That day the prophecy came true. The warnings had been steadily increasing in the past few days, and everyone knew—it would be legend.

Xenia had nowhere to go that morning. She stood on the balcony of her apartment, looking out at the plaza. She could see the shopkeepers, oblivious, still peddling their wares, which they had spread out over the cobblestone roads. Trainee students raced around them, swinging practice swords at each other, shouting about the hero of Viralda Village. But a sudden darkness, a cloud of black smoke, drew her attention away from all of them.

They flew down from Mount Exodus to the east in a cloud of smoke and tattered gray cloth, and they sounded like continuous thunder. Xenia’s heart stopped. She reminded herself what the Academy’s Headmaster had told her not so long ago, and she took a deep breath. She could do this. They could do this.

Any minute now, she told herself, Cain would run into the plaza brandishing that sword, the one the Light had given him under the Headmaster’s guidance. He alone would fight the demons that had come from Mount Exodus and begun to descend on the village. The Headmaster—no, the prophecy—had said so. But as she watched the demons, still streaming from somewhere on Mount Exodus, advance on the village gate, she felt her heart beginning to race. Reaching out, she gripped the railing of the balcony, her fingers clenching around it so tightly that her knuckles went white.

The demons drew closer, and Xenia still saw no sign of Cain. She pushed away from the balcony and dashed into the apartment, stumbling and nearly falling down the stairs in her haste, her breath catching in her throat. She knew what the Headmaster would say. He would be in no way pleased at her blatant rule-breaking, but she didn’t care. She needed to find Cain.

At the bottom of the stairs, she began to navigate Cain’s apartment, ducking through each door, expecting to find him in one of the rooms. Perhaps he would be in his bedroom, attaching the sheath of his sword, looking at himself in the mirror. She’d have no reason to worry. She could ascend the stairs once again and watch from the balcony.

Xenia heard the not-so-distant thunder from outside and couldn’t help but think that she should be there now.

But what if Cain wasn’t ready? What if he had forgotten? What if something had happened to him?

She eased open the door to his bedroom, the hinges squeaking, and peered inside. Almost immediately, she jerked back, gasping, and her hand flew to cover her mouth.

“Cain . . . !” she breathed.

He lay sprawled before her in the center of the room, his sword just out of his reach. Blood stained the side of his shirt and the hand he had pressed against it, as well as the wood floor beneath him.

“Xenia,” he exhaled.

She knelt down next to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “What happened?” she whispered.

“I . . . I was stabbed,” Cain said. “Someone came through my window. I couldn’t see who it was. Their cloak covered their face.”

Xenia fought to stay calm. “Do you have bandages?” she asked, and though she tried to keep it steady, her voice broke at the end of her sentence. She winced.

“In the closet.” Cain gestured to a wooden cabinet in the corner. One of the doors stood open, and Xenia could see old training tunics as well as new class colors sticking out. She rose to her feet, striding to the other side of the room, and dug through the supplies piled at the bottom of the closet. Eventually she came upon a thin roll of yellowed bandages.

As she began to walk back to Cain, an explosion shook the apartment, and Xenia fell to her knees again. Dust fell from the ceiling. Cain squeezed his eyes shut.

“The demons,” Xenia said.

“They must be at the gate,” Cain finished hoarsely.

The bandages fell from Xenia’s hand. Her eyes flicked to the sword that rested on the ground next to Cain.

“Xenia, what are you doing?” Cain asked, his voice low.

She reached for the sword, her fingers closing around the handle and lifting in from the floor. “I . . . I can’t let this happen.”

She shoved open the door to Cain’s room and ran toward the apartment’s entrance. Cain attempted to rise into a sitting position, his eyes widening as he realized what she planned to do. “Xenia! Come back! Stop!” he screamed.

She entered the plaza, the sword at her side. She had never had any formal training, not like Cain and the others had, but she had to do something. The demons had swarmed the plaza, their touch setting fire to buildings, destroying possessions, the smoke that surrounded them blinding the villagers, knocking them unconscious. Just in front of her, a demon snatched up one of the shopkeepers and deposited him on the other side of the square, where his entire body caught fire and burned like a torch. Xenia gasped and tried to fight off the tears that she felt forming in her eyes.

