I Accidentally Caught a Falling Goddess - The Star Falls in the Mire

Across the hearth, where a handful of smoldering gorse roots gave off more sour white smoke than heat, Elspeth stood with her ear pressed against the chink in the cedar planks.

She had her buff coat buttoned tight to the throat, her Thanecroft officer’s dagger tucked horizontally across the small of her back, her broadsword already greased with mutton tallow to prevent rust in the marsh mist.

“The wind died,” she said, her voice barely a whisper against the timber.

Corin looked up from his bindings.

She was right.

The sleet was still falling, but the violent, buffeting gusts that had howled across the peat bogs since dusk had dropped away in an instant. An absolute, suffocating stillness descended over the fens—a vacuum so total that Corin could hear the steady drip-drip-drip of condensation falling from the roan mare’s nose-bag in the lean-to outside.

Then the sky turned inside out.

It did not begin with thunder. It began with a light so brilliant, so terrible and pure, that the cracks between the timber planks on the hut wall burned like white-hot iron bars.

Corin’s marrow-circuit—the sealed emerald furnace deep in his pelvic basin—detonated into life without an order, surging up through his spine in a desperate, automatic reflex to keep the sheer atmospheric pressure from crushing his lungs.

Through the roof-vents, the clouds did not part; they were incinerated.

A falling mountain of celestial fire, blazing with the unbearable, cold white brilliance of a dying star, tore through the upper vault of the sky at twenty times the speed of sound. The light did not cast shadows; it erased them, turning the black peat bogs, the grey limestone ridges, and the distant mountain passes into a single, flat, blinding plane of stark silver.

The impact occurred two miles to the north, in the deep mire between the Black Moss and the limestone cliffs.

The earth did not shake; it buckled.

A shockwave of compressed air and vaporized marsh-gas struck the turf-cutter’s hut with the force of a solid timber battering ram. The cedar roof was ripped away in a single, explosive roar, the walls groaning as two corner posts snapped like kindling, sending a shower of burning gorse embers whirling into the dark.

Every campfire, every watch-lantern, and every tallow dip across forty square miles of northern frontier was snuffed out in the same fraction of a second.

Then came the sound.

It was not a boom; it was a low, grinding roar that tore through the bedrock like a colossal iron plowshare cutting through shale, accompanied by a high, singing frequency that set the iron buckle on Corin’s sword-belt vibrating against his ribs.

In the lean-to, the roan mare screamed—a wild, terrified animal shriek—rearing against her halter until the hemp rope snapped with a sharp crack.

Elspeth was out the door before the wood chips stopped falling, her boots splashing through the frozen mud, her broadsword clearing the scabbard with a sound like tearing canvas.

“Saddle the roan, Corin!” she roared over the whistling wind as the shockwave rolled away toward the south. “Every heretic warband from High Crag to the river border saw that flare! We have twenty minutes before the tracking hounds pick up the sulfur trail!”

Corin grabbed his kitbag, vaulted over the broken wall into the lean-to, and caught the roan mare by her broken halter, his newly awakened jade aether flaring along his forearms as he forced the terrified warhorse down onto all four hooves.

He threw the heavy leather saddle over her withers, cinched the girth with two savage, experienced jerks of his wrists, and swung up into the wet leather.

The northern sky was glowing with a strange, eerie green aurora that flickered across the low clouds, smelling of scorched earth, ozone, and the bitter, metallic tang of cold starlight fallen into the mud.

He dug his heels into the mare’s flanks, plunging out into the dark peat bogs behind Elspeth’s grey cloak, riding hard toward the rising column of white steam.