Prologue

Before there were doors between worlds, there were stories.

They whispered from hearth to hearth and ship to ship— of wolves that ran like midnight wind, of foxes with nine tails and nine more tricks beyond that, of fae who looked like carved moonlight and smiled like knives. Humans loved those stories—as long as they stayed in books and bedtime. The moment a story breathed, the moment a pair of eyes glinted from a tree line or a shadow stepped out of the corner of a room, humans did what humans do best when they’re afraid.

They reached for fire.

History will tell you that era was a fever. The old names for it vary—witch hunts, purges, “the cleansing,” depending on who had the quill—but what it looked like was simpler. Traps set with iron teeth, silver bullets lined up on clean tables, glass jars with nothing inside them except air and the memory of a scream. The first wolf fell in a farmer’s field. The first fae vanished on a road at dusk and left a bruise in the shape of a handprint on the universe. The first witch’s cottage burned so hot that the river alongside it boiled, and all the frogs leapt like little green prayers.

By the time the gods looked down—yes, plural, because tragedy has a way of uniting even deities who can’t agree on anything but dramatic entrances—the world had a smoke-ring around it. Selene stood on a cloud with her silver hair tangled in starlight and said, softly, “Enough.” Odin read a battlefield like a ledger and grunted something that meant the same. Hecate, who has a thousand keys and never once misplaces a door, considered the crossroads and the mortals’ messy hearts and decided that mercy would have to be engineered.

So they made another world.

Not a copy. A refuge. A place stitched out of the softest dark and the brightest light, pinned to the edges of midnight with a net of constellations. A valley the size of a continent cupped in the palm of the cosmos. They called it Nytherra, because the name tasted like night and threshold both. The first winds through its grasses carried the smell of river stones and summer rain. The first mountains unfurled their bones toward a newborn moon. The first sea dreamed in deep blue and waited to be named.

The gods opened their palms, and all manner of beings tumbled through the light like spilled jewels and thorns together.

The wolves came first, because that’s what wolves do. They ran out of the old forests onto new plains and threw their heads back and howled at a moon that had never been hunted. The fae arrived with the arrogance of a people who had always been beautiful, and found the beauty here too big for their old ambitions; still, they tried. Witches and wizards stepped through last, blinking like they’d been indoors for centuries and needed to relearn the sky. Kitsune trickled in between everyone else, laughing, leaving footprints that looked like poems. Valkyries descended in a winged wedge, their armor ringing like bells. Frost giants pushed the horizon wider just by standing there, and the temperature dropped fifty degrees out of respect or terror—hard to say which.

They weren’t alone. Dryads unfolded from the bark of newborn trees, hair full of leaves and secrets. Naiads rose in the first rivers, their laughter silver as minnows. Satyrs arrived at a run, pipes already tuned for trouble. Centaurs thundered across open grass, archery the language of their hello. Harpies took the high thermals and gossiped with thunderheads. Griffins nested on cliff-top ledges and blinked gold eyes at the new sun. Basilisks preferred the cool of caverns and the art of being underestimated. Phoenixes treated dawn like a hobby and ash like an outfit change. Selkies claimed the rocky coasts, hanging their skins on driftwood and kissing the sea like an old lover. Kelpies dragged lakes into the shape of their mood and dared you to ride them.

From the east, tengu argued theology with the wind and won often enough to get cocky. On quiet streets, pale yūrei drifted like sighs and taught children the correct way to be haunted. Oni opened breweries and brewed beer so honest it made liars cry. Tanuki ran gambling dens where you were more likely to lose your pride than your coins and come back anyway because the dumplings were that good.

Dwarrows—stubborn and excellent at it—chose the under-mountains and built workshops that sang when the furnaces ran hot. Norns took rooms on high floors and stitched futures into braids no one was allowed to touch. Djinn found the in-between places—attics, attars, alleyways where spice hung heavy—and did business in contracts written on smoke and sealed with a smile that meant exactly what it meant.

Humans, you ask?

No. Not by invitation. Not then.

Nytherra opened like a book, and the world wrote in it.

