Dev climbed a few steps in the dark entryway and peered up the spiral. The tower was lit only by sunshine coming through filthy panes of glass high above him. He could see long cobwebs hanging down, like something had broken through them. “Would you like to tell me what happened forty years ago?” he asked Astrid.

“Oh, yes.” She paused. “The meteors, of course. There were two of them that I saw. Others say more, but they must have landed far away, because I didn’t see or feel them hit. One after another those two came, slamming into the ground between here and Grimere. They formed the crater lake near Dragonsmarche. You’ve seen that, haven’t you? The impact cracked the earth and caused a big leak—water and fire came spurting up around the meteors to form the lake. And that volcano grew quickly.”

“Yes, I’ve seen it,” answered Dev, climbing slowly and stopping at the second floor, finding it in appalling shape. He leaned out the window. “So both meteors hit in the same place? That explains why no one could say where the second one hit. They stacked up.” He’d heard rumors about the meteors when he worked at the palace. People had said the impact caused their world to split off from the world of the Seven Islands, where Thisbe, Fifer, and Seth lived. They had a volcano there, too—perhaps that had come from one of the other meteorites that people had seen.

“Yes,” said Astrid. “The ground rumbled and groaned for hours. And it cracked somewhere beyond the castle, deep down under the sea where the rock was weaker. After a day or two, it gave way and split our world in half.”

Dev nodded. That’s what he’d heard. He went back down the steps, then exited into the courtyard. “But that didn’t cause this, did it? Wasn’t there some fighting? How did this happen?”

Astrid sniffed the air for a few moments, looking puzzled, then sniffed the ground near Dev’s feet. “There was an uprising,” she said when she was done. “A group of rogue soldiers who’d wanted to take charge and oust the black-eyed ruling families. They’d been building their faction for years, I think. Slowly but steadily. They never would have been able to succeed if it hadn’t been for the meteors and the earthquake. People thought it was the end of the world. And the sea… It bottomed out and left that big gaping chasm, with the castle barely on the stable edge of it. The queen’s ships were lost, falling forever.”

The idea of that was unfathomable. “So this group of usurpers saw the people’s panic as an opportunity?” Dev knew full well who’d led them. It was the king, Shanti’s father. And he definitely wouldn’t have called himself a usurper. His version of the story was very different from Astrid’s. And even though the dragon’s memory was faulty, Dev believed her over the king.

“Yes,” said Astrid, who was finally finding momentum in telling the story now. “Immediately after the meteors hit, the rogue soldiers captured several black-eyed children and forced them—by threatening their parents’ lives—to kidnap their friend Nadia, the queen’s daughter. The children obeyed, and the usurpers sold the young princess to pirates for a ridiculously large sum, which sent the black-eyed royalty into a tailspin. We believe the pirates escaped with Nadia to the land of the Seven Islands before that world broke off from ours.”