There was more in the next panel—symbols that made Travis’s head swim to gaze at—but he skipped them for the moment, turning so that he saw a later point in the story. Morindu loomed above the desert now, dark and powerful. Orú sat on his throne, shackled to it with chains, asleep, while seven stick figures drank from him, careful to seal the wounds again after they did.

Travis’s eyes kept moving across the wall. The story was almost over. An army like a sea flowed toward Morindu. Among the army were dots that radiated circles of power. Demons. The people of Morindu fled the city, escaping into the desert.

But not the Seven. Droplets fell from their arms, and a circle appeared in the air. A gate. Beyond was sea and stone. Then the Seven drank one last time from Orú, and when they were finished he was no longer a living man, asleep on the throne. He was a mummy, dead.

A figure holding a curved knife approached the Seven, jagged bolts of fury shooting from her eyes. Ti’an. Only before she could slay them, the Seven stepped through the gate, leaving only Orú and Ti’an. The last panel showed the city sinking beneath the sands of the desert as the army was crushed under the churning sands.

There the story ended.

Grace stepped onto the dais next to Travis. “So they drained him.” She gazed at the desiccated mummy. “The Scirathi thought they would find Orú’s blood here, but the Seven took it all, then escaped through a gate, leaving Ti’an. All this time she’s been trapped here with his corpse, made immortal by his blood.”

Travis hadn’t realized he had been speaking aloud as he read the story, but all the same he must have.

“If the Seven escaped, where did they go?” Larad said.

It was Farr who answered. “Earth. Look at the way the gate is drawn. It is like a tunnel through a great darkness. That must be the Void. Which means the Seven went to Earth.”

“Can we go now, Mother?” Nim said.

Vani stood. She had covered Ti’an’s body with a cloth. “Yes, daughter. There is nothing left for us here.”

“And where will we go?” Master Larad said. “There is water in this city, but we have no camels. We need to find the Last Rune, Master Wilder. But I don’t know how we’ll do that now. Not before the end comes. I doubt we’ll find it lying around here.”

Larad was right, the end was close. But the answer wasthere, Travis was sure of it. Only he couldn’t quite grasp it.

“What about the rest of the story?” Farr said, pointing to a large section of the wall. “You skipped all this. What did it say?”

Yes, that was where the answer was. Travis licked his lips. “When the thirteen morndarientered him, Orú understood the truth. The truth about the origin of the world. Of all the worlds.”

Grace touched his shoulder. “You mean like the story of the twins?”

“Yes, the twins.” Travis drew in a deep breath, then read the symbols he had skipped, speaking as he did, describing what Orú had understood as the thirteen entered him.

“It’s like Farr’s story. For an eternity, there was only nothing. Then, suddenly, the nothing gave birth to two things, two entities—one of being, and the other of . . .” Travis struggled for a word. “. . . of unbeing. Earth and Eldh, they were worlds of being. And there were more. Hundreds of them, millions. But there was only one world of unbeing, and that was the Void. It was like a sea between the other worlds, bridging them, binding them together.”

He was no longer aware of talking now. Instead, he was seeing it, understanding it without words, even as Orú had three thousand years before when the morndarientered him, becoming one with him.

It was all in perfect equilibrium, the worlds of being balanced by the Void. Or at least it was meantto be perfect. Only it wasn’t. For from the very beginning, there was something wrong.

Travis studied the symbols. A deep line was carved into the wall. On one side of the line were myriad small specks, as well as thirteen larger dots that emanated concentric lines of power. On the other side of the line were three circles.

No, not circles. Stones.

Travis could almost see it as it had happened. A mistake was made in the creation of the worlds and the Void. Somehow, in the chaos of those first moments of formation, fragments of unbeing were caught on the wrong side of the line. They found themselves drawn in and captured by the force of one of the worlds of being. The world Eldh. There, in a later age, those fragments of unbeing became known as the morndari, or Those Who Thirst.

Still striving for balance, for perfection, the multiverse spontaneously attempted to heal itself. Fragments of primordial being were sent to Eldh to counteract the morndari, to cancel them out and remove the flaw, so that the worlds of being would be perfect like the Void. These fragments of primordial matter were the Imsari.

Although they became known as the Great Stones after the dwarf Alcendifar found them and wrought into them the power of the runes Gelth, Krond, and Sinfath, the Imsari were not truly things of stone. They were something older, deeper—pieces of the very first stuff of being that sprang out of the nothingness. If they were to be called Stones, then this thing they came from was the First Stone. It was the first pebble tossed into an ocean to create a continent. It was the very beginning of everything.

The thirteen most powerful morndariwere similar, but opposite. They were fragments of the most primordial substance of unbeing. When the Imsari came in contact with the morndari, they would cancel one another out, returning to the nothingness that once spawned them. Thus the balance would be restored and the instability healed.

Only it didn’t happen that way.

In the south, on the continent of Moringarth, the thirteen most powerful morndariwere dazzled by blood and were trapped within Orú, merging with him so completely they could never be released again. And in the north, on the continent of Falengarth, where the Imsari fell, the three Great Stones were changed by the craft of Alcendifar, then were seized by the forces of the Pale King, and finally were scattered across the world, and even beyond, to the world that drifted closest to Eldh in the sea of the Void. To the world Earth.

Thus history conspired to keep the Imsari and the morndarifrom uniting as intended. And so the instability grew. Slowly at first. And then, as the end drew nearer, more swiftly.

The final symbols showed gashes opening in the fabric of creation. The line grew blurred, then vanished. And after that . . . nothing at all. Or less than nothing, for this was an emptiness that could never give birth, that never had given birth, that was without possibility. Without hope.

Travis stopped reading. He was dimly aware of his own voice fading to silence.

“She wasn’t trying to kill the Seven,” Vani said.

He turned. The T’golstood over Ti’an’s covered form. She looked at him, and sorrow shone in her gold eyes.

“I think you’re right. I think she helped them open the gate.” Travis studied the symbols. Fury sparked in her eyes as the Seven stepped through the gate—fury for the army that approached Morindu. “I think she knew it was crucial that Orú’s blood be guarded, protected, so that one day it could be used to heal the rifts in creation.”

Only she was mad in the end. Eons of dwelling here alone, deep beneath the desert, with only her husband’s mummy as companion, had destroyed her mind. She had wanted only to kill the intruders, to use them, to get her husband back.

I’m sorry, Travis said silently, gazing at her still form.

“What about the other morndari?” Grace said. She had been studying the symbols on the wall, and now she turned around, her expression sharp with curiosity. “If the thirteen that entered Orú were part of the primordial stuff of unbeing, what were the other morndari?”