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River nodded.
“Someone with the powers of the gods, demons, and Immortals isn’t easy to come by,” I said.
“That is so, though it’s not the full reason they wish to control her,” she told me.
“There’s something else? What?”
“Ask your mother.” She looked at Grace.
So did I. “What does she mean?”
“She is referring to the magic that the child absorbed from the telepath Faith,” Grace sighed, like she wasn’t happy to go into this. “Faith’s powers were extraordinary, far beyond that of any other telepath I have ever encountered. She possessed the ability of future sight, a powerful kind of magic.”
“You have it too,” I remembered.
“Not like Faith did,” said Grace. “I sometimes catch fleeting glimpses of the future, but Faith could see so much more. And she had some control over what she saw.”
“Apparently, not enough control, or she never would have been defeated,” I said. “She would have foreseen what was going to happen to her and avoided it.”
“There are, of course, limitations to magic, Leda. And Faith was only mortal. Your daughter is not. She is, in fact, very, very powerful. Those limitations will hinder her less.”
“Or not at all?”
“Perhaps. We shall see.”
So my daughter was going to be even more powerful than I’d thought. That only meant even more people would be after her.
“There is something else,” Grace said. “Your daughter would have absorbed Faith’s powers of past sight as well.”
The past…and now I was having more visions.
“I believe your unborn child’s abilities of sight allowed someone to use this place to send you very vivid, very frequent visions over great distances,” Grace told me.
I looked at River for confirmation, but her face was perfectly neutral, not giving a thing away.
“Well?” I demanded.
“Your daughter did indeed absorb all of Faith’s telepathic powers, but there is something else Grace has not told you,” River said. “A power Grace is hoping the child possesses.”
I looked at Grace.
The demon shot River a withering look, then quickly composed her face as she gazed upon me. “Visions of past events can be quite sporadic and incomplete, as you yourself have witnessed, Leda. It is a problem that was well-recognized by the Immortals. Long ago, in their studies of magic, they tried to remedy that.”
“How?”
“The Immortals analyzed magic by separating their ‘complete magic’ into individual strands,” Grace explained. “That’s how they made vampires, witches, fairies, and all of the other original supernaturals. It is also how gods and demons came to be. We were a result of their experiments on light and dark magic.”
Faris frowned, like he didn’t like the idea of being the result of an experiment. Well, join the club, Pops.
“The Immortals were unhappy with the vagueness and imprecision of their past-gazing powers, particularly their historians who desired a complete picture of their entire history,” Grace continued. “So they created two supernatural classes. Firstly, the ghosts, those people with the power of telepathy. And secondly, the unicorns, people with the power of magic-tracking, but also the power to read into a soul, into the fabric of their magic, the history of their magic, the events that created them and their magic. That too was a window into the past. Then, after studying both powers in isolation, after learning how to boost them, the Immortals worked toward combining those boosted powers into a single being.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing, as far as I can tell,” said Grace. “The Immortals were so focused on what had already happened that they didn’t see what was coming: the end of their civilization.”
“Because of the Guardians.”’
“Because of the Guardians,” Grace confirmed. “They destroyed the Immortals before those past-gazing experiments could bear any fruit.”
