 Harper Collins presents The Blade Bone, Book Four of the Horusan Archives, by Osmer Zahannet Kahn. Read by Jenny Bryce. Chapter 1 From the Near House of Worship to the Distant House of Worship The night journey passed in a rush of wind, an eternity, or an instant, an endless fall or a bright buoyant skimming over enigmatic deserts and opulent green valleys, Arian couldn't define it. Her body wasn't fatigued, her mind was pliable and fresh. Yet she carried centuries of loss in the innermost parts of her soul, as she was transported from the cavern of the Blue Eye to a city flattened by time, abandoned, say, for the deepest reaches of memory. When she looked to her right, she saw Sinia, and behind Sinia, Darnia and Sidi Youssef, the Blue Mage, whom Arian had first encountered in the lands of the Nagus. Moments ago, or a lifetime past, Arian had been at the centre of the Blue Eye, a vast geological formation in the heart of an unforgiving landscape. She had stood on a stone plinth, surrounded by tranquil waters that seemed to shift beneath her gaze, looking up through the roof of the cavern to a source of illusory light. Sinia beside her, Darnia and Youssef at her heels. There had been an orphan boy in her care, but now the boy was gone. He had vanished into the light, the same light that had brought them all here. All except Wafa, whom she couldn't find, no matter how she searched, the loss acquiring the painful weight of an ache. Nor had she seen him at the other stops on the night journey. She had been taken into a past that originated long before the wars of the Far Range. Two ancient holy cities, whose texts and ideologies had been lost to the encroachments of time, the night journey had shown her the extent of that loss. Secrets had been revealed. She had offered prayers for the dead at the sight of a grave in the city of the friend. She had also witnessed the birthplace of the messenger of the Isayin. She had been without her companions at these places of Detour. How would she be able to explain her experience? Where had she been, and what she had witnessed wasn't possible. The experience at temporal, outside of time that had meaning in the present, all the past as they had studied it. The city she'd visited had been preserved. From the moment of the events that had given them their significance, rare and new, with untouched olive groves and lemon trees, the veils dressed in arm and blossom. Her only reference to these places was her own sense of wonder. As soon as Arian had given herself up to the source of the light that shone upon the blue eye, her consciousness of the physical world had altered. Her vision had fractured, so that wherever she turned her gaze, she witnessed both the immediate, tangible present and the impossible distant past of a world undamaged by war, where difference tinged each note of familiarity she tried to ground herself in. Even the words in her mouth had changed their shape, the vowels softer and sweeter, the consonants more pronounced. The claim her mother tongue its lexicon her place of birth. But her name remained, companion of Hera, first oralist of Hera. Most blessed of her time to speak the word, most blessed to apprehend the word, for Arian to read was to divine the deeper meaning within. Language and light shimmered like a quick silver fire in her veins, gilded the corners of her vision, so that when she looked upon the world around her, she was seeing it with dual vision, with light upon light vision, keen as the lancing edge of Darnia's silver gaze, pure as a note of Sinia's rich voice, true as the heart of a lost and orphan child. She existed now between these three things, the penetrating look, the startling song, and the pure soul. In the immaterial, atemporal part of herself, the self that had undertaken the night journey to visit a place of myth, the city of the four, to visit the holy city where the Adra had sample complete. Ready to continue?