“No,” he breathed, remembering snippets of the manic words she’d spouted earlier, words he’d dismissed as the ramblings of a woman teetering on the edge between sanity and madness. A way through…yes…Break the cycle…protect my daughter…it must happen tonight, when the sun refuses to sleep…

He frowned, mind clamping down on that last phrase. “When the sun refuses to sleep,” he murmured to himself. He moved to the open window and peered out. The sun still hadn’t set, hovering on the horizon much later than normal. It should be dark by now. In fact, was it his imagination or had the sun actually moved higher and grown brighter since he last gazed upon it?

“What is happening?” he said to himself. All this time, he’d assumed Cora was slowly going mad, just as Sinna had done, but now…what if he’d been wrong? What if there was more to it all? It wasn’t like his wife could control the movement of the sun, but then how did she know it wouldn’t set?

Rather than immediately going after her, he finally sat at the table and inspected the book he’d ignored earlier. For some reason, just reading its title gave him chills. The Origins of the Blood Tide, by Luxor Glin.

He cracked it open and began to read.

Three hours later, he closed the book, unfinished, a million jagged, confused thoughts whirling through his mind. He didn’t know what to think, but he’d read enough to wonder whether he’d been too quick to judge whatever it was that was happening.

He hated leaving Bryony alone, but she was a good sleeper, rarely awakening from nightmares to disturb their own sleep. And he needed to find Cora. He needed to understand.

With that in mind, he closed the window and slipped outside into the brightest night the world had ever seen.

Later still

Cainan ran, drawn by the unusually potent smell of smoke in the air, the hint of flames above the rooftops, though they were the wrong color for fire, and the screams of villagers.

After a long sprint, he reached the house that was causing the disturbance. It was on the other side of the village, a good mile or so away from their own home. Some villagers were fleeing, and he was forced to shove his way through to join the dozen or so stalwart souls who had created a water line, passing buckets from hand to hand and then tossing them onto a fierce blaze not of oranges and reds and yellows, but wielding flames of black and gray and white. Every bucket that was thrown on the fire seemed only to intensify its hunger for destruction.

A particularly powerful burst of flames shot forth from the structure’s window, glass shrapnel exploding outwards in a sharp spray. One of the bucket wielders caught fire, screaming, stumbling aimlessly away. Cainan ran to the man, tackling him to the ground, feeling the heat on his own hands as he forced him into a roll with the hopes of snuffing out the flames. But then there was nothing to grab onto, his own skin limned with ash—the only thing that was left of what had been, just a moment ago, a human life.