I jolted awake.

Not that me jolting was anything unusual; but this jolt was different. More violent, as if someone or something had yanked me out of my slumber before I was fully rested. As if someone or something had reached bony arms into my head, wrapped skeletal fingers around my brain, and squeezed, digging dirty fingernails into my membranes.

Ouch. My head ached with a fierceness that weakened me, more so than it normally would after a nightmare. But had I been in the middle of one such horrid dream? Or had something truly snatched me out of slumber? I couldn't tell, and would need to fix myself a refreshing, awakening brew to determine that.

I pulled myself off my mattress. I'd sweated so much, the sheets clung to my back. When in my underground lair, and all my enchantments were up—the blockage at my door, a spell of illusion to prevent anyone from being able to look inside—I slept in the nude. After spending days on days wearing the heavy, thick cloak of my mage position, I yearned for freedom and air on my skin, if only for a few hours of sleep.

My bare feet collided with glacial cold as I set them onto the concrete-like floor under me. I was used to the sensation, actually enjoyed it most days; but today, it made me wince.

Cracking my back, my knuckles, my neck—that all made me wince, too.

Why was I wincing so much?

I didn't have many facial expressions that I knew of. Spending one's life living underneath a veil that cloaked one's face taught one to not bother making faces. No one would see them. Sometimes, when I glimpsed myself, uncovered, in the mirror, I practiced grimacing and smiling, just to see if I still had the ability to do so. To see if I hadn't forgotten how to show my emotions, in case one day...

In case one day someone would see them.

That was a fool's dream, of course. As long as I was Arden, Ace of Spade Island, advisor to the monarch of Acewood, I would never reveal my face. Never reveal the lines along my skin, nor what my skin color even was. Never showcase my eye-color, the length of my nose, the shape of my jawline. Not even if I were to somehow take up a lover—but I'd never dare that. Aces didn't take lovers. It was forbidden.

And I didn't miss it. The gazes across a crowded room, the dashing about to find a place to hide and fondle one another, the sweaty aftermath of sex—it was all overrated, to me. Sure, I'd indulged in it in my youth, but since donning the role of Arden, I didn't particularly care whether I was ever intimate again with another person. This—my position, my abilities, my responsibilities—was more than enough for me.

As I moved away from my small bed tucked in the corner of the rectangular room, the ground shook. Not the quick, subtle shudder I tended to sense often here in the basement, whenever guards ran across the upper floors and made my entire room shiver. I was so far below solid ground, yet I still knew when they were agitated, practicing drills in the castle's corridors.

No, this wasn't one of their drills. This was an earth-shattering rumble, a destabilizing tremor. Coming from beneath me, not above or around me.

I stumbled side-to-side, losing balance, but set my hands in the air, palms downward, to use my power to keep myself as upright as possible. Breezes whooshed out of my fingertips and kept me grounded.

The shift was strong, continuous, the floor rumbling as if containing a fiery beast beneath it. Blazing heat licked at the soles of my feet, crashing up my legs and wrapping around my middle.

This was no regular earthquake. Earthquakes were already a rarity for Acewood, and this one was...something else. Something unnatural. Something magical.

"Shit," I muttered under my breath, racing to the locked closet where I stashed my cloak and veil. They had to be protected any time they weren't on my person, as they were the primary source of my power. When I'd been fitted for the threads, and once they'd been placed over my head and body, they'd infused my blood with some energy, some abilities. But the majority of the spell work remained in the fabric and to be at my strongest, I needed to be wearing it.

I unlocked the padlock and ripped the ancient armoire doors open, yanking out my cloak first, throwing it over myself. Then came the veil, and it settled comfortably over my head, belonging there. Tailored to me.

Donning the outfit helped me better stabilize myself, but the shaking didn't stop. It continued, accompanied by a low growl that might have been coming from under me, but also from above; I was too disoriented to tell. I also couldn't tell if it was an animalistic growl, or something caused by the shifting of floor-boards, the earth below my feet.

As I lifted my chin to gape up at the ceiling, to attempt to see through it, a wave of wind blasted into me, knocking me backwards. Not my wind, not my powers. Not anyone's powers that I could recognize.

