"Domi, come with me. We're going out in the field."

Those were the dead-last words he wanted to hear from his aedificans.

"No," Domi said, waving the primer on reading he brought with him. He lounged on one of the cots in the infirmary, keeping an eye on the two Empowered patients sleeping in the corner while Arbita brewed something foul-smelling in the back of the room. "I'm happy to stay right here and practice my glyphs, thanks." He cringed as Valens scowled at him. "What can you possibly need me for out there? I'm useless. I can't do anything."

His aedificans shook his head. "You can't use your sorcery yet, but there are other things you can do."

"Like what? Snatch? You got something you need stolen?"

Valens tossed something at him. Domi yelped as it hit his chest. He scrambled to catch it.

The boy glanced down at the thing in his hands. "What the heck is this?" About the size of the boy's palm, it looked a bit like a tree, but with amethyst crystals instead of leaves. Where a trunk would be, there was instead a silver handle.

Valens waved for him to follow, and with a sigh, Domi put the book down and rose from the cot. "Serenitas and I are leading a team of worldholders to repair the Trellis. While we do so, we must concentrate on our work. You are going to guard us."

"Guard you?" He didn't like the sound of that at all. Guarding someone implied there might be something horrible and dangerous they needed to be protected against. Like clivias. "Don't you have, like, five worldholders here with you? What am I supposed to do that you all can't do on your own way better?"

Valens inclined his chin toward the thing he had thrown at Domi. "You will use that to kill anything that comes near us."

"K-kill?" Domi asked, dread rising. "Please don't tell me we're going to be near clivias."

His aedificans offered him a grim smile as they stepped out into the waystation's hallway and grabbed their heavy Germinating paenulas from hooks on the wall. "To repair the Trellis, we are going to need to be under the area of the worst damage, so we'll lack the Trellis's protection from bestias. And yes, some clivias may still linger there. Don't look so worried, though. Our starholders and mindholders drove most out, so we probably won't run into any, but if some happen to still be here, you will keep them off us."

"Great," Domi said in a small voice. He waved the tree-thing. "How does this work?"

A faint hum rose from inside the amethysts. He frowned. Had someone used promenia to make the crystals, or were they made of promenia?

In the last couple days, he had realized all magic possessed its own distinct resonance and rhythm. Except for the promenia Valens used to keep an eye on him and the Trellis's vast roar above, he lacked the skill to tell the difference between types of magic by sound alone. But for the first time, he thought he could learn later if he paid careful enough attention. Still, he didn't like paying attention; the obnoxious sound made his head ache.

"Don't do that," Valens growled, and the aedificans's promenia sifted through the air.

Domi grimaced. "I did it again, didn't I?" There was another sound he now recognized: the sizzling and popping promenia made when a worldholder dissolved it. That sound now came from inside the amethyst tree.

Valens took the weapon from him, scowled at it as his promenia passed through the crystals, and handed the artifact back. "It is still mostly intact," he said in a grumble. "Please don't destroy it."

"I wasn't trying to."

"That works," Valens said, "by aiming the crystal end toward a creature you wish to strike. It will sense your intentions and your target and help you aim true."

"All right," Domi said. "And if this thing fails?"

"It won't."

"But if it does?"

The aedificans offered a tight smile as the two of them stepped into the snow and found Serenitas and her three alumnas waiting. "Then you should run."

***

This was not what the wondertales led Domi to expect a mighty sorcerous undertaking would be like.

Perched on a boulder in the basalt outcrop where they gathered, he surveyed the five worldholders below him. In the Holy Ovidiana, sorcerers always stood in a circle, arms stretched to the sky, as they murmured magical incantations.

The group before him loitered around like hikers on a rest break.

Valens lounged on the ground with his back against the stone, legs stretched before him and head back, like he had fallen asleep. Serenitas sat cross-legged on a low boulder, hunched over her knees, her black braids spilling around her to hide her face. Two of her alumnas slouched with their shoulders serving as one another's pillows, and the third lay sprawled in the snow.

Domi didn't understand why they weren't cold. He shuddered in the icy wind, and he was not sitting on the frozen ground like the others. All Valens said by way of explanation before ignoring Domi's questions had been, "Prometus." But Domi had prometus too, so why was he half-frozen while everyone else looked warm and toasty?

He had been left to puzzle over it alone as all five worldholders turned to their work.

Domi glanced up at the sky, breath stalling in his throat as it did every time he made the mistake of peering up at the damaged Trellis. In the borderlands this close to the night-side, the sun crouched halfway beneath the horizon, glaring over the edge as a thin crimson crescent. Overhead, the jagged fragments of the Trellis glowed a strange bluish green instead of gold, livid against the black, purple, and blue sky beyond.

All the storytellers said the night-side looked like this, that people in the distant wilds where the Trellis was more patchwork lived their whole lives beneath a sunless, bruised sky. He could not imagine such a thing. Until now.

The worldholders were making decent progress, so Domi hoped they would be able to leave this creepy place soon. It appeared to his untrained eyes like the repairs were almost done. Globules of melting Trellis no longer fell from the sky, fizzling out before reaching the ground. He had watched the cyan strands wend across the heavens for the past three hours, woven like fabric on a loom.

A strange sensation accompanied it. He tried not to concentrate too much on the promenia's singing and wavering distortions. The last thing he wanted was to do the only thing he seemed good at so far and dissolve the other worldholders' promenia by mistake.

But he found it hard to ignore what he sensed, in particular what he heard. First, a soft hum rose in the distance, which grew louder as promenia swelled on the skyline and then gathered in an gossamer disc above the three alumnas. He had no idea how they were calling the particles to them. However, as soon as the mirage-like distortion grew immense enough to cover the whole outcrop, it began to coil around Valens and Serenitas.

