Every sense afire, I slow to a brisk walk as I dart around a knot of young people already turned out in Xishlon finery. They eye me curiously as I rush past, their clothing emblazoned with glowing purple moons and hearts, their faces decorated with iridescent lavender shimmer.

Catching my breath, I zigzag through narrow streets and dark alleys toward the pull of the mounting heat, sweat breaking out all over my skin from its increasing potency. Eventually, I emerge from a shadowed alley onto a broad cliffside street.

And come to an immediate halt.

A clutch of soldiers stands before me, idling near a runic roadblock. Suspended, wheel-size blue-glowing runes stretch out in a line just past them, the sorceresses’ faces obscured by both the light behind them and their cloaks’ dark hoods. One of the soldiers raises a piece of blue lumenstone and angles the bright shard toward me, casting us both in its glow.

Every muscle in my fire-suffused body tightens as I meet the falcon stare of Quoi Zhon—one of the soldiers I traveled with to the Agolith Desert.

One of the Vu Trin soldiers who tried to kill me.

Time warps as Quoi Zhon’s piercing stare sharpens and the remembrance mushrooms into a full-blown reckoning—If she recognizes you through the glamour, you’re dead. Quietly turn and leave. Just turn and leave.

Pulse blasting, I slowly pivot on my heels, lower my head and start a measured retreat, praying that her memory fails to connect.

“Halt!” her dominant voice booms out.

The word is an arrow shot to my back. I launch into a sprint, throwing myself into the next alley as her cry of “Black Witch!” goes up. Multiple boot heels give chase, my feet skidding against cobbled stone. I race forward, barely able to think around the dash of my heart against my rib cage and the intensifying firelight aura veiling my vision. Drawing on Lukas’s and Valasca’s training, I wrest hold of my Ash’rion blade and slide my fingers across the hilt’s air runes, hastily murmuring a runic spell.

A shiver of cold hits my back. I turn and skid onto a narrow street to my left just as a whistling whir sounds behind me. Not slowing, I glance over my shoulder and spot countless frost-knives scything through the air behind me, along with bright streaks of silver stars.

Panic firing, I hurl myself into another alley, the stars and knives crashing and clanking against a wall to my rear as my stomach gives a nauseating twist.

The alley I’ve ducked into is far too long. I can’t outpace them to its end.

The metallic tang of rune magic behind me powers up. I can taste it on the back of my tongue. The panicked stampede of my pulse threatens to overwhelm me as Yvan’s Wyvernfire sears through my lines.