She summoned her courage and ran into the chaos of it, clutching the sword. The eyes of the remaining villagers turned toward her from all sides: she felt Jon’s surprise, Kandice’s horror, Tor’s confusion all at once, and she lunged at the nearest demon, managing to slice it through the middle. A shriek hit the air, and the demon vanished in a cloud of smoke. Light poured from the sword, and Xenia continued to swing it. Though her form lacked the precision of a trained swordsman, she cut down demon after demon. The smoke and screams of their deaths filled the air.

And suddenly, from all directions, they surged toward her.

She kept swinging the blade, trying to keep them back, but there were too many of them. They surrounded her. She ducked and held up the sword, but they still came. They surrounded her like a cloud, blocking her from the sight of the rest of the village. She felt her strength fading and collapsed under their weight. Cain’s hoarse, desperate screams followed her into unconsciousness.

Viralda Village burned beneath the shadows of demons.

“Xenia . . . Xenia!” A voice interrupted her nightmares, and she opened her eyes to see Cain’s worried eyes and tight mouth hovering over her. “I thought you’d never wake up…”

Xenia pushed herself into a sitting position and looked around her. The wind blew ash across the plaza, which was littered with the charred remains of buildings. The buildings that had once lined the plaza had been emptied and incinerated, leaving only charred husks in their places. Flames still licked at their foundations. She could see no movement save for that caused by the breeze. She dared not hope that the people still in the square would ever take another breath. Viralda Village was more silent than it had ever been.

Xenia turned to look at Cain, and when she beheld the bottomless sadness in his eyes, she couldn’t stop the tears that threatened to spill over. “Are they all . . . ?” she whispered.

He closed his eyes and nodded, and she folded herself into him, burying her face in his chest, as the full force of it hit her. She sobbed and he threaded his fingers through her hair and told her it was all right, even though they both knew it couldn’t possibly be all right. The prophecy had told them they would be saved, and they were not.

“I’m so sorry,” Cain whispered, his mouth brushing against her forehead, her hair.

Eventually she lifted her face to look at him and asked, “Why are you sorry? Someone stabbed you, Cain—” She broke off midsentence, and her hand dropped to his waist, searching for the wound.

“I bandaged it.” His hand caught hers, and he managed a weak smile. “I can barely breathe, but my side seems to have stopped bleeding. If you hadn’t gotten those bandages . . .”

Xenia sat up. “You need to rest.” She scanned the plaza around them, and her eyes landed on the apartment buildings behind them, where the upper-class trainees had lived. Where the two of them had lived. “Do you think your apartment is still there?”

“I don’t know,” he sighed, and when she met his eyes, she saw the hopelessness lingering there, ghostlike, haunting him. “I guess we don’t have any other choice but to find out.”

Xenia rose to her feet. Cain rose with her, and when they both swayed, unsteady, they leaned on each other for balance. As soon as they were both on their own two feet, they looked at each other and laughed softly.

They crossed the plaza, picking their way through rubble and bodies. Xenia reached over and threaded her fingers through Cain’s, and he kept hold of her hand as they neared the building.

The door, at least, had remained intact and swung inward with no more than a slight squeak of protest. The entrance, they saw, was in less favorable shape, though it still stood. Some of the walls looked scorched at the edges, and the railing that lined the stairs had begun to fall to pieces near the bottom. They pushed open the door to Cain’s apartment first and found that most of it had been spared the fire, although the bedroom window had been broken and shards of glass littered the floor. Xenia insisted that she wanted to see her own apartment and took Cain’s hand, leading him up the stairs.

The fire hadn’t touched her apartment. All of the furniture had remained in its place, and none of the walls were scorched or even discolored. Xenia looked around, and as she did, tears began to form in her eyes.

“What is it?” Cain asked, looking at her, his emerald eyes flickering with concern and confusion.

“Why spare this?” Xenia managed. “Out of all the things . . . We could have had our classmates back. Ket and Kandice and Tor . . .” Her face crumpled into an expression of unchecked mourning, and fresh tears ran down her cheeks.

Cain slid an arm around her waist, and as he drew her toward him, she stood on her toes and pressed her mouth against his, leaning into him. He closed his eyes and held Xenia to him, returning the kiss, but as soon as they separated he shook his head.

“Xenia,” he whispered, his tone warning and hoping at once.

She silenced him with another touch of her lips to his, and as she hooked one finger around his belt and tugged him toward the other side of the room, she responded, “Remember that time two years ago? After training that afternoon . . . when we were together?”

