Book One – Chapter 1

Yves had never seen them before, or any of this. Neither had Midnight. Before this day, they had never entered . They had always passed at a distance, skirting wide around the Broken Desert, never through it.

To enter the Veil’s boundary, they had to wait for nightfall.

They had come during the coolest season, though the distinction meant little in the desert, and nothing here. The Witch Mother had warned them that the monoliths magnified daylight until it became lethal. From one column to another, light refracted, intensified, returned, and intensified again, until the two forces fused into the White Fire. Any creature caught between them was blinded and burned. Even at the Veil’s outer margin, Yves felt the flames so intensely that he had to assess and assure himself, more than once and with rather serious attention, that he was not currently burning alive.

He and Midnight withdrew. They moved along the edge where storm and shard-rain met, circling the depression at whatever distance the heat demanded and the land permitted. Yves kept one hand steady on the pendulum, its pull guiding them toward . The artefact wanted a straight line, right through the Veil and into the burning field of monoliths beyond. Naturally, the artefact had not been burdened with a body. While Yves and Midnight could not advance as the orb demanded, they could at least choose the point of crossing.

In the unknown to come, every step mattered. Every meter gained now, every second spared later, might become the difference between returning before dawn and burning where they stood, a few steps short. So they kept walking towards a marginally better danger, to enter a little nearer to the centre, once darkness took the dunes.