PROLOGUE
3 Years Before the Ace War
Solar Year 3,799,853 Saura
Herald struggled for breath as the desert wind dragged loose sand across his boots. "Why...?" His throat clenched around the word, forcing him to swallow before he could continue. "He was like a brother to you. Why?"
The ebony staff sagged in his grip as though it had gained weight with every breath he lost. Its polished shaft remained cold despite the scorching desert, while the black jade skull carved into its tip gave a faint pulse beneath his palm. Its hollow eye sockets faced the man crawling through the crimson sand several paces away.
Blood marked the man’s path in broken streaks. One leg dragged uselessly behind him, his breathing came wet and shallow, and every movement looked as though it should have been his last. Yet when he raised his face toward Herald, he was smiling. Not wildly or desperately, but with the satisfaction of someone who believed he had already won.
Herald’s fingers tightened around the staff until the carved ridges bit into his palm. The man noticed. His smile widened slightly, as though Herald had just confirmed something for him.
Sand shifted behind Herald.
He turned only far enough to catch a flash of golden hair lifting in the wind and the edge of a crimson lotus tattoo before cold, rusted metal struck the back of his skull with a crack that swallowed every other sound.
The horizon snapped sideways. Herald’s staff slipped from his fingers and struck the sand as the evening sun smeared red across the dunes. His knees gave way first, then his shoulder, and finally his cheek hit the ground hard enough to fill his mouth with grit.
The sand should have burned him. Instead, cold seeped through his skin. The grains pressed against his cheek with a winter chill that had no place beneath a desert sun, as though this narrow stretch of earth had stopped belonging to the living before he ever touched it.
His eyelids grew heavier. Pain throbbed once, twice, then dulled into something distant around the edges of his thoughts.
Am I dying?
Another thought surfaced beneath it, quieter and somehow older than the panic. Herald could not tell where it came from. He only knew it felt familiar enough to frighten him.
Is this... the end of another futile cycle?
He did not understand the thought, yet his lips moved before he could question it further. A faint smile formed against the blood and sand.
So this is how it ends.
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Solar Year 3,799,850 Saura
6 Years Before the War
Heat reached Herald before memory did.
He opened his eyes to crimson-gold dunes trembling beneath the harsh sunlight. For several breaths, he remained where he was, one hand half-buried in the sand, listening to the wind scrape along the remains of mud-brick walls. Bleached prayer flags snapped weakly from a collapsed roof nearby, while black fungi crept over cracked stone in thick, uneven patches.
A settlement had once stood here. Enough walls remained to show where rooms had been, but the desert had already begun filling them in.
Herald pushed himself onto one elbow. Pain pulsed behind his eyes, sharp enough to make him squeeze them shut before trying to sit up. The movement sent grit sliding from his clothes and hair. Nearby, a shattered well stood with its stone rim split down the middle. Half-buried beside it lay a flat piece of dark material, smooth and strangely untouched by the decay surrounding it.
Nothing else moved. No voices came from the houses, no animals picked through the rubble, and even the wind seemed too loud because there was nothing competing with it.
Where am I?
He pressed his fingertips against his forehead and searched his memory for an answer. The effort brought only another pulse of pain. He tried to picture the road that had brought him here, then a home, then a face. Nothing formed. When he reached for his own name, he found the same blank space waiting.
His breathing shortened. Herald lowered his hand and stared at his own fingers, as though they might offer something his mind would not.
Why can’t I remember my name?
"Herald."
The voice came from behind him, and he turned so quickly that pain flashed through the back of his skull.
A young woman stood several paces away, the wind pushing dark hair across one side of her face. An obsidian orchid held part of it back, tiny turquoise stones set into its petals catching the sunlight whenever she moved. Dust covered the lower edge of her shawl and clung to her sandals, enough to suggest she had been travelling for much longer than the few moments he had known she existed.
She stared at him without speaking again. Her shoulders lowered a fraction when their eyes met, and one hand loosened at her side before curling again almost immediately.
The word she had spoken lingered in Herald’s mind.
Herald.
He knew it was his name. The certainty came without memory, as natural and useless as knowing the sand beneath him was hot.
He pushed himself fully upright and kept several paces between them. "Who are you?" His voice scraped badly enough that he winced, one hand touching his throat before he lowered it again.
The woman’s lips parted, but whatever answer had been there never came out. Herald watched her expression tighten instead, and the delay made him more aware of the empty ruins around them.
My name is Herald. I know that much. Why do I know that and nothing else?
He glanced past her toward the broken houses, then toward the open desert behind him. Neither direction meant anything. "Where am I?" he asked, more sharply this time. "And what happened to me?"
She drew in a slow breath. "Herald..." His name sounded different in her voice now. Not like a call across a distance, but something she had said too many times to count.
"That doesn’t answer either question." He kept watching her hands. One had found the edge of her shawl and was twisting the cloth between two fingers. "Do you know me?"
Her gaze lifted back to his face. "Do you remember me at all?"
Herald let the silence sit for a moment because he wanted the answer to change if he looked long enough. He studied the obsidian flower in her hair, the turquoise stones in its petals, the dust on her shoulder, and the faint crease between her brows. He searched for the tug of a memory, even something small enough to mistake for one.
Nothing came.
"No." The word left him more quietly than he intended. He watched her fingers stop moving against the shawl. "Should I?"
Her gaze dropped toward the sand between them. The wind lifted a strand of hair across her mouth, and she brushed it aside without looking at him. "Then it happened again."
Herald’s stomach tightened before he fully understood the sentence. He took one step toward her, close enough now to see the strain around her eyes. "What happened again?"
She did not answer. Instead, she crossed the remaining distance between them.
Herald stiffened when her arms wrapped around him. His first instinct was to push her away. A stranger embracing him in the middle of a ruined settlement should have felt wrong in every possible way, and for a heartbeat he even raised one hand between them.
Then he stopped.
Her warmth reached him through the cloth at his chest. He caught the faint smell of dust, sweat, and something floral from her hair. None of it gave him a memory, but his body eased before his mind allowed it, as though some part of him recognized the shape of the embrace even when the rest of him could not.
That unsettled him more than if he had felt nothing.
She let go after a few seconds, though not quickly. When she stepped back, Herald searched her face again, hoping the closeness might have shaken something loose.
It had not.
"What happened to me?" he asked, his voice lower now. "You said this happened again. What does that mean?"
The woman looked at him for a moment, then toward the dead houses surrounding them, as though the answer might be easier to give without meeting his eyes. By the time she spoke, her fingers had already tightened around the edge of her shawl again.
"The shraap returned."