He closed his eyes and nodded, as if he were unearthing the memory, absorbing it.

“Come back to me, Cain,” she breathed. “At least for this moment.”

Without resisting, he agreed. He leaned into her again, and she pulled him down onto the bed, all the while trying to forget that outside of the intact apartment, they were surrounded by the remains of their village, the betrayed souls of those they had known, the lies of the prophecy, fed to them since they were young. But amid all of this, she couldn’t forget, and the tears continued to stream down her cheeks.

Xenia woke up in the middle of the night feeling like she had inhaled a lungful of dust. She tried to suppress her coughs as she untangled herself from Cain and slid out of bed. Throwing open the door to the balcony, she allowed herself to collapse over the railing and expel the desert air from her lungs in a series of painful coughs. She stood, tipped her head back, and forced herself to breathe normally.

The feeling of suffocation soon left her, and she looked out at the midnight sky, a sea of sapphire and distant stars. She recalled the legends that the people of Viralda Village had passed down for thousands of years: legends of the Travelers, who had established villages like Viralda in the middle of the desert, of mysterious tribes of people who had lived in the desert long before the Travelers, of other villages long vanished, of the Lords of All Living who still walked among them and were constantly reincarnated. Her mind lingered on the last of those, their gods who might walk above and might walk below.

The Light, those gods of day who kept peace and order. The Lord of Luminosity and the Celestial Lord. The Beasts, the gods of night who caused chaos, discord, darkness. The Demon Lord and the Lord of the Deep.

One of Viralda’s elderly shopkeepers had sworn to see the Lord of Luminosity reincarnated many years ago, before Cain or Xenia was born, before any of their class’s parents had been born either. She said she remembered one of her classmates standing in the plaza at dawn. She had looked out the window, wondering what he was doing. When the sun came up, unearthly light washed over his whole body. He raised his hands to the sky and, seconds later, vanished completely.

“Our stories tell of the Lord of Luminosity looking just like that,” the old woman would say, tears forming in her eyes. “And our classmate—he was the kindest person you could ever know. We never learned where he went, but he must be looking at us from somewhere, as the next Lord of Luminosity.”

Reincarnation, the old stories said, did not mean taking on the body of a god at birth, but rather in adolescence or adulthood. The Lords of All Living watched over the people to see who would readily succeed them and choose a person based on their actions in the first few decades of their life. After all, the Lords’ power could never last forever in a single body, and in order to hold their power over the world, they had to renew it by choosing a successor.

The Celestial Lord and the Lord of Luminosity came to take successors during times of patterns in the stars or in the cycle of the sun and moon, such as the sunrise the old shopkeeper had described, and less frequent occasions such as meteor showers and eclipses. The Lord of the Deep, it was said, brought those back from death who had fallen into the Chasm, the canyon that now cut the villages off from the rest of civilization and the place where the Travelers had come from. Those who tried to cross it often fell to their deaths, and the Lord of the Deep appeared to some of them, salvaging their broken bodies.

The Demon Lord, they said, stole people away from the depths of depression, from self-harm and suicide. He told them he could make them whole again, said that he could make their pain count. Said that they could exact that pain upon endless legions of uncaring, oblivious people in another body and with greater power, instead of drowning in hopelessness.

The people of Viralda Village had begun to whisper the legend of the Demon Lord under frightened breath after the Headmaster proclaimed the prophecy. If demons were to attack the village, they must be sent by the Lord of All Living whose name bore such creatures, and that meant he still existed. No one had seen signs of the Light for many years, and yet the prophecy, among other things, gave them reason to believe that the Beasts still reigned.

Xenia leaned on the railing and looked out at the ruined plaza ahead of her. Once she had looked out her window and seen her classmates, seen the shopkeepers, seen children running back and forth with practice swords. Once she and Cain had been two of those children, making up games to play and running between the legs of the adults who prepared for the festivals. Once she had laid in the warmth of the sun next to her classmates, breathless from their runs, and eventually next to Cain, keeping hold of his hand and daydreaming about their future together.

All of their plans had burned with Viralda Village. They would have to travel to another settlement, to leave this one behind—they could never hope to rebuild it, not with just the two of them.

