Empress of Dorsa (The Chronicles of Dorsa)

Milo’s head snapped back as if she had slapped him. “You know? How?”

She cocked her head at him, brows furrowing. “Who are you?”

Before Milo could answer, the dream morphed once more. The brothel’s common room disappeared, and Milo found himself staring out at a vast, endless ocean. Milo’s head swam with the sudden change. Instinctively, he reached out to grab something to steady himself. His gloved hand met a wooden mast. They were on a ship.

“You are a messenger of Preyla, aren’t you?” the pirate said to him. She didn’t wait for an answer; the rizalt walked away from him and leaned her forearms on the ship’s railing. She said something Milo didn’t hear, apparently to the ocean itself.

Was she mad?

“I’m not a messenger of – of Preyla,” Milo said to her back.

“Yes, you are.”

Milo blew out a frustrated breath. There was no point arguing with a madwoman. “Fine, I am a messenger of Preyla. I came to tell you that Commander Joslyn of Terinto and the Empress of the Four Realms need your help. They’re both trapped inside some part of the Shadowlands, but I think their physical bodies are in the Kingdom of Persopos.”

“I know,” the rizalt said again. She turned around. “But I don’t think I can help. I tried. There are too many of them for one person to fight.”

The ship, the ocean, the pirate all began to dim, like a room falling into darkness as a lantern was turned down. The rizalt was beginning to wake up.

“We need you – they need you.” The dream grew darker, and Milo spoke as quickly and urgently as he could. The pirate might be the Commander’s last hope. “You are the only person who knows the way to the Kingdom of Persopos, and –”

But by the time Milo reached the word Persopos, he was speaking not to the Rizalt but to his own empty bedchamber. He sat up, peeling off a piece of parchment that had stuck to his cheek.

He had to stop falling asleep on his desk like this. He needed real rest – his entrance exam was one week away, and between studying and dreamwalking, he hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in at least a fortnight.

Maybe he could work in a nap today, between study sessions. For now, though, he would make his way to the beach. The weak sunlight filtering into the room suggested it was just after dawn, which meant Linna would be training.

He wanted to tell her about the rizalt. Just like the Commander and the Empress, the pirate was definitely alive. But maybe she wasn’t in the Kingdom of Persopos anymore. Linna should look for her; everyone knew that sailors staying in Port Lorsin haunted the brothels in the Shipper’s Quarter, and Milo thought that was as good a place to start the search as any.