It had their exquisite beauty as well as their potency. It could slice through magical protections, slay demons at need. It was woven round with protective spells to shield its bearer against death magic.

Strange, her father had not died from a blade, but from a weapon that had not existed on the home world; a truesilver bullet fired from a weapon that most Terrarchs thought obscene, the bane of their age, the herald of the end of their dominion. A gun had ended Malkior’s life. It was a new weapon for a new age, an age in which humans were rising against their betters, and had the tools to work the overthrow of even the most powerful of sorcerers. With truesilver bullets they need have no fear of demons. Even the Shadowblood could fall before them.

Perhaps Rik, half-human, half-Terrarch, as comfortable with guns as with sorcery was the symbol of this new age, and of the bastard culture that would grow out of it. She thought of his mixture of arrogance and fear, and wondered what would become of him. Perhaps he would survive. Perhaps Asea would use him up and then discard him as she had done so many others. Perhaps he would fall to the Shadow, the first of many like him, who would become its agents in this world. Like Asea, the Shadow used whatever tools it found most useful.

Something irritated her eyes. Her face was wet. Her father was dead. He was dead and all the things she had wanted to say to him would remain forever unsaid, all the questions she had wanted to ask would never be answered. All the complex knot of emotions would never be untangled.

Thinking about her father and about the Shadow she felt oddly adrift. She had served both, but she realised now that she had really served her father, seeking always to please him, to gain his attention even when she had defied him. Until recently she had possessed no real knowledge of what the Shadow was like. She had thought she had known, but she had not, not in the way that he had.

Malkior had been one of the First. He had come through the gates from an older, purer world. He had experienced the Shadow first hand, had served it since childhood, had bowed before its glory willingly, had been touched by it and granted power. He had not thought of it as demonic. He had talked about it as liberation, of freedom from the tyranny of Adaana, of the old Angels who had held back their people for so long.

She had known such things only through him, his stories and his faith. He had been its prophet and its embodiment and now he was gone. There was nothing left for her to serve. She felt more loyalty to the Queen-Empress of Sardea than she did to the Shadow’s cause. Without the physical anchor of his person, the Shadow’s was merely a side on which she found herself by accident.

Doubts she had long suppressed beat black wings around her skull. In a way she was glad that her father was gone, his plans to use the Black Mirror and open a gate to Al’Terra unfulfilled. For all his certainty of their glory, she had found the idea of the Princes of Shadow manifesting in this world a frightening one. It was one thing to work towards such a goal in the long distant future.