The sudden frigidity startled me into remaining frozen in place. I spread my legs out in a defensive stance, in case another blast jarred through me. It was often cold down here, but not like this. Not like snow had blanketed the entire room and changed its overall aesthetic from black to white.

The tremors stopped abruptly. I wavered as I readjusted to the stability.

The brutal wind never returned.

"Oh," I said, letting my shoulders droop as relief washed through me. "Oh, it's all right. Everything is fine."

Nothing was fine. But saying it out loud helped me convince myself. It helped me think that maybe I'd imagined it all.

I hadn't. My bedsheets strewn on the floor, a few fallen books from my old bookcases against the walls, herbs and bowls and tinctures I'd set up on high shelves—that was proof I hadn't been dreaming. I hadn't made all this up.

Something had shaken the castle to its core, and it wasn't me.

I sucked in a deep breath, then released it. I had to compose myself for what was to come next: research. That intense shaking, the sudden burst of wind, the overall sense of discomfort and unfamiliarity—I'd never experienced that before. Not as Arden, not as the person I was before. It couldn't have been a natural occurrence. It was magic.

But what kind?

I'd normally consult Ossenna on this matter, but I'd detected her spirit as elsewhere at our last meeting. She was going through something, but she didn't want to speak about it. And when Ossenna was put-off or irritated, she needed several days to recover. Isolation, strong tea, and alone time with Sym. She thought no one knew about their relationship, but nothing got by me. Not when they devoured each other from across the meeting room and pretended not to care so deeply for one another.

I didn't care if they cared. What other Aces did wasn't my business, and I wouldn't report them. As long as what they did wasn't a detriment to the kingdom and the work we did, it wasn't my problem.

I fumbled over to my desk, still sensing the shudders through my legs though the actual tremors had ceased. An after-effect of such tremulous movement, I assumed.

There, right where I'd left it—though the quaking had flipped the pages—was my primary magic tome, The Book of Arden. Yes, a book named after me. It had to be, since I'd created it.

Cobwebs dangled from its sides, curling around the table's wooden legs as if holding on. I hadn't moved the tome from its spot since I first inherited this position. All I did was turn the pages, seeking the spell or explanation I needed. Never did I close it, and never would I. It was an encyclopedia, a lifeline, my means of faking my way through a powerful position I still didn't understand, most days.

Being Arden was...hard. Everyone feared me but respected me. Everyone avoided me but revered me when they had no choice but to be in my presence. My black, impossible-to-see-through threads gave them pause, reminded them of horror, of death. But in fact, black was, in my culture, a sign of neutrality, of nothingness. My abilities had nothing to do with death. They were lit with life, growth, understanding. Except when I was in war-mode, but thankfully that hadn't happened in while. Not since the—

"Riots." My fingers paused over the sentence I'd been about to read, and I jerked my chin up to glance at the ceiling again. Were those tremors actually the footsteps, but more intense than usual, tricking me into thinking they came from beneath me? Were they the boots of the guards as they ran across the upstairs hall, in a rush to protect the other mages, the nobles residing at court, the staff? Not a drill, but a real emergency?

Riots.

I shook my head as I calmed the erratic images of blood and gore in the streets of Acewood.

No, it wasn't riots this time. It couldn't be. Sirens had rung in the castle and gardens when the initial attacks commenced; and no sirens rang now.

It was something else.

I refocused on the book, where the pages had shifted to what I was looking for. Odd; had the abrupt wind turned those for me? Found the magic I'd been thinking of before I'd even approached the desk?

It wouldn't have been the first time the world around me responded to my emotions before I thought them, expressed them. The cloak's properties worked with the elements, with the atmosphere, similarly to how Ossenna's powers functioned, but with a sharper edge. Where she could close her eyes and envision scenes or take a sip of herbal tea and receive a prophecy, I had to touch things to receive revelations. Sometimes, touching the air itself was enough to trigger something—like that wind.

I'd never done that before.

"Cool trick," I said, wiping the smile off my face to concentrate.

The paragraph I'd set my finger to glowed as I read it. It spoke of shifts in the atmosphere, arrivals from other realms and dimensions, disturbances in the composition of our planet. These were occurrences that could cause earthquake-like happenings that a being strong as I could channel.

