Page 1 of Heavenly Bodies

CHAPTER ONE

Elara Bellereve had been able to walk through dreams for as long as she could remember. Some were Stygian black and jagged nightmares; others were sherbet-painted and cloud-filled, the daydreams of the innocent. Then came the brown, flat dreams of the day-to-day and the incense-perfumed prophetic dreams, those that the seers throughout Celestia dreamed.

She had fallen into the dreamscape of a Helion. She knew that much. Yet, as she crept around the red sand dunes of his dreams, something struck her as familiar about them. Had she walked here before? The colours were vivid and bright, the air dry and hot, so unlike the cool and dark dreams she was familiar with. She saw the back of a male figure, strong and lithe as he wielded a golden sword, battling against something. But as she crept closer, she saw shadows surrounding him, attacking him, the figure gasping for help as they slowly began to suffocate him.

She woke with a start, her surroundings filtering through the remnants of her dreams. A panicked blink showed her only darkness. A coarse fabric itched her cheek—a sack by the feel of it.

She had been running down the cobbles of the Dreamer’s Quarter, dress damp with blood, and then—

She racked her brain. There’d been the scent of dread-poppies pressed to her nose, arms around her waist and…nothing.

She swallowed, raising her rope-tied wrists to try and remove the sack, but a sharp yank on them stopped her. She hissed, lowering them and forced herself to sit up as much as she could. She was moving, theclop-clopof hooves and hard wooden slats digging into her back suggesting she was in a wagon. ‘If it’s money you want, I can give you money,’ she said, blinking away the fog.

There was a faint laugh, and a man with a slightly lilting accent spoke. ‘We have enough of that.’

‘Then what?’ Elara asked, forcing her voice steady. ‘Are you in league with the Star?’

Silence.

She slumped back, her last memories before the darkness flittering around the edges of her mind.

One moment she had been dancing with Lukas at her birthday ball and the next…

Red starlight, blood—so much blood—seeping over marble, and a scream to run.

Her breath began to race away from her and she forced herself to drink it back in—once, twice, as she squeezed her eyes shut.

Into the box, into the box, into the box.

She chanted it until her emotions had been rammed down inside of her, a veneer of calm replacing them.

She took stock of her position. It seemed she’d been kidnapped. Fucking kidnapped. Aquaria, the Star of misfortune, must have been laughing over her shoulder.

Elara blinked, forcing herself to remain present, to gaugeas much as she could of her surroundings. The memories of the last few hours rattled, desperate to be let out, but she gritted her teeth as she ignored them. She couldn’t stay with those memories right now, couldn’t think of home—or she might unravel entirely.

Think.

How could she escape these people? She checked in with her well of magick. It was awake all right, writhing in the pit of her stomach, ready to be siphoned into her Three.

She didn’t even bother to try and summon the shadows she was born with. If they hadn’t appeared in eighteen years, then they wouldn’t now.

And her dreamwalking was useless in this instance, which left her last gift. One she could actually use.

‘Where are you taking me?’ Elara demanded, in a tone as bold as she could muster. She looked down—light was visible through a tiny sliver at the bottom of the sack covering her head. Shifting herself carefully, slightly increasing the size of the sliver, she could make out her shoes, and a pair of heavy boots to her right, all drenched in Asterian light.

‘You’ll see soon enough.’

She kept her eye fixed on the soft violet light—the only indication that she was still in Asteria—as she tried to form a plan. All she had to do was wait for the cart to stop, which it inevitably would have to. And as these brigands—whoever they were—attempted to haul her to whichever terrible fate awaited her, she would make her break for freedom. She could do it. She had to. The cart rumbled on, as Elara bided her time, turning over her plan of escape as she softened her body, feigning sleep.

Hours must have passed from the way the light began to turn indigo, when a voice broke the silence.

‘I’m hungry.’

Elara tensed at the different voice, this one with a similar lilting accent.

The first voice, the one that had spoken hours ago, replied in a low tone: ‘You can eat when we cross the border. Though if you spent as much time worrying about your king’s orders as you do what you’re going to shove down your gullet, you’d have been promoted by now. It’s your own fault you’re not in the King’s Guard.’

There was a muttered response as Elara picked through the conversation. King? Border?