Embermore: Book of Archaeopteryx BOOK ONE

Night had a way of making Embermore look older than it really was. This was not an illusion, exactly. Embermore was old. Very old. Old enough that its ruins had ruins, old enough that archaeologists could excavate a building only to discover that somebody else had already excavated it centuries earlier and then built a chapel over the hole because, apparently, even ancient people had a talent for making simple things unnecessarily complicated. But at night the age became visible. The mountains surrounding the valley became black silhouettes, their peaks broken and uneven against a sky without stars. The grass had long since died. The trees were skeletal things, their branches twisting upward as though they had spent centuries trying to escape the earth and had finally given up halfway through. There was no moon. No birds. No insects. Nothing moved except the wind, and even the wind seemed reluctant to remain.

At the center of the valley stood the Obsidian Spire. Nobody knew who had built it. This was not unusual in Embermore. The kingdom had been constructed on top of civilizations whose names had vanished, and those civilizations had apparently been constructed on top of civilizations whose names had vanished even more thoroughly. History in Embermore was less a straight line than a pile of bodies, ruins, half-translated inscriptions, contradictory legends, and extremely confident historians arguing over footnotes. The Spire had survived all of them. It rose from the earth like a black tooth. No windows. No doors. No carvings that anyone had ever managed to translate. Its surface was smooth enough to reflect almost nothing, and when the Archivists had tried to examine it with magic, their spells had simply disappeared. Not failed. Disappeared. The distinction had bothered them enormously. A failed spell could be studied. A spell that vanished without leaving evidence was something else.

The Archivist stood before it. She had been walking for nearly six hours. Her boots were soaked. Her cloak was torn. One hand was bleeding. She had lost her lantern somewhere in the forest and had not bothered to retrieve it because, after three decades of studying forbidden history, she had learned an important rule: when an ancient magical object wants you to see it, it generally provides its own lighting. The Obsidian Spire did. Not much. Just enough. A faint gold glow had appeared beneath its surface. The Archivist stopped. Her breath became visible. She looked at the Spire. For several seconds, nothing happened. Then she smiled. It was not a happy smile. There are smiles that mean happiness. There are smiles that mean politeness. There are smiles that mean a person has just realized they have forgotten something important. This was the fourth kind: the smile of someone who has spent an entire lifetime being told that she is insane and has finally acquired evidence.

“You are here,” she whispered.

The Spire remained silent. The Archivist stepped closer. “I know you are.” Still nothing. She placed her palm against the stone. Cold. So cold that pain traveled immediately through her fingers. She did not move her hand. The glow beneath the surface intensified. The valley trembled. The Archivist closed her eyes. She had imagined this moment many times. This was perhaps the most embarrassing thing about scholarship. People imagined scholars as calm creatures who spent their days reading dusty books and correcting other people’s grammar. In reality, scholars could become every bit as obsessed as priests, kings, criminals, or children who had discovered a particularly interesting hole in the ground. The Archivist had spent forty-two years searching for the truth about the First Age. She had been eleven when she found the first reference, twenty when she discovered the second, thirty-four when she realized the references were connected, forty when she was expelled from the Royal Academy for insisting that the official history of Embermore was false, and forty-one when she discovered the location of the Spire. At forty-two, she had come here. And now she was beginning to wonder whether being right had been a mistake.

The Spire cracked. The sound was soft, almost delicate. A thin golden line appeared across the black surface. Then another. Then another. They spread outward from a single point, branching across the stone like lightning trapped beneath glass. The Archivist stepped backward. Her heart began beating faster. “No.” The fissures continued. “No, no, no.” The pattern was unmistakable. She had seen it in manuscripts. She had seen it on fragments of bone. She had seen it carved into the walls beneath the oldest temple in Embermore, where the priests had claimed the markings were decorative because admitting otherwise would have required explaining why the temple was built over a mass grave. Wings. Two enormous skeletal wings. The symbol of the First Age. The symbol of the creature whose name had survived even when nearly everything else had been forgotten. Archaeopteryx.

The Spire split open. Light erupted from within. The Archivist threw up her arm. Heat struck her face. Stone exploded outward. Fragments of black obsidian tore through the dead grass, embedding themselves in the earth with enough force to make the ground shudder. The Archivist remained where she was. She could have run. She did not. That distinction mattered. Courage, she had always believed, was not the absence of fear. It was the moment in which fear became irrelevant. At least that was what she had written in her journals. Now, standing before the opening Spire, she suspected she had written it because she had never previously been afraid enough to discover whether it was true.

Something moved inside the light. The Archivist stopped breathing. A silhouette emerged. Tall. Thin. Impossible. At first she could not understand what she was seeing because the mind is poorly equipped to process things that contradict its accumulated understanding of reality. There were limbs. There were wings. There was a long, narrow head. Then feathers began to form, one at a time. Black at first. Then silver. Then colors that seemed to exist somewhere between blue, violet, and the particular shade of darkness visible immediately before lightning strikes. The feathers spread across its body. Its wings unfolded. The first movement produced a sound like a thousand pages turning simultaneously. The second produced wind. The Archivist’s cloak snapped behind her. She fell to one knee.

The creature stepped forward. Its talons struck the stone. Once. Twice. Three times. Each impact sent a vibration through the valley. Then its eyes opened. The Archivist had expected fire. She had expected gold. She had expected something monstrous. Instead she saw intelligence. Ancient intelligence. The kind of intelligence that made human intelligence seem temporary. The creature looked at her. The Archivist felt the weight of that gaze settle over her. “You remember me.” The voice did not come from its mouth. It came from inside her mind. She swallowed. “Yes.” The creature tilted its head. “Why?” The Archivist stared at it. “Because someone had to.”