Chapter 332

Grid didn't even have to think about it.

He knelt down, put his palm flat on the cold stone in the middle of the great rune, and said the only name that came to mind.

"Reidan."

Nothing happened.

Then, under his hand, the dead lines began to warm.

A thin thread of violet light crept out from beneath his palm and ran along the nearest groove. Then another. Then dozens of them, racing outward through the rune, filling each line in turn, until the whole vast circle was glowing so brightly that the crowd around the plaza raised their hands to shield their eyes. Grid felt something pull at him, deep in his chest, the same place the light had gone into back in the shrine. The crown in his inventory grew warm.

[The successor of Arisha has awakened the Rune of Passage.]

[The fragment has been bound to: Reidan.]

The ground shook. A low sound rolled through the cavern, deep enough that Grid felt it in his teeth. Then the whole city moved. Not up, and not down. It slid through something that wasn't quite space, carrying every house and bridge and forge and every person standing in the plaza along with it. Grid's stomach lurched. And then, as gently as it had started, it stopped, and settled, somewhere new.

And then, at the far end of the plaza, where there had been nothing but a blank cavern wall, a line of light appeared.

It was thin at first. A single bright crack running straight up the black stone from the floor. Then it widened. And widened. The edges of the crack pulled apart, slowly, as if the wall itself was a curtain being drawn back, until there was a doorway standing in the rock, taller than the tallest house in the city.

And through it, light was pouring in.

Not violet. Not the soft blue glow of runes.

Gold.

Warm, ordinary, afternoon gold. And with it came a breath of wind, the first moving air that had blown through this cavern in a thousand years, carrying a smell nobody in the city had ever smelled before. Grass. Dust. Sun-warmed stone. The faint, sweet smell of wheat.

The crowd went completely silent.

Grid stood up and dusted off his knees. "There we go," he said, pleased with himself. "Portal."

Nobody moved.

He turned around. Thousands of Dark Elves were staring at the doorway. Not one of them had taken a step. Grid suddenly realized that none of them knew what was on the other side. None of them had ever seen it. They had heard about the sky in stories their whole lives, the way he had heard about dragons as a kid. Something that probably existed, somewhere, for other people.

Luvian was the first to move.

He walked forward slowly, Arisha's Sword wrapped in dark cloth across his back, the Deepvein Spear in his hand. He stopped right at the edge of the light, where the gold met the shadow. He stayed there a long time.

Then he stepped through.

Grid followed him with Noe on his shoulder.

They came out on a low rise of open ground just outside a city wall. A city Grid knew very well. He could see the familiar gate from here. The towers. The golden fields of wheat stretching out across what had once been desert, swaying slowly in the breeze. The smoke rising from the chimneys of the smithy district, where his own forge was waiting.

Reidan. Right there. Maybe a ten-minute walk.

And above it all, the sky.

It was a perfectly ordinary afternoon. A few white clouds. A pale blue so wide and so high it seemed to go on forever. The sun hanging low over the fields, warm and gold.

Luvian was standing completely still in front of him, with his face tilted up.

Grid had seen him fight lizards without blinking. He had seen him kneel to a whole city. He had seen him hold that spear like it was the most precious thing in the world. He had never seen him look like this.

Tears were running down Luvian's face, and he didn't seem to know it.

Behind them, the others came through. Slowly at first, one or two at a time, then more, then all of them, stepping out of the rock and into the light and stopping, stunned, just as Luvian had. The old woman who had told Grid that no one had ever seen the sky stood with both hands pressed over her mouth. A little boy pointed up at a cloud and asked his mother, in a whisper, what it was. She couldn't answer him. She was crying too hard.

In ones and twos, all across the hillside, thousands of Dark Elves sank down onto the grass, and simply looked up.

Grid stood among them with his hands in his pockets, feeling oddly out of place.

He had seen the sky a thousand times. He saw it every day on his way to the smithy. He had never once thought about it. But standing here, surrounded by thousands of people seeing it for the very first time, he found himself looking up too, as if he'd never really noticed it before.

It was a nice sky, he decided. A really nice one.

Then his vision exploded with notifications.

[You have 389 unread whispers.]

[Guild chat: 1,047 unread messages.]

Grid flinched. He had forgotten. The moment he stepped out of the fragment, he was back in the normal world, back in range of everyone. And everyone, it seemed, had been trying very hard to reach him.

He opened the whispers. The first forty were from Lauel. He scrolled. The next thirty were also from Lauel. Some of them were just his name, over and over. One of them simply said GRID in capital letters with eleven exclamation marks. A few, near the bottom, were from Vanter, Faker and Jishuka. And surprisingly he got 2 whispers from Rudra as well.

"...He's going to kill me," Grid said.

"Lauel is going to kill Master, Nyang," Noe agreed.

Grid was still scrolling, trying to find the newest message, when something small and grey dropped out of the sky and landed on his shoulder, right next to Noe.

It was a pigeon.

Noe stared at it. The pigeon stared at Noe. Then the pigeon decided, very sensibly, to ignore the demonic cat entirely, and stuck out one leg toward Grid. There was a small rolled-up letter tied to it with a ribbon.

Grid knew that ribbon. It was the pale blue one from Irene's sewing box.

His heart did something strange.

He untied the letter with fingers that suddenly felt clumsy, and unrolled it. It was short. The handwriting was neat and careful and very familiar, though in a few places, the ink had smudged, as if the hand writing it had been shaking.

My dear husband,

I don't know where you are. Lauel says no one can reach you, and that you are certainly safe. So I am sending this the only way I know, and I am trusting that it will find you, the way you always find your way home.

I wanted to tell you in person. I wanted to see your face. But I can't wait any longer, and I think if I don't tell someone soon I shall burst.

Dear, I am with child.

We are going to have a baby.

Please come home soon. I miss you terribly. And so, I think, does someone very small who hasn't met you yet.

Your Irene.

Grid read it.

Then he read it again.

Then a third time, very slowly, his lips moving. Except he couldn't seem to make the words stay still. They kept blurring.

We are going to have a baby.

The hillside went quiet around him.

He could see Randy, whom he must have summoned at some point without noticing, tugging at his sleeve. He could see Noe's mouth moving. He could see the pigeon pecking at his shoulder, waiting for a reply. He couldn't hear any of it.

"...A dad?" Grid whispered.

He didn't move.

He stood there just outside his own city, with thousands of Dark Elves sitting in the grass behind him, the letter held in both hands, his mouth hanging slightly open, staring at nothing at all.