Isles of the Emberdark

by Brandon Sanderson

a towering white mass of Investiture, translucent but not fully transparent, the size of a large building. It had a head and body, vaguely, and dozens of long, many-elbowed arms. Eerily, it didn’t move. It just…shifted. It was in one place, then a moment later it had changed to another posture—leaving the previous pose as a fading afterimage.

“A full Threnodite entity…a type 1-6. With my own eyes! Well, a monitor and my own eyes!” He held Starling’s arm with one hand, clutching his tome with the other. “It could vaporize our souls with the wave of a hand! It could kill even you, or Crow, or Nazh! It’s a being of almost pure negative Investiture!”

Out here, solid ground was rare—but things made entirely of Investiture could swim in the unsea. If your ship went down, you could deploy floats.

If Starling had still been able to access her powers, she might have been able to feel their emotions as the woman leapt to her feet and began waving frantically, as the man clutched the child with relieved joy. That moment, when despair became hope…she loved that moment. A moment like that was why she’d been exiled. And why, despite her hardships, she had never once regretted the decisions that had led her here.

In reality, dragons were like amphibians. Two-stage beings. They mated and gave birth in human form, and their children grew as humans until the transformation. After that, they lived in their draconic form for decades, mastering their abilities. From there, they lived in both forms, equally comfortable on land and in the air.

Her body absorbed the shock; her manacles prevented her from using her powers overtly, but her people didn’t want her dead. She could drop from any height and survive.

A brilliant white draconic figure burst from her, transparent and glowing. An echo only—a way of revealing herself to mortals. It was real enough for the entity, which could sense that which wasn’t always seen.

Motionless. Looking straight at her. It had a glassy white, smooth head. Within the reflection on it, she saw… Eternity. Nobody knew quite what these things were, the entities that had all but destroyed the planet Threnody—then moved out into the cosmere, hunting and exterminating life. Perhaps they searched for that which had been taken from them in the death of the god they’d once been part of.

Starling, aged and withered, in her human form. Lying, bedridden, someplace dark. Watching the sky. Dying alone, with those cursed manacles still locked on her wrists.

“You could have come upon this family much faster,” she whispered, looking into the thing’s terrible face. “But you advanced slowly. You could have killed me, but you stopped and showed me a terrible future. You don’t just want me dead. You want me broken and terrified first. Nazh is right—and for once, Ed is wrong. You’re not just some force of nature… You’re evil.”

She was Illistandrista. Dragon.

Dragons aged very slowly, particularly once they obtained maturity—Uncle Frost was over ten thousand years old. And though he looked like an old man in his human form, he probably had another ten thousand in him. So if she were going to die old…that meant twenty thousand years without ever stretching her wings again.

She was watched over by Nazh, his eyes glowing full green. Shards. Anyone who knew anything about his homeworld would understand that warning, and know not to push him into the red. But Crow…was difficult to read. She didn’t appear frightened. She had to know that if Nazh started killing, he risked losing himself—and so would be wary to go so far. Was that why she seemed so calm?

Besides, the sooner Nazh went to his meditations, the better. He walked a fine line, engaging a shade’s bloodlust, and she always hated asking him to.

“Lass, you ever been part of a mutiny before?” Starling hesitated, then shook her head. “This is my second,” Crow said. “I learned some difficult lessons the first time. Once you lose a ship…well, there’s no going back.” She stepped right up to Starling, sneering. “Even if I were to haul you to that door and toss you overboard, the others would never follow me again. Fear isn’t enough. Not for a crew like this.” She pushed past Starling, whose manacles went cold. Crow was Invested, the bearer of an unnatural aether. She had hidden powers Starling had seen only once, when writhing vines emerged from the captain and ripped a person clean in half. The manacles knew danger, and warned her of it. One of the few advantages to the stupid things.

“The bigger problem you’ll have is this ship’s historical inability to turn a profit. That, and its connection to a Silverlight outlaw in the Grand Jesk, Cephandrius Maxtori. Though of course, the fact that most of us are fugitives in one way or another won’t help.”

Leonore said, standing. “We should be toasting. Hot choc for all!” “Leonore,” ZeetZi said, “one does not toast with chocolate. Haven’t we a proper libation with which to celebrate?” “Libation?” she said. “That’s not a word.” “It…” He sputtered. “It’s absolutely a word! A perfectly legitimate one!” “Whatever,” she said. “Hot. Choc. Now!”

Leonore pulled her mask down, showing determination. “Guess it’s decided,” she said. “We don’t go down without a fight, yah?”

