Tension gripped him. His hands curled into fists. He couldn’t process what he was seeing. He had no words for this.

All he knew was that he’d gone through a long dark tunnel before popping out into a bright, blaring, incomprehensible metropolis.

This must be why babies entered the world wailing. If he weren’t a grown man and a warrior, he’d want to wail, too. This place was awful.

Thank the gods, infants didn’t remember. Life was traumatic enough already, especially when you had no idea what was happening. Or why. Something Piers could attest to right now—and then some.

Words magically flashed on the side of a tall building. The letters weren’t familiar to him, but for some reason, he could still read and understand them instantly. Welcome to the Big Apple.

He frowned. That made about as much sense as the rest of this.

Sudden movement kicked up around him, in front and behind. He stayed where he was—apparently in the center of a wide, two-way thoroughfare. Strange, box-like units of transportation zoomed past without any horses or oxen to pull them. Many of them were yellow.

His heart galloping faster than a centaur, he turned in a slow circle. On all sides, buildings rose higher than any he’d ever seen in his full thirty-one Thalyrian year cycles. Endless windows climbed them, but instead of being deep-set, open arches, the windows contained reflecting glasses.

Suspicion stirred inside him. Windows like that were for people who hid things.

As he gazed skyward, an enormous, winged beast roared overhead, discharging a trail of smoke behind it. Another shiny sky dragon crossed the first one’s path, leaving writing above him. Piers stared at the two intersecting tracks of cloud fire. Did that X mean something?

Surrounded by objects and sights he’d never encountered let alone imagined, he knew with absolute certainty he was no longer in Thalyria—or at least, not on the known continent.

Was he dead? Could this be the Underworld?

That didn’t make sense. The Underworld followed a pattern. You arrived on the Plain of Asphodel. If you had your obol—he checked his pocket, feeling the hard little nugget of the coin there—you handed it to Charon for passage across the River Styx. On the far side of the Styx, you either walked into a normal, everyday afterlife, or you followed the golden path to a glorious one in Elysium.

This definitely wasn’t Elysium. And Piers didn’t think it was the Underworld. Surely, he’d remember dying?

So, what was this Big Apple? And how did he end up here?

And gods, the noise. The place stank, too. Like everything else here, it was a smell he didn’t recognize.