At first, they lived as if apocalypse had taught them nothing. The wolves built no walls and trusted the wind. The fae built nothing but walls and trusted no one. The witches found a cliff beside a waterfall and carved a city into the stone with spells and stubbornness. It gleamed at sunset like a blade and a promise. The Valkyries threw up halls that were more like songs than architecture—vast spaces built to echo victory. The giants chose the far north, where ice was thick enough to stand memory on, and stamped citadels into the permafrost until their doorways were as tall as storm clouds. Kitsune claimed the east, where bamboo forests rustled with secrets and paper lanterns dreamed by rivers. The sea-folk cut a pearl-white city into a reef and lit it with lanternfish; they traded pearls for gossip and salt for favors.

For a time, balance held together with spit and glamour.

Then came technology, smuggled in the pockets of witches and the curiosities of foxes and the sheer will of wolves who were not as simple as other people liked to pretend. Nothing that burned planets, mind you. The gods had no patience for explosions. But clever things: rune engines that hummed with borrowed moonlight, glass woven with lightning so you could see a friend across a city without moving your feet, airships that rode the seams between wind and spell, their balloons stitched with sigils and their propellers carved from old oak because it remembered storms.

The first airship rose out of the witch city at dawn, its belly aglow like a lantern. People in the markets paused with bread in their hands and craned their necks as the rumored thing became a real thing, beating its shadow across their faces. It banked over a field where wolves were training and dipped lower until the wolf who would be king someday snapped his head up and bared his teeth at it, instinctive, affronted—until he saw his reflection sprawl across its polished brass and laughed, because sometimes even a predator can be a boy with a grin.

The city grew upward. The farms fattened outward. The roads braided themselves between constellations of towns. Nytherra learned to glow.

From the air you could read it like a map of desires. In the capital, towers broke the sky like glass reeds, their windows veined with runes so the whole thing shivered a soft blue at night. The trains that ran between cities were sleek bullets with sigil-scripts along their flanks—a sentence of movement that never finished. Markets threw up tents at sunset so the moon could shop for a change. Stalls sold candied starfruit beside enchanted spare parts: you could bite into something that tasted like childhood while haggling for a new capacitor that ran on captured lightning. Streetlights blinked on at dusk with a pleasant sigh, and if you looked closely you could see a moth anchored inside each bulb, wings beating slow—tiny battery hearts.

The wolves claimed the western quarter of the capital, where buildings were low and wide and had courtyards for running. Their palace looked less like a palace and more like a den that forgot how to stop becoming rooms: a sprawl of black stone and honeyed wood and wide glass. Balconies returned to the moon what windows stole. Ramps sloped everywhere, because a king didn’t always walk on two legs; the halls were fur-silent and echo-loud at once. In the center, a throne like a horizon line: plain, dark, unpretentious—placed not on a dais but level with the floor, so the king and his people could look each other in the eye.

The fae spread like perfume. The Night Court’s district gleamed with mirrors and water, corridors that turned and turned until you forgot who you’d been when you went in. The Day Court kept gardens like libraries, each path a paragraph that told you what to feel if you let it. Their politics were a latticework of favors and debts, sturdy until you breathed on it, and then it changed shape to suit whomever smiled first. Nymphs kept bathhouses where the steam knew your name. Gorgons ran jewelers where the gems refused to lie about their provenance. A single cyclops owned the best forge in the city and had a waiting list longer than a royal grudge.

Witches kept their city in the rock, but they weren’t cave-dwellers. They carved windows big enough for weather to visit and strung bridges between buildings so ravens could hold evening meetings there, gossiping and judging everyone. Their laboratories were less bubbling beakers, more patient circles drawn on floors where equations in chalk grew into spells if you walked them long enough. They had rules. They loved rules. They broke them only when the breaking looked like a new rule in disguise. Mages from desert lineages taught glass to remember the wind; stormcallers leased lightning to the transit authority at a respectable interest rate.

The kitsune? They did not so much build neighborhoods as suggest them. Tea houses that weren’t there yesterday stood on corners with doors that rang chimes when they opened and sighed when they closed; if you went back today, you might not find the corner at all, but you might find a bridge over a creek that had never been there before, and on the bridge, a fox with human eyes who would trade you a secret for a bite of your dumpling and leave you wondering if you’d been charmed or simply charmed. Tengu ran rooftop dojos and taught air the art of being stepped on.

