Katran released her breath in a sigh as she leaned back against the cave's smooth stone wall. She closed her deep green eyes, drawing some strength from the firm bones of her world. The air she inhaled smelled of earth and sea, the same familiar scent she had breathed since infancy. A firemarble's golden glow intruded into the darkness behind her eyelids, though it did nothing to warm her cold skin.
Her finger slowly traced the book's edge, feeling its leather texture. It was a stolen book, but the skill that had revived and rewritten it had been a gift. However, that gift of Writing had been taught under strict supervision, and for practical purposes only—certainly never intended for its present use. He had no foresight in such matters; his vision was keenly focused, but its field was narrow. Though suspicious of everyone, he could not have imagined that his most favored student would turn into a despised enemy, and use the skill he had given her to write a refuge for the rebels of Riven. Katran had not imagined it either. She had always opposed him in secret, but now she was the leader of those fighting against him. To think that she was their greatest hope to defeat the Lord Gehn . . .
A sick feeling lurched through her stomach as fear and hatred flared in her chest. She loathed him, the murderer and false god through whose hand her beloved world had been written and would be destroyed. Unconsciously her hand strayed to the square-shaped scar on her neck. That was all they were to him. Numbers. Resources to be used for their skills. Slaves that could easily be replaced. Followers whose only purpose was found in the service of their arrogant, capricious savior.
It was without meaning.
Katran's eyes snapped open, and she stared blankly at the golden cover of her book. How strange it was—their weapons were words. Angles and curves of ink on a page, flimsy in themselves, but behind them was power beyond imagining or containing. Both fought with the same weapon, though in drastically different ways. She allowed the words freedom to grow and flourish with little lives of their own. Her touch was gentle, organic, and steeped in dreams. In contrast, her enemy bent and twisted words to his will like raw metal—brilliantly fashioned yet mortally flawed, impaled on their own sharpness. Without the escape she had written, her people would die with the world that had mothered them.
The womb from which the cry released . . .
A single tear slid down her cheek and landed on the cover of the book, shining there like a clear jewel. She gazed at it, seeing how it reflected the room in odd convex distortion, like her world's water trying to escape heat. An image of that water boiling in the fire of a writhing death, mixed with the blood of its children, flashed through her mind. Blinking hard, she wiped the tear from the surface of the book, feeling its wetness slide off her skin. That was how she felt—a separate entity, on the surface but never able to get inside, never belonging.
Her own people did not know her. And Atrus . . .
The lips from which the kiss is wrought . . .
Katran pushed a stray strand of her black hair behind her ear as she opened the book. The gateway image was still dark, heavy with possibility, its writing finished. It needed the power from one of Gehn's domes before it would work. She thought it fitting that his own book, ink and dome would help cause his downfall. The weapon he had given her over thirty years before was piercing into his heart. The gift was turned against the giver.
"It fits you and your treachery," she hissed under her breath. Her hand had tightened into a fist, but she bit her lip and released it as the bleak vision of reality seeped back into her mind. Staring into the void on the page, its black emptiness seeming almost defiant, her nightmares crowded back into her mind. She felt with searing pain the dagger she wielded against him plunge into her own soul as a bloody gash of stars tore through the flesh of the earth . . .
With a shiver and a sigh that came from deep within her, Katran closed the book.