Sabíana had often had strange, unsettling dreams in the long years of her sickness. Even before she had been given, and had taken, the chance to escape her broken body in the form of the eagle (only to be captured by a certain recalcitrant Gumira by the name of Khaidu), her dream reality was more vivid than the dreary, everyday pain of the invalid. She had had dreams of herself as a fish swimming through an underwater ruin that looked vaguely like Vasyllia a thousand years into the future. However, the wondrous more often gave way to the horrible—pestilence and war and famine and many other variations on the theme of the death of her people and her city.
But never had her reality matched her dreams so well.
The palace had once been a true jewel. Carved out of the bones of the mountain, a
