams he could not see.
“End it,” he said. “I’ve had enough of this nightmare.”
The only reply was a ripple that shuddered the air, causing Emmet to pause uncertainly.
That’s odd… he thought.
Something struck his side with sudden force. He felt the pressure, the blunt scrape of painless impact, but also felt a moist sensation.
He set the boy’s limp hand gently on the ground, then touched his side. His breath caught as his fingers brushed torn cloth, then met something rigid and impossible.
Emmet froze. An arrow had pierced him. There was no pain, yet he was stunned by the sheer presence of it. Warmth spread beneath his palm, slow and undeniable, and when he looked down, he saw blood gathering at his side, bright and thick, rolling in warm ribbons over his hip.
A chill crept along his spine.
This shouldn’t be possible, he thought. I’m in the trial chamber. My body lies beneath the Orr. This is shaped light, nothing more.
But the blood did not flicker. It did not dissolve. It slid down his thigh in heavy drops that darkened the soil, joining the boy’s mortal blood in the mud beside him.
This has to be part of the trial, he thought. But wasn’t the trial supposed to be over at the sound of Matra’s voice?
“End it!” he called again, louder, though the battle gave no sign of hearing him.
He rose unsteadily, glancing back for the attacker, when a low vibration stirred the air, a subtle trembling that hummed through his teeth and into the bones of his jaw. The light above wavered, as though some unseen veil brushed across the surface of the Orr, and for a moment the entire battlefield dimmed. Flames lost their ferocity and faces blurred at the edges. Even sound seemed to flatten, as if the world had taken a long, uncertain breath.
And in that muted breath, he saw it.
Near the base of the flames, a darkness gathered—darker than smoke, darker than the shadows cast by fire, a quiet, coiling presence that rolled along the ground like a slow, unnatural mist. It did not reveal itself fully; it lingered at the margins, half-formed, more suggestion than shape.
Emmet froze. This was not merely death as the Old World had known it—silent, final, woven into mortal flesh. This was something else. Something cast out, gathered, and given form. It was no simple absence of light. This was Khoshmar, the banished form of death itself, the darkness cast out by the Orr long ago, held at bay by its radiance and barred from the lands of immortals.
In a panic, Emmet searched the sky for the Orr again, but it was nowhere in sight.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Emmet whispered, voice trembling. He was unsure whether he spoke to the darkness or to himself.
Within the swirling shadow, something shifted. It was an impression more than a form, as if the idea of a hand reached toward him, not a true hand, not flesh nor spirit, but the mere outline of it, like a thought given contour.
Emmet’s pulse quickened with fear.He tried to raise his hand, to summon the light within him that was supposed to be able to push back such darkness, but nothing happened.
Khoshmar moved forward, stretching the shadow from the flames beyond their bounds, and Emmet staggered backward, tripping over the body of the boy.
He pushed himself to his elbows, looking past his blood-drenched robes at the slithering darkness, the approaching entity of death, seeing the suggested form of a hand reaching toward him.
“End the trial!” he screamed.
A line of light split the sky with a sudden brilliance, and the world unraveled. The battlefield shattered like glass struck by a pure, resonant note; darkness, fire, bodies, and smoke broke apart into threads of gold that spiraled upward, returning to the unseen lattice from which the illusion had been woven. The ground vanished beneath him. For an instant, he hung suspended, weightless, his stomach rising as droplets of his own blood lifted from his skin and drifted like tiny suns before dissolving into light.
Then the smoothness of spirit-matter met his back. Five figures stood around him again, dressed in the splendor of High Sanctum robes. The light of the Orr shone from high above, illuminating everything with its warm, golden glow.
He was back in the trial chamber.
