His family, and several dozen other refugees from Sacred Valley, had just seen their home destroyed.

“Apologies,” Lindon whispered.

The view cut off.

But he could still see it. He could feel it, his entire being focused on it.

Tears tracked down his sister’s face as she approached him. “Is there…is there something we can do?”

Lindon barely saw her.

“Maybe we could go back? We can find more room. Even…even if we can save one more person…”

The Titan wasn’t in a hurry, but Sacred Valley wasn’t a long walk for it. If it continued walking in the same direction, it would reach Mount Samara in a matter of minutes.

Lindon stopped the cloud’s propulsion. They could go back. At the very least, they’d be able to pick up a few more people.

His spirit screamed a warning, and he looked up at the windows that were once full of glass. All he could see was a wall of purple crystal.

Mercy threw herself at it, leaping forward. “Stop!” she shouted.

Akura Malice’s fist closed around the cloudship, and they were swallowed in shadow. For a few long heartbeats, Lindon was alone in the darkness.

He couldn’t even feel his own body. All he could feel was the space twisting around him and the sinking numbness of failure.

[It…it wasn’t a failure,] Dross said. [It wasn’t! …Lindon?]

The darkness fell away.

They floated over a dark city. Spires of smooth black stone reached to the violet-tinted sky, and the shadow aura was thick here. Luminous flowers shone white, pink, or blue from carefully cultivated public gardens, and Remnant horses pulled carriages through the sky on tracks of purple flame. All around the city, walls stretched up, black and imposing.

Some of the remaining Irons cried out, groping blindly as their senses weren’t strong enough to penetrate the haze. Lindon had to steer the fortress away from a smaller cloudship before it crashed directly into them.

Far below, a scripted spire stood proudly from an open courtyard. A teleportation anchor.

Even for a Monarch, it would have been hard to send their entire cloudship through space in one trip. Malice had sent them to the one place she could reach easily.

Moongrave. Capital of the Akura clan.

The fight for Sacred Valley was over.

17

The cloudship was anything but quiet as they drifted in the wind over Moongrave.

While Lindon had been focusing on the battle with the Dreadgods, bloodspawn had risen all over the ship. Some of them had been destroyed, but others were still attacking, and it took him and Eithan a moment of concentration to destroy them.

In the meantime, virtually everyone was shouting something.

“What happened?” Lindon’s father demanded. “We’re not moving!”

His mother clung to Kelsa, holding a glowing blue-and-yellow sword in one hand and a matching shield in the other. Products of her Soulsmithing, which she must have been hiding somewhere. She looked to Lindon with terrified eyes. “Where are we?” she asked, and she probably meant to sound demanding, but it came out as a plea.

Kelsa pushed her way free of her mother, dashing aside to the open windows to peer down, getting a look around and shouting descriptions of their surroundings.

Orthos was a burning lump of shell in the corner, and his head snuck out of his shell. He let out a long breath of smoke. “Safe. We are safe.”

Yerin wasn’t shuddering in the corner anymore. She was slumped against the wall, her head hanging. “Useless,” she mumbled.

For Lindon, every second crawled by as though Dross was speeding up his thoughts, but that one word from Yerin speared him through the heart.

He turned around and gathered her up. She let him, all eight arms hanging limply to her sides.

“Lost my spine. Almost buried you all.”

No. She wasn’t the one who had led them all to the edge of their deaths.

“I’m so sorry,” Lindon whispered into her hair. “Yerin, I…I’m just…I’m so sorry.”

She gave a dry laugh. “Sorry for dragging us along?” Yerin tapped the side of her head. “Mostly, there’s only one in here. For a blink there, we had two again. Both of us about to ruin our robes, and curled up like we’re looking to die.”

Lindon squeezed tighter. That wasn’t what had scared him.

She hadn’t frozen up. She’d tried to leave. He had seen the Moonlight Bridge begin to activate.

If she could have, she would have tossed herself to the Bleeding Phoenix.

A hand rested on Lindon’s shoulder, and he turned to see Eithan looking serious. “Ziel isn’t here,” he said in a low voice. “Nor are Jai Long and Jai Chen. They’re resourceful enough that they may survive, but in a battle like that, there are no guarantees.”

Kelsa straightened up. “Jai Long? They left. They’ve been gone for…what, two days?”

Eithan gave her a sympathetic smile, but he didn’t correct himself.

And Lindon knew just as well what Eithan wasn’t saying.

Dross, what happens if the Wandering Titan keeps heading east?

[He might stop at the mountain. If one of them had a huge power source like that, best to guess that they all do. Then maybe he’ll feed on that and go back to sleep!]

And if it doesn’t?

[…there’s no source of aura to interest him for who knows how many thousands of miles east. The Desolate Wilds and Blackflame Empire are too weak. He’ll probably stop to feed on something, but more likely he just keeps wandering until he gets tired.]

And that was assuming the Titan didn’t stop and turn Sacred Valley upside-down looking for whatever prize it wanted. Lindon had been assured several times that ancient security measures had stopped that from happening before, but there was no guarantee it would be the same result this time.

The most likely scenario was that it wandered east, wrecking the Desolate Wilds and the Blackflame Empire. The same way it had destroyed Sacred Valley.

Lindon pulled away from Yerin and removed Suriel’s marble from his pocket. The candle-flame burned as steady and blue as ever, but its calming aura felt like a lie.

The vision of his own future had stopped when he died, so he hadn’t seen what the Dreadgod had done after destroying Sacred Valley. Maybe in this reality, they had averted a worse future. Even if that were true, the fate had come a lot sooner.

And Lindon had failed to stop it.

[Ah, but look at it this way,] Dross said. [Did you fail?]

Dross drew his attention to the dozens of lives still remaining in the cloudship. They were battered and cut and bruised and in terrible shape, but they were alive.

Not to mention the hundreds—maybe thousands; Lindon couldn’t be sure—who had made it out on the Akura ships before. Dross pulled up that memory and shoved it right into his mind’s eye.

The spirit prodded him further. [What did you really set out to do?]

To save Sacred Valley.

That was the answer, and they were the words he’d always used to himself when he thought about his purpose for gaining strength.

But what did that mean, really?

Saving his family? They were safe. Here in Moongrave, with Mercy’s endorsement, they could be as safe as anywhere. Once their cloud fortress was repaired, he could take them with him or even leave them here.