A shadow at the edge of Xenia’s vision shook her from her thoughts, and she squinted into the darkness, looking for movement. She saw nothing but debris and dust. It had likely been a trick of the desert darkness, but what if another one of the villagers did lurk out there in the shadows? After scanning the ruins in front of her for a minute, Xenia turned back toward the door, shaking her head.

A hand clamped around her shoulder with enough force to bring stabbing pain to her arm and tears to her eyes, and she felt herself falling toward the balcony railing. She opened her mouth to scream, but as she did so, a gloved hand clamped around her mouth, preventing any sound from escaping. She twisted, trying to escape, trying to see who her assailant was, but she accomplished neither.

The hands pulled Xenia close against a form as unforgiving and inhuman as marble, lifted her up and pushed her over the balcony railing. She fought to free her hands and get them around the railing, but she only flailed in midair, her fingers just missing the ledges and her breath stolen from her lungs. Panic filled her, and her vision went white as she foresaw the conclusion of her life, the ground below her, the death at the hands of an assassin she would never see. But when she closed her eyes, anticipating the impact, she felt nothing.

She opened her eyes and saw the ground beneath her, the balcony above her. Somehow she had made it to the ground without shattering herself against the unyielding desert ground. She didn’t feel the assassin’s hands on her anymore, and she took a deep breath, letting it out all at once in the word: “Cain!”

The hands returned from behind, never revealing an identity, closing around Xenia’s wrists, forcing a piece of cloth into her mouth to keep her from screaming again. Above them, the balcony door burst open and Cain emerged from the apartment. His eyes widened at what he saw, and he leaped over the balcony railing, rolling to his feet in the dust below.

That got the assassin’s attention. The hands that had been before clamped around Xenia’s wrists let go and threw her to the ground, and as he came into her line of sight, she saw him for what he was.

A man—tall, taller than Cain, and thin. A hood covered his face, yet his bleached hair came loose from it in strands. He wore black down to his gloves and boots. She glimpsed his eyes under the hood and through his unkempt hair, and she saw them gleaming orange, like flames were jumping inside them. He faced Cain and threw a hand out over his head, closing his fist around a sword that appeared in thin air with his touch.

He looked like a demon.

The two circled each other. Cain held the Light’s sword in front of him, and the assassin brought the sword he had conjured to his side. Cain leaped at him, but he moved a fraction of an inch and blocked the blow, sending Cain flying into the front wall of the apartment. His sword clattered just out of reach, and the assassin strode to the wall while Cain struggled to get up. He seized Cain by the collar and held the shadowy conjured sword to his throat.

“Let me go,” Cain had the nerve to hiss against the pressure of the blade. He bared his teeth at his opponent.

Xenia stared, wide-eyed, at Cain and the assassin. She had wanted to intervene, but the assassin’s display of power stunned her. He could kill both of them with no more than a flick of his wrist.

“I’ll let you go if you ask,” the man snarled at Cain. “I want to hear you beg.”

“No.”

“Really?” The assassin pressed the blade harder against Cain’s throat, threatening to cut off his air, drawing the slightest bit of blood. “Let’s hear you say no to me now.”

Cain’s face went scarlet with the strain of breathing, but still he managed the slightest shake of his head. The assassin pulled Cain’s collar tighter, digging the blade deeper, and Cain let out an audible gasp that ended abruptly as the pain of the blade at his throat made him wince.

“I’ll wait,” the assassin snarled.

“Fine!” Cain choked out, his voice a fraction of its usual volume. “Please! Let me go . . . !”

“Good boy,” the assassin answered. He thrust Cain back against the wall, where his head hit the stone and he collapsed, unconscious.

Xenia tried to push herself to her feet. She scrabbled through the sand toward the place where Cain lay and the assassin stood, but she blinked and the assassin had his hands around her wrists again.

“Oh, you’ll be going nowhere near that boy,” a voice hissed in her ear. “Not if the Demon Lord can help it.”

The Demon Lord? Xenia’s entire body went rigid at the idea. One of the Lords of All Living—one of the Beasts—had interfered in Viralda? Her eyes widened, but the assassin hauled her to her feet and pressed her close against him, preventing her escape. She struggled, but the assassin’s grip on her arms only tightened. She watched Cain’s lifeless body lying in the dust, and even as the image grew smaller and the tears slipped down her cheeks, she felt it burning, forever, into her memory.