The air in The Dregs tasted like burnt metal and cold ash. It was a taste I'd known my whole life, a layer of soot that coated my tongue, my skin, and every single one of my hopes.
This part of the city didn't have streets; it had wounds. We lived in the cracks between ironworks that groaned day and night, their smokestacks painting the sky a permanent, greasy gray.
I was currently pressed into one of those cracks, my back scraping against cold, damp brick. My lungs burned, not from the air, but from the run.
"Check the alley!" a voice barked, heavy with an accent that came from a better part of the city. A "cog-jockey," one of the private guards paid by the merchants to keep rats like me from their precious goods.
I held my breath, clutching the small, wax-paper-wrapped package to my chest. It wasn't food. Food, I could steal with my eyes closed. This was medicine. Small, chalky-white pills that cost more than a month's rent. Pills that probably wouldn't work.
But "probably" was better than "definitely."
A heavy, booted footstep echoed near the mouth of the alley. I squeezed my eyes shut, pressing myself so flat I almost disappeared. I was good at that. Being small. Being quiet. Being forgotten.
The guard grunted, a sound of pure disgust. "Nothing but slag in here. She's gone."
The footsteps faded.
I didn't move. I counted to one hundred, my heart thudding a painful, angry rhythm against my ribs. Only then did I slide out, a shadow detaching from other shadows, and run. I ran over mounds of rusted gears, under pipes that leaked brown sludge, and through a market square where hollow-eyed people sold things they had stolen from each other.
Home was a single, cold room on the third floor of a tenement that threatened to collapse with every gust of wind. The door didn't have a lock, just a chair I wedged under the handle.
"Anya?"
Her voice was the only clean thing in my world. It was small, a tiny thread of sound in the cold room.
"I'm here, Elara."
I crossed the room and knelt by the cot. My little sister was buried under a mountain of thin, patched blankets. Her eyes, pale blue and too big for her face, found mine. A smile tried to form on her lips, but it was too much work.
This was the "wasting sickness," as the cog-jockey doctors called it. A polite name for Aether-Starvation.
Up on the mountain, the Aethelgard War College sat like a black, obsidian god. It drank the magic from the land, siphoning the Aether from the earth, the water, and the air to power their spells. And down here in The Dregs, we, the people who lived on that drained land, just... faded.
Elara was fading faster than anyone.
Her skin was like thin paper, her hair limp. She looked like a watercolor painting left out in the rain.
"Did you… did you get it?" she whispered. Her breath was a tiny cloud in the freezing air of our room.
"I did." My voice was rough. I hated it. I hated the toughness I needed in the street, because it always clung to me in here, where I just wanted to be soft for her.
I broke one of the precious pills in half, we had to make them last, and helped her sit up. She was so light. I could feel every bone in her back. She swallowed it with a sip of sooty water.
"It hurts today, Anya," she murmured, sinking back into the pillows.
"I know, Elly. I know." I felt a familiar, hot rage climbing up my throat. Guilt. It was always guilt. I was her big sister. I was supposed to protect her. And I was failing.
I tucked the blankets tighter around her, my rough fingers brushing her forehead. She was cold. Always so cold.
"Sing me the song?" she asked, her eyes already drifting shut. The half-pill always made her sleepy.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. "Stars, they fall, and the mountain calls…" I sang, my voice cracking. It was an old lullaby, one our mother used to sing. A stupid song about the magic on the mountain.
Elara was asleep before I finished the first line, her breathing shallow, but even.
I watched her for a long time. The fear was a living thing inside me, a cold snake coiling in my gut. The pills weren't working. They were just... slowing it down. I could see it. She was dimmer today than she was yesterday.
I needed more. I needed something real.
I left the chair wedged against the door and walked back out into the gray. I didn't know where I was going. I just knew I couldn't sit there and watch her disappear.
I ended up in the central square, where the wind was the most brutal, cutting through my thin coat like a knife. It was here that the Hegemony posted its stupid announcements.
A new one was plastered to the public board, a thick sheet of white parchment that screamed "elite." I'd seen them putting it up this morning.
THE GRAND TOURNAMENT OF AETHELGARD
I sneered. Every five years, the college held this brutal, deadly thing. They forced the heirs of their fancy houses to compete, and they plucked a few "gutter-rats" like me from The Dregs to be cannon fodder. To prove how strong the elites were.
I'd always spit on the posters. It was a game for monsters.
"BY ORDER OF ARCHON SORIN VAL-VALERIUS," it read in sharp, black letters. "A TRIAL OF STRENGTH, MIND, AND MAGIC."
Blah, blah, blah. I skimmed the words I already knew. "Glory for your House." "Eternal Honor." "A place at the Archon's side."
My eyes caught on the last line. The line I'd always ignored, always assumed was just another lie.
"THE VICTOR SHALL BE GRANTED THE GRAND BOON."
I'd heard the stories. The last winner, some elite kid, had asked for gold. The one before that, a girl from a lower house, had asked for a title. They were selfish, stupid wishes.
But the promise was there, as clear as the soot on my face. A single wish, granted by the Archon himself.
A wish.
The word felt foreign, like something that belonged to another, cleaner world. But as I stood there, freezing, my mind flashed back to Elara's pale, trusting face. To her whisper: It hurts today, Anya.
What if I wished for a cure?
What if I wished for him to stop the sickness? To give the magic back?
It was impossible. A gutter-rat from The Dregs? Winning a tournament for the most powerful mages in the world? I didn't even have magic. Not real magic. Just a weird, dark something inside me that I kept buried, a chaotic feeling that made things... unravel... when I was too angry or too scared.
It was a stupid, suicidal idea.
But it was also the only one I had.
I looked up, past the endless smoke, to the black obsidian towers of Aethelgard. They were a threat. A shadow that had loomed over my entire life, stealing the warmth from our world.
And for the first time, I didn't just feel hatred. I felt a cold, sharp, terrifying resolve.
I was going to get into that tournament.
And I was going to win.