The edge of Abonia's jungle was a seam between life and nothingness.

  Rohan had lost count of how long he had been wandering. Time had stopped meaning anything here — it was no longer the movement of sunlight across the canopy, but the rhythmic cramping of an empty stomach, and the cycle of wounds on his ankles festering open, drying, and splitting again.

  He was in a worse state than the most wretched scavenger of the dead. He was nearly naked, his skin crusted over with black bloodscabs and thick, caked mud. Since his brother's death, his soul had been living in a state of half-detachment — he would simply be walking and then find himself on his knees in the mud without knowing how he got there, letting the bloodthirsty flies drink from his back without the will to brush them away.

  Whenever the grief came in like a tide and covered his mouth and nose — whenever he wanted to simply lie down and quietly become another patch of rotting fungus on the rainforest floor — that base, ignoble thing called the will to live would claw its way back to the surface. Hunger, like a rusted spear, would twist through his insides.

  And so he would crawl on hands and knees to a rotting log and shove the writhing larvae into his mouth, or crouch at a stream's edge and fight a crocodile for a fish.

  "Brother… why am I still alive?" He murmured it to himself, again and again, more times than he could count.

  The completed Kris at his waist was heavy as a block of raw iron. The ruby eyes of the deity-hilt pressed against his skin with a cold that never varied, never warmed. It had suppressed the darkness in him — but it seemed to have pressed down on his aliveness along with it.

  Then, one day, the jungle ended.

  Rohan pushed aside a last dry banana leaf — and the world in front of him blazed so bright he had to shut his eyes.

  An open slope of grass, and at its far edge, no more endless green. Instead, something that stirred a feeling he had no name for: a vast, deep blue, wider than anything he had ever imagined, wider than the Abonia River by ten thousand times. The sea wind hit him with a sharp bite of salt, and swept away the smell of rot that had been living with him for days.

  In the shadow at the edge of the slope, a figure was standing.

  Rohan's spine arched on instinct. His right hand shot to the deity-hilt at his waist. A low sound came from his throat — rough and unused, like a voice that had forgotten how to be a voice.

  The figure turned slowly around.

  Rohan went still.

  A man's face — skin the same deep bronze as Rohan's own, the same deep-set eyes and lightly curling hair of the Ezan people. But what the man was wearing gave Rohan the disorienting feeling that he was looking at a strange sculpture with a human head placed on top.

  The man's outer covering was white. Completely, impossibly white — smooth without a single crease, as though it had been made from some extraordinarily fine material, something like bark that had been pressed flat and sewn together with absolute precision. It clung to the man's torso, and at the chest and cuffs, there were hard, circular pieces that caught the light with a silver gleam.

  What baffled Rohan most was the man's feet. He had no toes. His feet were enclosed entirely in two smooth, hard black shells, shining like the carapace of some great creature.

  "Don't be afraid, child."

  The man spoke. His words carried a slight, unfamiliar lilt — but they were unmistakably the dialect Rohan had grown up with.

  Rohan did not lower his guard. His eyes stayed fixed on the man's chest. There, a thin silver chain descended along the white outer covering and disappeared into a concealed pocket.

  The man noticed where Rohan was looking. A mild smile crossed his face. He reached up with two fingers, pinched the chain, and drew out a perfectly round metal object that gleamed like silver.

  It was the most intricate thing Rohan had ever seen in his life.

  With a press of the man's thumb, the cover of the object sprang open, revealing a white face inside. Across that face, several slender black needles moved in an absolutely precise and unvarying rhythm — one beat, and another, and another.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  The sound was faint. And yet in that moment it seemed to press through the wind around them as though the wind wasn't there.

  A chill moved through Rohan without reason or warning. Was that a heartbeat? Was that small metal box alive? How could anything beat so evenly — so evenly that it produced in him a coldness he had never felt before?

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  "This is called a pocket watch. It counts time for us." The man stepped forward — his movements unhurried and deliberate, the way you'd move toward a frightened deer. "My name is Keling. Like you, I am a child of this forest."

  Rohan looked at the man's crisp white outer shell. Then he looked at himself — his own armour of filth and dried mud. The contrast produced something that felt almost physical.

  "You… you're Ezan?" Rohan's voice came out barely above a rasp.

  "I was." Keling closed the distance between them. He carried a faint smell — something blended from tobacco and flower water. He showed no sign of being repelled by the stench on Rohan, but drew a snow-white cloth from his breast pocket and held it out.

  Rohan did not take it. He had no idea what it was for. In everything he had ever known, that degree of whiteness was reserved for offerings to the gods.

  "Come with me, child." Keling looked out toward the coastline in the distance. "There is a place where a power exists that can wash away every sin you carry. There is no endless head-hunting there. No jungle mud. In that place, you can become a person again — not a blade fouled with bloodstains."

