It was the name Wardens—and Djinn—gave to a section of the world that had been scorched by something unnatural; a place where the basic energy that coursed through the world, the pulsebeat of the Earth, no longer existed. A black corner looked fine, but to anyone with sensitivity to power, it was desolate and sterile. Wardens—those who controlled the basic powers of nature—suffered when they were trapped inside one of these dead zones. Still, we got off better than the Djinn. Djinn died. We’d been trapped in the massive black corner, sailing hard for the horizon, for days, and it was taking its toll at an increasingly horrible rate. It was so hard, watching them suffer. It was slow, and painful, and terrifying to watch, and as our cruise ship sailed ever so slowly through the dark, empty seas, trying to get outside the supernatural blast radius, I began to wonder whether we would make it at all. The New Djinn—the Djinn who’d been born human and had become Djinn during some large-scale disasters—were in a lot of pain, and slipping away.
