Book One – Chapter 1

You might be inclined to think that her judgement did not really count, because she was his familiar. She had been with him when he had conjured his first ever shard, and since then, she had witnessed all of his good, and all of his bad, and all the frankly unforgivable as well. But if you thought about that for more than a moment, if you really thought about that, you would understand that this did not make her judgement less severe but, in all bothersome respect, more personal. Oh, so much more.

And Midnight wanted to see it, the pride. She was a proud beast. Yves was rather different from her in that regard, in almost every practical and inconvenient respect, but when it came to his shards and illusions, he agreed. You had to have standards. And to internalise them, you had to uphold them against cost, exhaustion, and uselessness, even when the only one judging was yourself.

Yves’ dome of shards was an elegant piece of symmetry; a transparent half-globe of perfectly aligned fragments that spiralled down from a central apex. Each successive ring widened by a measured degree, which made the shards overlap without crowding. Their angles accepted impact, while their seams carried all force outward rather than inward, redirecting the rain of glass without compromise. It was efficient. It was exact. It was, under the circumstances, entirely excessive.

Beneath this pride turned dome, they approached the Veil.

They passed into it.

The desert landscape disappeared. The Veil was violence falling from the sky. The shards struck down on the dome in ceaseless impacts, smashing and shattering against the transparent half-globe with the roar of a crystalline world forever breaking. Yves held the dome to answer the assault, focussing to receive, divide and redirect the impacting force before it could gather inward.