A deep, purring hum reverberated from the Trellis above, echoed a moment later by the gathered promenia. The wavering distortion on the edge of Domi's true vision became visible at that moment as the swirling wisps of particles turned the same radiant cyan as the Trellis.

The promenia shot upward from the outcropping like a reverse falling star. Domi could not see the particles join the Trellis high above, but he thought he heard the merger, almost, a duet of two ringing wordless voices that soon melded into one. The light grew in the sky, expanding toward the horizon and the night-side beyond as one hour turned to two and two turned to three.

He hoped the worldholders would finish soon. He'd been stuck watching them forever, and he was bored of having little to distract him from the cold and the creepy sky except the howling wind and sound of his heartbeat.

Wait, heartbeat?

Domi frowned, trying to focus past the harsh Germinating gale. Yes, something pulsed through his ears, but why did he hear his own heartbeat? No wait, that couldn't be his heartbeat. Unless something was wrong, that irregular throb shouldn't come from inside his chest.

A moment later, as the wondertales came back to him, he realized with dread something was, indeed, very wrong. The stories all said the same thing: Clivias made this eerie sound. While hunting.

Domi froze like his ma taught him to do while breaking if he found himself surprised by an unexpected sound in what should have been an empty domus. But this time it was not a servant's padding footsteps or the creak of an old house that greeted his ears.

Beyond the outcrop, where brittle, icy grasses as tall as his head grew, something rose out of the overgrown snowy meadow like a dandelion catching a breeze.

The thing hovering at the edge of the outcrop resembled nothing Domi had ever seen. It was like an animal, but without any limbs or head. It was like a flower, but without any leaves or stem, just thin almost translucent filaments. Pale as ice and longer and wider than the length of Domi's body, the bestia drifted in midair. There, it hung motionless save for those thread-like tendrils, which swayed through the air like an old woman's long white hair might float beneath water.

He did not know what, if anything, it could see or hear. Did the bestia sense things the way day-side creatures did? Domi didn't want to find out. Heart in his throat, he glanced at Valens, trying to move nothing except his eyes. The worldholder was oblivious, as were the others, deep in their work. He gulped, shifting his gaze back to the clivia. And gasped.

Two clivias now drifted near. He had not noticed the second bestia approach; the pair throbbed in perfect sync. The new one, pale blue with a darker underbelly, was far smaller than the other, only the size of Domi's head. A juvenile? He hoped not; he didn't know much about animals, whether the day-side or night-side variety, but he did remember most tended to be very protective of their young.

As slowly as possible, Domi lifted the amethyst tree, trying not to breathe. Remembering what Valens said about the artifact's ability to detect intentions, he focused hard on the two bestias hovering in the air before him like wisps of blue and white smoke. He imagined the artifact destroying them, striking them with lightning maybe, or burning them up in an inferno, or—

A wave of golden and black promenia shrieked out of the violet crystals and sailed harmlessly past both clivias.

"True aim, my arse," he said, then clamped a hand over his mouth. He aimed again, but this time the weapon did nothing. "Oh crap," he whispered.

Run. Valens told him to run if the thing failed, but that would be stupid. He couldn't save his own worthless skin and abandon the only people capable of fixing the Trellis.

Not that it mattered whether he wanted to flee or not; both clivias now pointed several pale filaments toward him, somehow aware the blast or curses had come from him. Perhaps they could see and hear, despite the lack of anything resembling eyes or ears.

However they sensed the world around them, the bestias were on the move now. The smaller one rose into the sky, far faster than Domi thought the creature could fly after it had hovered motionless so long. The larger one shot three feet up into the air and then surged straight at him.

Domi yelped, smacking the weapon twice, and finally got off another blast with the amethyst tree—missing again—before the bestia forced him to roll to the side. Milky-white filaments swept toward him and missed his face by a hair. He lurched back and scrambled, scraping his hands on hard bedrock, and jerked the amethyst tree up.

Black and gold promenia roiled through the air, entwined around the creature, and condensed. The clivia fell to the ground in hundreds of glistening pieces, leaking translucent fluid and very dead.

The smaller one pulsed high above. Domi got off one blast with the weapon—and missed. Then the amethyst tree stopped working again.

"No," he whispered, shaking his head as the creature pulled its filaments close to its body and dropped straight at him.

He was not sure what he did, then. Even later, he would have trouble piecing it together, perhaps because of the utter strangeness of his own actions.

He heard the hum of the promenia inside the crystalline tree. He heard the silence where promenia should have been. Then he simply filled the silence with the humming.

Something like that, anyway.

There came a sensation akin to falling from a vast distance. His vision filled with the blue clivia, and he had a dim sense that was bad. Then coal-black smoke and golden glitter boiled through the air before him. Beyond the singing of promenia in his mind, one last throbbing pulse reverberated from the bestia, followed by a cascade of wet thuds.

After that, the world narrowed for a long time to hard bedrock, chill snow beneath his back, and white-hot agony in his skull. Now his heartbeat really did pound in his head. It hammered behind his nose, causing blood to bubble up and gush down his face. He couldn't bring himself to care.

Instead, he lay still and, when the worldholders around him at last stirred and all the noise started, tried to make sense of what their frantic words and their hands on him meant.

Someone said something about "broken" and "forgeholders." He had no idea what they were talking about.

Valens's confused and annoyed face hovered above him. "I told you to run if the artifact failed. Instead, you fixed it?"

"I did?"

"Yes."

It was the last thing his aedificans or anyone else said or did that made any sense for a long while.