Which meant it was likely that no one upstairs—not even mages such as Sym, Ossenna, or Otho—had felt what I felt. No one would know our ground had shaken, disturbed by something potentially nefarious.

I had to investigate.

I readjusted my cloak and veil, securing the buttons and magical seal to keep the material better affixed to my person. My gloves were near my bed, so I shrugged those on, then my boots, before lifting the enchantment over my door to pass through. Even I wasn't immune to the protections of the spell I'd cast; I still had to deactivate and reactivate it every time I crossed the threshold of my lair.

Once I'd reset the charm, I strolled leisurely down the deep, dark hallway leading to the stairs. If anyone saw me tense, my fingers twitch, detected any hint of distress from me, they'd panic. I had to be neutral, stoic, and impenetrable at all times.

It was hard, pretending to not be in tatters underneath my veil. To act like I didn't experience every single shift in the organisms surrounding me, and to feign comprehending what they meant. I fought to put on an actual facade and show myself as solemn and knowledgeable, when I was far from either. But the smooth-running of Acewood, and the survival of its inhabitants, depended on me.

As I climbed the stairs, slowly, to not slip from the puddles of dank water at the bottom, my nostrils picked up on something...foreign? Frightening? Illusional? I couldn't tell, but the air was different here. More so than usual. And weirder still as I got closer to the ground floor of Acewood Castle.

"Something has breached through," I whispered to myself, rounding a corner the instant I made it to the top of the stairs. I pressed my hands to the nearest wall, analyzing every vein of energy below the surface, trying to detect malicious intent.

I smelled nothing, felt nothing. Just that odd change, the vague notion that someone or something had ventured into our world, our castle. And the fact that I couldn't distinguish more than that was troublesome.

But was I supposed to warn the other mages of something so uncertain? Or take the risk of pushing deeper, trying to figure out what the threat was before exposing it to them? I'd never been wrong before, and The Book of Arden had never led me astray. Yet something about this occurrence...made me nervous. Uneasy on my feet. My lungs sucked in more oxygen than needed, so much that it became hard to breathe.

If I was to gather with the mages and attempt to explain to them what I was feeling, I needed to recompose myself. If I was a heaping, gasping mess as I waded into the throne-room, that'd start a commotion. I'd gotten a whiff of their energies coming from that direction, so I knew where to go, but still, I hesitated. They'd be on the alert before I got a chance to speak with them.

One breath in, two breaths out.

I rolled one shoulder, then the other, and swayed my head side to side, reorganizing my thoughts, bringing to light my priorities.

One breath in, two breaths out.

I tugged on my gloves, ensuring their rough, leathered texture wrapped tightly around my fingers.

One breath in, two breaths out...

I took off. I was too set in my decision to change my mind. How I'd describe this sensation to my co-mages, I still had no clue. But so far, any time I'd had to converse with them, I'd stunned myself into speaking with eloquence, never sounding afraid or wary, never masticating my words and making it hard to understand me. The cloak's magic gave me confidence and helped me form my sentences when they were stuck in my head.

Thank goodness.

Sure enough, as I trudged down the thick-carpeted corridor leading to the throne-room, I heard them inside. Sym's pinched tone, Ossenna's melodious voice, Otho's captivating register. I detected their scent, too—Ossenna was all fierce rainforest and tropical flowers, Sym was corn and sharp citrus. Otho was the tart hart-fruit and roses. I wondered for a second how I smelled to them, before the guards pulled the massive doors apart and allowed me access.

They were atop their respective thrones—chairs fashioned for us once we realized the princesses wouldn't be back for a while—in deep discussion. From their relaxed postures, I deduced that I'd been right, and that they hadn't felt the tremors I'd experienced in the basement. Sym was the only one harboring a constant scent of stress, but even he wasn't sitting as uptight as usual.

I cleared my throat to announce my arrival, and they all gazed at me, questions in their gold, galaxy, and sky-blue eyes.

"There's been an atmospheric shift," I said, opting for the truth, and praying they wouldn't demand detailed explanations. "And I'm not yet sure what it is, but something, someone, is here. Someone who doesn't belong."

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