A small rag followed, and he dipped it, then began rubbing. He’d found, while applying the stuff to the propeller, that it wasn’t like wax. Instead it was like a stain—it sank in. As he rubbed it on a section of the bottom, that section started glowing more profoundly. The wood wasn’t merely coated in light; the glow suffused the boat.

“Well,” he finally said as the birds emerged, “at least we know they can be hurt.” That earned him a solid pecking as both birds laid into his foot. Which, admittedly, he probably deserved.

Silverlight was a city built above a sun. It was a full city inside Shadesmar, one of the first multicultural settlements in the cosmere, with a history going back millennia. Here, peoples from dozens of planets mixed, and many had lived here generations—coming to think of themselves as Lighters first and foremost. The city’s architectural aesthetic was to build tall instead of wide: willowy skyscrapers of a limber design, with dragonsteel supports—ultralight and extremely strong, allowing for constructions that went much higher than otherwise would have been possible. Walkways crisscrossed them, and many had hovering pods as rooms, hanging out over the expanse.

brilliant light of the perpendicularity. Named the Silverlight Nexus, it really was like a sun, colored a frosty white, giving the city its name. It hung in the void beneath the city, lighting everything from underneath with a calm, even glow.

This was one of the rare portals that could transfer people in and out of the Physical Realm. They referred to the regions in Shadesmar around planets as subastrals, and those regions took on unique characteristics—influenced deeply by the thoughts of the people on said planet.

The Nexus was unique among perpendicularities, as it led to not one place in the Physical Realm, but three. One of which was hidden, shadowed: the planet of Yolen. For millennia, the dragons had kept the secret that it was the source of nearly all life in the cosmere and the origin of the Shards, though that news had been revealed quite dramatically a few decades back. Still, travel to it was strictly regulated.

Miniature, because it was only the size of a city, though it was the largest natural perpendicularity. Most started as small pools, barely ten feet in diameter, and had to be expanded to accommodate ships.

Once, she’d been one of the few allowed the secret to traveling through the Nexus to emerge from the greatstar of Yolen, a glowing hole in the upper atmosphere of her homeland. The dragons had an entire infrastructure up there, with a flying city. Her manacles now prevented her from accessing that place, unless she found a way to break free from them—something even Master Hoid hadn’t been able to do.

The powerful Nexus of Silverlight caused time dilation in the region. Each day spent in the city currently passed as ten for those on the outside, which could cause problems with relationships if one stayed in Silverlight too long.

“Ah, being a fugitive ain’t so bad,” Leonore said, putting her mask down. “Helps with your nerves.” “Helps?” Ed asked. “How?” “Helps,” Leonore said, “in that it keeps you nervous, you know? So you never feel too comfortable anywhere. That way, nobody can ever get the jump on you—and stress doesn’t bother you, because you’re already stressed out of your rusting gears.”

“A map,” he said softly. “Supposedly. We…went to the location. That’s where you found us. We were searching there when the fire broke out.” He blushed. “We were fools, selling everything for a ship we could barely fly, trying to find this on our own…” She held it up and found faint writing on it, in faded ink, that she couldn’t read. “A map to what?” “A hidden perpendicularity,” he said, “that nobody knows about.”

“Well, shall we be off?” Ed asked. He’d broken out his formal arcanist hat—which was somehow even floppier than the other one. Looked like he was wearing a half-stuffed round pillow with a scoop of ice cream on the top. In her experience, though, the sillier the hat among humans, the more respectable it was.

“Grandfather of Shards,” Ed said. “By gods known and unnamed…” He reached under his robes and took out his Pathian earring, holding it tight as his hand trembled. “It’s the forty-seventh count… The numbers align… The text is even legible…”

“This is a piece,” he said, “of the Iriali Long Trail record. A missing piece—one we know exists, but of which no surviving tapestry fragment remains.

“What does it say?” Starling asked. “Oh!” he said. “All of the Long Trail tapestries have the same information! Records of visits to various planets the Iriali investigated as potential homelands on their voyage. Most of them are unsuitable, and many thought mythological, particularly ones this old. Let’s see… Ha! They went the wrong direction, didn’t they? The family?”

“Middle-Old Iriali,” Ed said. “It had a character shift in the 3000s—and since their numbers are letters, if you read this straight, you’ll do it wrong. You need to swap a few to get the right coordinates. It’s quite tricky, since—while they navigated by the Current as we do—we don’t know a lot of their landmarks. Fortunately, this one uses Silverlight as a prime reference point. Funny to think of those ancient people, who kept records in tapestries instead of books and walked between worlds, visiting this place when it was just a bunch of draconic palaces.”

