The first step into the fog was a leap of faith. Both Ransom and Zephyr held back a breath, but Kiran charged forward. He had lived his whole life running straight at danger, arms open wide. There had been a brief time there when he thought that would need to change, that he would need to find some other way to live. But now he knew better. This was who he was, who he would always be. The one who stepped forward first.

The fog parted around him, clinging to his shoulders, surrounding him. When he took a second step and then a third, he knew that the powder had done the trick. He waved his arms out in front of him, trying to push away as much of the dense cloud as he could, for it was hard to see anything at all. In fact, he didn’t even notice the broken jar until his boot crunched on top of it.

The noise brought Ransom to him, and Zephyr a few seconds after that.

“Come. We don’t have much time,” Zephyr murmured, pushing past him and taking the lead.

They came upon a few soldiers first, one still with his arms up, as if to protect his face from either the shattering glass or the incoming magic. He was not frozen, per se—more like he had forgotten the reason he had put his hands up in defense to begin with.

Of all the storms he had faced—twisters and firestorms and hurricanes—fog unnerved Kiran more than any other. He would rather die in a fiery blaze of chaos than waste away wandering under a storm’s enchantment, lost to himself. It was why it was one of the only affinities he had not sought for himself. When it came time to steal the heart of a storm, you were betting your heart was the stronger of the two. And he had always been willing to do that with the fiercest tempests from which others shied away. But to take the heart of a fog storm required strength of mind as well as heart. You had to not only empty yourself of the fear of death, but of the fear of living on, caught by the storm, a slow, torturous, forgotten death.

“Over here!” Zephyr yelled.

Kiran left his thoughts behind and followed her voice to find her kneeling by a middle-aged woman with honey-brown skin and expensive clothing, who was sprawled facedown on the floor. She appeared to have fallen in the chaos, and now she looked chillingly unaware, laid out that way, her eyes wide but unseeing.

“This is the queen. I would rather have one of the men, but she will do if we cannot find anyone else,” Zephyr said.