Ashes of Man (The Sun Eater, #5)

by Christopher Ruocchio

I bared my teeth in a Cielcin’s feral smile. The windows behind the general shattered. Attavaisa’s eyes went wide as the wind rushed past it, tugging at its white braid. Its mouth opened, but its curses and its threats were forever silenced as Ugin Attavaisa and its guards were pulled from their feet and thrown into the black heart of space beyond. The holograph plate cracked itself an instant later, banishing the image entire. In the sudden dark that followed, I screamed, and the noise of it tore from me and through me as I fell once more to my knees. It was a scream to rival Valka’s in the dark tower of Ganelon, a scream of triumph and pain both—and of power returning. The lights in the ceiling above my head burst like ripe fruit, plunging the space at hand into darkness total and absolute. Silence then.

Olorin laid a hand on my shoulder, tried to move me. I shrugged him off. How well I remember my reflection in that broken holograph, that table of shattered glass. Jari the Seer had spoken of my broken road, my ruined path through time. Brethren, too, had seen it, had marked the ways in which the Quiet had interfered with me, had moved me to his purpose. He had shifted Demetri’s ship from Teukros to Emesh, had traded my right arm for my left, had brought me to that mountaintop on Annica, and from Annica to . . . where? To Eue? To Perfugium? To hell itself?