Valkyries kept to high places—the bones of old volcanoes and the ends of ridgelines where clouds hooked themselves to the earth. Their halls were no-nonsense spaces full of banners that told you who’d died and why and whether they’d done it well. They had little patience for mirrors, good ale, and a lot of opinions about cowards. They also had, if you stayed long enough to see it, an excellent sense of humor that was mostly practical jokes played on giants, and once—only once—on a dragon who took it well enough to leave the mountain unmolested for a year.

Giants made the north a lesson in scale: walls like mountains, doors like sequoias, hearths big enough to roast an ox and warm a childhood at the same time. The air there smelled perpetually like snow, even in summer, and the wind spoke in a grammar of ice. They were not a friendly people, but neither were they immediately murderous. The trick with giants was understanding they didn’t see you unless you had a banner or a roar. Dwarrows hammered aurora into steel and sold it south for prices that made kings hiss through their teeth.

And so Nytherra spun along. Not peaceful, not exactly—friction was baked into the recipe—but alive, and lovelier than the old world in the ways that mattered, because it had not yet learned how to hate properly.

If you’re waiting for the part where it did, you have the right instincts.

It began with the wolves. Of course it did. The curse on some of their bloodlines—call it lycanthropy if you want the clinical term, call it hunger if you want the truer one—didn’t vanish just because the scenery changed. Most wolves kept the beast as a companion and not a master, because culture is a better leash than iron. But a few—just enough—decided the new world was promise enough to become the old one again. They ran wild. They bit where they wanted and called it freedom. They gathered behind a banner stitched with their own rage and named the man who held it “king” because he was the kind who smiled with all his teeth.

His name would sour in the mouth later: Thornfang. Malrik. A lesson: put “fang” in a surname and you’re either destined for poetry or prison.

The wars that followed weren’t endless, just felt like it, because there is a special fatigue that comes from fighting your own cousins. The wolves who believed in order like a drumbeat faced the wolves who believed in appetite like a religion. The fae pretended to help and mostly helped themselves. The giants watched from the north with interest, counting favors they’d never have to pay. Witches argued successfully for neutrality: their magic stitched flesh back together without asking who’d torn it in the first place. Kitsune sold information at a loss, because the real profit was seeing what would happen next. Centaurs ran messages across battle lines because no one stopped a courier who could outrun an arrow. Harpies circled and composed ballads about tactics while everyone else bled and rolled their eyes in rhythm.

The gods stayed quiet and watched. Intervention has a cost. So does freedom. Nytherra learned both.

The end of that first war looked less like victory and more like exhaustion, which is a kind of victory that doesn’t get songs. The wolves crowned a king who had enough wolf to be loved and enough lycan to be feared, and for a while that balance held, like a coin spinning perfectly on its edge. He had a son who learned to walk the way his father had learned to rule: slowly, braced, as if wind could knock him over at any moment. He grew up in halls that called him both blessing and warning. He learned to smile like a secret and scowl like a sunrise.

By the time Alexander Veylor took the throne, Nytherra had traded infancy for something sharper. The airships had gotten faster—sleeker hulls, smarter runes. The trains hummed like contented animals and arrived when they said they would, which is more than can be said for most political promises. The towers grew taller and fainted less in storms. Neon sigils joined traditional lanterns, so streets at night looked like someone had spilled paint and it decided to be elegant. The city had its rituals: market on moon nights, festivals every time the stars did something vaguely impressive, weddings in gardens where the trees knew the names of everyone present and would correct the officiant if they fumbled. Children learned to spell by tracing glyphs in the dust. Teens sent each other messages trapped in bubbles that popped when you kissed them. Old men argued about the ethics of glamours over chessboards that occasionally bit.

Wolves ran on rooftops when they couldn’t bear the ground. Fae tried to own everything that reflected. Witches expanded their library until it needed its own weather system. Kitsune continued to set up tea houses where you most needed tea and least expected it. Valkyries flew patrols in formation so precise the birds got jealous. Giants practiced patience and sharpening. Sea-folk held moonlit races with hippocamps and came back wearing crowns made of foam and laughter. Dragons slept under mountains and pretended not to hear the festivals because if they woke hungry, the invitations would get awkward.