“Oooooh… Look at this. They say they found a perpendicularity. Fat chance of that! Let’s see… Birds? And bugs? A deadly island… Oh… Oh wow!”

Anyway, birds. There has always been talk in the arcanist community about magic birds, and there are many verified examples of them.”

“Khriss,” Ed continued when no one replied, “recently linked historical records of these birds with a little out-of-the-way planet we’re getting all sorts of reports about. It’s a pre-space-travel industrial planet the Scadrians have claimed. Quite upsetting of the Scadrians, claiming someone else’s homeworld, but you know how they are. Rusting this! Rusting that! I scowl and throw coins in your face!” “Don’t you literally worship a Scadrian?” Nazh asked. “That’s different,” Ed said. “He is nice. Plus, he’s the only known living Shard who has performed the—”

“Well, Khriss says this place has a perpendicularity—she connects it to a record of some people who encountered a well of power in Shadesmar, traveled to the other side a couple of times, and mostly all just died. Some arcanists laugh at the idea, because there can’t be a perpendicularity on that planet, right? Because there’s no known Shard Investing it. Khriss hasn’t been able to prove it herself, because she can’t provide coordinates.” “Shardless perpendicularities are an obsession of hers,” Nazh agreed. “Anytime I was out working on another mission, she’d tinker on this problem, trying to find proof of new perpendicularities on planets that shouldn’t have them. I didn’t have much to do with it… Honestly, Star, I thought it was a waste of time. Rumors of new perpendicularities are always flying about, but they never come to anything.”

“But Scadrians are wild about the planet, and there’s rumors of the Rosharans talking about it too. We thought it was because of these accounts of the locals and their cultivated Invested birds, which can supposedly initiate a Nahel bond. Everyone is always excited about new Investiture that can work with anyone, so it would be huge business.” He looked at the map. “But it would absolutely pale in comparison to the existence of a perpendicularity.

Drominad—the planet—isn’t near any other perpendicularities, which means it would open up an entirely new section of space for cheap travel. It could save billions in FTL expenditures, never mind the military applications…”

Twice now, he’d glimpsed what the skullsnakes hunted: a shoal of glowing fish. One group had fluttered past yesterday, maybe some two hundred feet below, but fled as his boat neared. They hadn’t been lured by his bait, and looked—to his untrained senses—like groups of ocean fish did in the real world.

Rokke let out a cry that sent Dusk jolting upright. What was wrong? Had she seen something? But no. That cry sounded vaguely triumphant, and she had her head tipped back, wings outstretched. She cut off after a second, noticing the two of them watching, then shrank and became a bundle of embarrassed, puffed-out feathers. “That was wonderful,” Dusk said. “Thank you.”

Xisis, or Xisisrefliel by his proper draconic name, was one of the old ones. Around since before the Shattering, an event that had happened over ten thousand years ago.

Spring emerged from the back room to confront her. The large peakspren was—like all of his kind—made of stone, with a smoldering magma core that shone through small cracks along his “skin.” He wore a guard uniform that had been tailored just for him, though he still looked like a bag of chips stuffed with far too much air, bulging at the arms, chest, and thighs.

“Starling,” Spring said. “There’s optimistic, then there’s stupid. Whatever you mutinied about, he isn’t worth the effort. You should run.” The “he” here was just dialect—peakspren language used a gendered version of “it” that often slipped through, particularly for emphasis.

Finally, Spring waved her over to the private elevator. He didn’t accompany her up—she was a dragon, and deserved some measure of respect, even in her state. That meant no security guard minder.

“Why I saved those people?” she asked. “No,” he said. “That is obvious. Again, the fool’s influence.”

He snapped his fingers, and a figure emerged from the edges of the large penthouse room, hurrying over. The tall human looked maybe to be Rosharan, though the cut of his clothing was unfamiliar to her. He lifted the wine pitcher from the table just in front of Xisis, took less than one step, refilled the wine cup, then bowed and retreated.

“You couldn’t do that yourself?” “It’s important to give people things to do, child,” he said, then leaned forward. “That’s Tumak. Once emperor of his nation. He needs a little more training in obedience before I can set him on other, more interesting tasks.” “How many monarchs do you have now?” “Oh, just a couple. Six. Seven.”

Xisis didn’t have slaves. Such barbarism was outlawed in Silverlight—plus, he would never keep someone for longer than a few months in such a state anyway. He didn’t need to enslave people, because he could offer boons unavailable to even emperors. All the wealth in a nation could not buy an extra hundred years of life on a backwater planet—b...