  Wash away… every sin.

  The words landed with precision on the most undefended place inside Rohan. He thought of the fire consuming the Longhouse. His brother's body held upright by spears. The madness that had been in him when he was cradling that head. If such a place truly existed — if there was truly something that could lift that cold, slick feeling from his palms—

  "Where?"

  "The harbour." Keling smiled and pointed ahead. "It is a new home given to us by the gods. The buildings there are more magnificent than the sacred mountain. The light there does not go out even at night."

  The journey to the harbour took three full days.

  Throughout those three days, Keling played the role of a patient listener. He provided Rohan with a soft food cut into small pieces that smelled of wheat and grain, and water so clear it seemed to contain nothing at all, carried in a transparent vessel.

  Each evening when darkness came, Keling would sit by the fire and describe the world outside.

  "There are no biting insects like these." He gestured at the horseflies drinking from Rohan's wounds. "The houses there are built from hard stone — no monsoon wind, however violent, can make them shudder. Everyone there is dressed like me, holding conversations with dignity, eating with grace."

  Rohan listened as though in a trance. For a boy who had grown up with bamboo, timber, and mud, the world Keling described was like a miracle glimpsed through a gap in the clouds — real enough to see, too far away to touch.

  "Are the white giants there too?" Rohan asked, remembering the Aru spirit-child's final warning.

  "They are not giants." Keling shook his head with a quiet laugh. "They are called the Solarians. They are the emissaries of light. They have brought us something we could never have imagined… civilisation."

  When Keling said the word civilisation, something close to fervour moved through his eyes. He told Rohan that the Solarians commanded thunder — guns and cannons. They commanded iron — great ships. They could travel across the open ocean. They could kindle fire in the dark that would never go out.

  "Rohan — think about it. If your tribe had possessed that kind of power. If your brother had commanded that thunder… would those Odsu snakes have dared set a single foot inside your Longhouse?"

  Rohan went quiet. The hypothetical entered the ash of his chest and caught light.

  He was right. If Rohan had possessed that power, his brother would not have needed to shield him with his own body and be driven through by a dozen spears. If he could be like Keling — wearing a skin no blade could pierce, holding time itself in a silver case—

  Something broke the surface of the dead ground inside him. Curiosity. A small and tentative hope. He began to want to see that world. To see this civilisation that could bring an end to all the grief.

  On the morning of the fourth day, when they came over the last headland, Rohan lost the ability to speak entirely.

  He stood on the ridge, vacant-eyed, and the Kris slipped from his fingers and landed on the grass with a dull clang. He did not notice.

  Below him, the simple arc of beach he had expected was gone. In its place stood a complex of buildings on a scale so vast it exceeded anything his imagination had ever attempted — constructed from pale grey cut stone, rising with a near-perfect vertical certainty toward the sky.

  The harbour.

  Rohan had never known that stone could be cut so flat, stacked with such flawless evenness, reaching upward like that. The great buildings had windows layered upon windows, each one throwing back the morning light in a dazzling glare.

  At the stone quayside, several enormous black creatures were moored.

  Solarian ocean-going ships. Their vast wooden hulls were painted deep black, their masts climbing so high they seemed to lean into the clouds, their immense sails rolled and quiet for now. Beside these leviathans, the dugout canoe Rohan had grown up paddling would have looked like a few dead leaves drifting on the water.

  On the docks below, crowds of people moved like a colony of ants. He could see the Solarians Keling had described — skin as white as bone, wearing uniforms trimmed with gold, their very hair seeming to catch the sun like metal.

  They were nothing like the demons Rohan had imagined. On the contrary — they moved through the sunlight with steadiness and confidence, as though the ground belonged to them absolutely.

  "Welcome to the new world, Rohan."

  Keling came to stand beside him and laid a hand on his shoulder — gentle, warm, carrying a steadying kind of weight.

  "Look at this place. Everything you're looking for is here. You are no longer a deserter carrying a blood debt. You will become one of them. You will learn their language. You will master their tools. Only then will you have the real power to protect the things you want to protect."

  Rohan looked at the stone city shining in the early morning light. The distant sound of a harbour horn drifted up to him — low, resonant, like the slow breathing of some ancient and enormous creature.

  The self-recrimination inside him — that weight he had carried every waking moment — retreated, almost miraculously, in the face of that vast, orderly, powerful sight. He felt so small. Small as a speck of dust the monsoon wind had blown from a branch. And the great civilisation spread below him seemed to be a net — wide and deep — that might actually be able to catch him.

  "Maybe the harbour… really can bring some peace."

  He told himself this quietly, in the place no one else could hear. He bent slowly and picked up the mud-caked Kris from the grass, and held it close against his chest.