She was everywhere. Felt everywhere. Spattered around the dome.
With exquisite care she opened her eyes. Care in case Siff was looking, but of course he wasn’t. He thought she was dead because he was stupid. Because he’d forgotten, as he took her blood, that she was an alchemist, which was little more than being a blood-mage dressed up in some pretty morals, and a blood-mage never bled out unless they wanted to, not even if you opened their throat from ear to ear.
He was standing by the gate, lost in his own world full of wonder. She watched through half-closed eyes and found she couldn’t blame him because the wonder was hers too. Other worlds. Was that really what he’d found? Was this where the Silver King had gone? No, she knew better than that, but perhaps it was how he’d come to the realms in the beginning. Or perhaps there were others. The realms remembered the Isul Aieha who’d tamed their monsters, but there were whispers, if you looked deep in their histories of that time, of others. Of an age lost even further in the past, when the dragons had been young, of silver half-gods who strode the world in their thousands.
She looked at the silver sea. Had they come from this place? Was this where they’d been born?
Her blood was spattered over the arches. She’d lost a lot. Almost too much, and the stones were drawing their power from her now, from her essence. She explored them but they were beyond her comprehension. Artefacts of another time. They needed her, just a tiny little bit of her, to function. She could take that away from them, close them. Past that they were a mystery.
‘Everything is wrong,’ whispered Siff to the emptiness. ‘The Great Flame? No. This. This.’ He sobbed, overwhelmed, and maybe he was right.
With exquisite caution Siff reached one foot through the gateway. His boot touched the silver beyond. He gasped.
His boot had her blood on it. She reached through it to touch the silver sea with her mind. To see.
And so she saw.