The sky above Ren Vale’s head didn’t fall. It shattered into six overlapping panes of frosted glass.
He was eighteen, lying face down in a ditch behind the High court stables, coughing dark lung-blood into a puddle of freezing manure while royal cavalry trampled the bread-rioters into the mud.
He was fifty, sitting on the cold iron dais of the High Citadel, his fingers crippled with gout, his signed name carving the death-warrants of forty-two former comrades whose names he had deliberately erased from the regimental scrolls.
He was thirty-five, chained to the salt-crusted wall of a desert quarry, licking water drops from a rusted iron ring. Meanwhile, the skin peeled from his blistered cheekbones, having forgotten the color of his sister’s eyes twelve years ago.
“Hold his jaw!” a voice shouted from somewhere across an ocean. “He’s swallowing his tongue!”
Ren’s spine arched with the violent, unnatural stiffness of an oak beam buckling under a siege ram. His heels drummed against the black fiery sand, kicking up sprays of cold soot. His fingernails, stained indelibly with violet gall-nut ink, clawed wildly at his own throat. It tore through the collar of his patched lambskin apron, leaving red, bleeding furrows in his pale skin.
