Prologue — Fire on the Wind
Dorothy wakes to heat on her face and ash on her tongue.
For a half-second she thinks: tornado, Kansas, splinters and sky. But the roar is not wind. It’s wings.
A thatch-roof village burns a field away—orange teeth tearing through rafters, smoke stacking into the bruise-blue dusk. Iron shadows wheel overhead: simian bodies with brass pinions and leather masks, torches clamped in clawed feet. They drop, rake, rise—herding, not hunting. Pushing everyone east.
“Dorothy?” says a small voice by her ear.
She flinches. A dog—brown, wiry, eyes too knowing—has wedged under her arm. His mouth moves with the shape of words like he’s known how forever. “It’s me. Toto.”
She blinks hard. “Dogs don’t—”
“—not in Kansas,” he says, already scanning the ridge-lines. “This isn’t.”
Screams break like waves. A centaur staggers past trailing fletched fire in his mane; a girl with gills hauls two baskets of shells that hiss and pop as they cook; a stooped brownie drags a trunk of tools by one handle and won’t let go. Somebody yells, “East! To the green road!” and the crowd starts that way by instinct, the way cattle run for an opening they’ve used before.
Dorothy’s head is full of stitched memories: a farmhouse, a cyclone cellar; a striped stocking under a house—no, that feels borrowed—and a city that glowed. None of it explains the burn in her lungs or the way her feet choose east before she decides.
Toto tugs at her sleeve. “Move.”
They fall into a river of refugees. Out here there are no kiosks and no calming bells. The world runs on what you can carry and what you can trade.
A market blooms out of panic because that’s what people do. At the treeline a pair of hedge-witches flip a blanket and lay out boiled eggs, soot-sweet apples, two needles, a spool of gut. “We’ll take copper, salt, or favors we can call,” one says, voice brisk, eyes kind. A peddler with a pack like a small building paces the line, calling, “Shoes for feet, bread for names! Marker now, labor later!” A fairy with a broken wing cries when someone hands her a scarf; then she stabs the scarf-seller with a hatpin because fear and mercy are siblings that bicker.
Dorothy doesn’t have money. She has a voice that sounds like certainty. “Trade eggs for water duty,” she tells the hedge-witches, and four boys with buckets nod like she’s in charge. She divides the line into three thinner lines so they move. It feels like remembering a dance she never learned. People obey her because the words fit the shape of their panic. She notices it, and then refuses to think about it.
Above, a ring of Monkeys dips and spits fire in a crescent—never quite close enough to scatter them, close enough to keep them from turning back. Herding, always herding.
“Why burn at all?” Dorothy asks, breathless.
“So the road is crowded when we get there,” Toto says. And then, too quickly, “I heard that. From… someone.” He shakes once, like a dog shedding rain, and smiles up at her in a way that makes her forget he said anything at all.
They barter the stream with a ferryman who demands names, not coins. “Names are good money,” he explains, dropping each into a little jar. “One day I’ll need a Rilka, two Tollivers, a Finn.” He marks Dorothy’s as “Dorothy?” with a question mark because even her name sounds like something the wind told him.
On the far bank a rumor arrives on a mule with foam on its chest: the Wizard marches behind the Monkeys, not ahead. They say his chest is part tin now, plate bolted where a heart should show; they say straw lines his helm like a crown that forgot it was a hat. He tried to rebuild his old kingdom out west—failed, starved, froze—and learned a new trick instead: turn the land itself into a stampede and let your enemy choke on the crowd.
Dorothy hears it and thinks of a man behind a curtain; then the memory slides and won’t bear weight. “A wizard is a man,” she says anyway, like a prayer. “Men can be stopped.”
“Sometimes,” Toto says. In the same moment his ears cant toward the burning village with an intentness that’s not quite animal. His pupils shrink, then bloom. If there were instruments here, some dial in some tower far away would log a handshake and write: relay received. But there are no instruments, so Toto just sneezes and grins and asks if she has any cheese.
They move in bursts—walk, run, duck beneath a fallen elm while cinders comb the field. Barter again: a carpenter swaps splints for three hours of pushing his cart; a sprite trader swaps a flask of still-cold well-water for a promise—“two strong backs, harvesttime.” Dorothy signs the promise with a straight spine and a steady hand, like she’s done it a thousand times. She doesn’t remember doing it once.
As the light thins, the press of bodies funnels to a cut in the hills where three standing stones shoulder a narrow pass. A woman waits there on a rock with a bell at her feet. She is older than any rule Dorothy has ever seen; lines like riverbeds map her face; a red thread ropes her wrist. Over her shoulder, under a tarp, something glints—glass neck, sand heart. The hourglass hums just enough to itch a tooth. At her ankles, a pair of shoes gleam like winter fruit: red leather, impossible.
“Westreach,” someone whispers. “The Warden.”
The Warden watches the sky first, the crowd second, Dorothy last. Her gaze moves like a blade kept oiled for a long time. She rings the bell once—one clean note that doesn’t echo so much as pierce—and somewhere high above a ring of Monkeys wobbles, loses its circle, flares out of formation. Burning torches drop early and die in dirt. The note dies. The sky remembers itself.