AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Lore was sympathetic, but she couldn’t accept that there was nothing for them to do, that fate was a sealed tomb they couldn’t break open. She squared her shoulders and glared at the man in the roses and ivy. “There has to be a way to make the gods… make them wait for different vessels. Better ones, more suited. Surely we can send them back to wherever they were before, where they weren’t hurting anything.”
“You can’t make a god do anything, girl,” Anton said. “You’ve read my prophecy, yes? I can see it. You read the words Apollius Himself spoke to me, as I breathed the holy smoke of the braziers, as I saw the heavens open and His light shine down.” His not-quite-smile widened, making blood sheet from his mouth to the ground. Or maybe it wasn’t a smile anymore. Maybe it was a grimace, now. “You read it all.”
Something about that didn’t read as a full truth. She riffled back through that ritual night, trying to see if there was something she was forgetting, something he might’ve let slip.
In the back of her head, Nyxara was silent, waiting. This must be one of the things She couldn’t talk about.
“So, what?” She crossed her arms and intensified her glare on the former priest. “We just sit back and let the pantheon take us over?”
“Things move in cycles,” Anton said, not really an answer. “And there is more than one way to have all the power, everything leaked from the Fount. Though you, pretty goddess-girl, are a complication, just as you’ve always been. He cannot see clearly, with you.”
Lore arched a brow. “Are you going to try and get rid of me again? Might be difficult, now that you have roots.”
That rasping, tearing laugh. Anton didn’t answer.
But Lore’s mind had latched onto something, her subconscious churning finally pulling up a helpful memory. That night, with the garden burning around them, Anton said that Apollius had spoken of Lore by name. But there’d been no mention of her in the prophecy they’d read, no mention of any names but the gods.
And there’d been those markings at the bottom of the parchment, the ones Malcolm said he couldn’t read…
Lore seized Gabe’s hand, tugged him out into the main part of the greenhouse. He didn’t resist her pull, though his face was confused when she spun to face him. “We have to go look at the prophecy again.”
His brow slashed down. “What good would that do?”
“There has to be part of it we missed. Some new information. We didn’t read it all.”
She expected to have to argue her point, but Gabe, surprisingly, seemed to take her at her word. He nodded, then looked over his shoulder at Anton. “I don’t think he has anything to tell us.”
It was a confession, almost. Anton wasn’t useful. There was no reason for him to still be here.
Beyond Gabe’s shoulder, she saw the former Priest Exalted twitch, more blood falling from his mouth. His eyes shone, unsound in the moonlight. “There’s nothing more in that prophecy,” he rasped, straining forward. “You read it all. You are doomed.”
Lore glanced at Gabe. “That’s as good as a confirmation that there’s more to it.”
Anton snarled, trying to push out of the roses that grew through his body, coming at her like an animal. Despite her deep and abiding hatred for the man, sympathy squeezed her heart.
Gabe looked at his former mentor a moment longer, his mouth flat, the tendons clear and tight in his neck. Then he turned, making his way out of the greenhouse.
“Gabe,” Lore murmured. “He isn’t… you should…” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say the words. He isn’t really living like this. You should take him out of his misery.
She didn’t have to spell it out. Gabe’s blue eye closed; his head dipped down, hiding his face from the flooding moonlight. “I can’t,” he whispered. “I told you. He’s…”
And now it was his turn not to say the words, but Lore knew them. The shape of them, at least. He was the only kind of father Gabe had left.
With that, they left the greenhouse, the sounds of Anton snarling and blood pattering on the ground following them out.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The truth is a wound as often as it is a comfort.
—Myroshan proverb
Lore and Gabe slipped through the night like wraiths. The moon, full and brighter than it should be, lit their way as they left the garden and ran through the green. Then into the Church, its hallways hushed with deep darkness, shadows gathering thick in the corners as the corridors narrowed into cloisters.
Gabe made another torch, started down the dark stairs. They knew where to go, now, headed straight to the door that held Anton’s prophecy. Lore unlocked it, quicker this time, like the Mortem in the wall recognized her.
Inside, the lectern, the glass dome. She hadn’t approached it earlier, but she did now, with the same trepidation as someone sneaking up on a sleeping wolf.
When the irrational fear that the parchment would suddenly grow claws and leap for her subsided, Lore stepped as close as she could, squinting to peer through the glare on the glass from Gabe’s torch. The prophecy was written in an ornate, hard-to-decipher script. It was honestly a feat that Malcolm had been able to read it so clearly, even though that part was in Auverrani.