Everything worked. Until it didn’t.

“Humans don’t belong here,” people said, when they said it at all. It was an unsung agreement, like paragraph indents. Humans had been the problem. Humans had invented fire and good intentions and pitchforks and the repeated belief that their fear should be everyone’s problem. The gods had built Nytherra specifically to outmaneuver human fear.

So when the first human fell through—tumbled out of a storm into an alley that smelled like night flowers and fried dough—the world held its breath.

She didn’t stay long. None of the early ones did. The storms were hungry back then, doors that swung on angry hinges. People slipped in and came out like coins flipped, one side wonder, one side terror. Most went home with a story that got them laughed at or locked up. A few didn’t. A few stayed in memory like a bruise.

The wolves learned to sniff for rain that wasn’t natural. Witches learned to follow static to a rip in the air and sew it up tight. The fae learned, as they always have, how to make arrivals into leverage. Kitsune learned to sell umbrellas that always opened in time, except when it would be funnier if they didn’t. Norns marked the dates on quiet calendars and refused to tell anyone what the pattern meant.

The storms quieted. For a while, they were a rumor you told to excuse being late. “Ah, yes, sorry, light hurricane ate the tram. Gorgeous, though.”

Peace again, the precarious version.

Do not be fooled by pretty balance. It is always one insult, one ambition, one night too long without sleep away from surrendering to gravity.

By the time our story begins, Nytherra is a painting you could fall into if you’re not careful. Skyscrapers ribbed with runes. Airships purring like cats along the sky’s spine. Street markets at midnight with lanterns dripping color and vendors calling out spells in prices: “Three charms for a coin, honey, a fourth if you smile like you mean it.” A wolf boy on a balcony with his elbows on the railing, staring at a moon that keeps staring back. A fae girl in a mirror practicing the face of a future queen. A witch at a desk with ink on her thumb and lightning living quietly in a glass on the windowsill. A fox in human clothes flicking a tail under their coat, grinning at secrets. A Valkyrie at the top of the city’s highest bridge, counting the beats between heart and horizon. A giant in the north, closing his eyes and listening for footsteps he’s been promised and dreading both. A dryad tangled in a skyscraper’s living wall garden, braiding ivy into a crown no one will see. A selkie in a rooftop pool, laughing like the ocean remembered her name from across a world.

And the king—Alexander—on a throne level with his people, jaw set like a dare. Around him, advisors who are friends, and friends who are obligations, and enemies who wear politeness like cologne. He is not yet cruel. He is not yet kind. He is that most dangerous thing: decisive in the wrong direction, sometimes, and honest about it only with himself.

You will meet him. He will growl. He will speak in sentences shaped like commands, because that’s the dialect of kings. He will look at a girl and realize that fate has a sense of humor and he does not. He will try not to need her because need is a liability. He will fail beautifully.

But before all that, before the banter and the battles and the breathless, stupid choices that look exactly like love, there is weather.

On a day like any other, in a world that had forgotten how afraid it used to be, the sky over a mortal forest remembers. Clouds build an architecture of anger. Wind spins on its heel and asks the trees to bow. The air mellows to green like an old bruise. Somewhere, the gods put down their tea.

A path threads between pines. It is nothing special—dirt, root, rock—and then it is.

A girl walks there, alone. She is twenty-two and bright the way a new coin is bright, recently tossed, not yet landed. She has a quick mouth and a quicker heart and the kind of stubborn that wears out shoes. She is thinking about nothing dramatic: how her hoodie is too warm, why moss is slippery, whether she should’ve gone to brunch instead.

She stops because the wind does something impossible. It lifts her hair straight up and whispers, Close your eyes.

She doesn’t.

The hurricane unbuttons itself from the horizon and steps neatly around her, a wall of spinning light and rain and the promise you only get in fairy tales right before a terrible idea. It does not yank her so much as invite her. It holds out a hand made of weather and says, in the soft voice of a thing that has already decided, Come along.

Zoey Mitchell—reader of stories, maker of coffee, collector of poor life choices—stumbles.

And then the world tips, the sky opens like a trapdoor, and she falls straight into the eye of it.